New Book from the Nordic Africa Institute:
Hansen, Karen Tranberg and Mariken Vaa (Eds.):
Reconsidering Informalities – Perspectives from Urban Africa ISBN 91-7106-518-0, 235 pp., Published by the Nordic Africa Institute, 2004. Price: SEK 250, Euro 25, GBP 16.95
Keywords: Informal economy, land use, livehoods, planning, urban housing, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe
This book brings together two bodies of research on urban Africa that have tended to be separate: Studies of urban land use and housing, and studies of work and livelihoods.
Africas future will be to an increasing extent urban. Nevertheless, the inherited legal, institutional and financial arrangements for managing urban development are inadequate. The recent decades of neo-liberal political and economic reforms have increased social inequality across urban space. Access to employment, shelter and services is precarious for most urban residents
Extra-legal housing and unregistered economic activities proliferate. Basic urban services are increasingly provided informally. The result is the phenomenal growth of the informal city and extra-legal activities. How do urban residents see these activities? What do they accomplish through them? How can these “informal” cities be governed?
The case studies are drawn from a diverse set of cities on the African continent. A central theme is how practices that from an official standpoint are illegal or extra-legal do not only work but are considered legitimate by the actors concerned. Another is how the informal city is not exclusively the domain of the poor, but also provides shelter and livelihoods for better-off segments of the urban population.
Karen Tranberg Hansen has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology, University of Washington (Seattle), 1979. She is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University.
Mariken Vaa (b. 1937) obtained her Mag. Art. degree in sociology from the university of Oslo in 1967 and has been working in institutions of higher education and research since then, primarily in Urban and Regional Studies.
From 1997- 2002 she was coordinator of the programme “Cities, Governance and Civil Society in Africa” at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, and is currently professor of development studies at Oslo University College, Norway.
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