civilising african cities:international housing policy from colonial to

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1 Civilising African Cities: international housing policy from colonial to neoliberal times. Branwen Gruffydd Jones Goldsmiths, University of London Paper to be presented at the workshop Building states and civil societies in Africa: Liberal interventions and global governmentality Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University 26-27 January 2011 Draft work in progress, not for circulation Critical scholars of the ‘liberal project’ and global governmentality in Africa have elaborated important insights and strands of enquiry which could usefully be extended to explore the arena of housing and urban governance. 1 The purpose of this paper is to explore international agendas and interventions in the realm of housing and urban governance in Africa, as a distinct component of broader ambitions to build liberal states and civil societies. Private property ownership is a core building block in the assemblage of liberal order, and the home- owner is a central figure in neoliberal civil society. How and to what extent have international ideas, institutions and practices of government in Africa reflected these principles? Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and the shift, within Europe, from disciplinary to liberal and then neoliberal modes of government and techniques of power provides a framework which helps in revealing the politics in what are often supremely technocratic policy discourses. Yet the scope of analysis must be extended to include the specificity of colonial governmentality, which was largely absent from Foucault’s historical analyses. This paper first provides a brief summary of Foucault’s analysis, highlighting core points which can help to illuminate some of the political logics of current international housing policy, and indicating the importance of incorporating the colonial experience into this broader analysis. The rest of the paper explores the changing contents and politics of housing policy and urban governance from colonial to neoliberal times, with specific reference to Africa.

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Page 1: Civilising African Cities:international housing policy from colonial to

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Civilising African Cities: international housing policy from colonial to neoliberal times. Branwen Gruffydd Jones Goldsmiths, University of London Paper to be presented at the workshop Building states and civil societies in Africa: Liberal interventions and global governmentality Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University 26-27 January 2011 Draft work in progress, not for circulation

Critical scholars of the ‘liberal project’ and global governmentality in Africa have elaborated

important insights and strands of enquiry which could usefully be extended to explore the

arena of housing and urban governance.1 The purpose of this paper is to explore international

agendas and interventions in the realm of housing and urban governance in Africa, as a

distinct component of broader ambitions to build liberal states and civil societies. Private

property ownership is a core building block in the assemblage of liberal order, and the home-

owner is a central figure in neoliberal civil society. How and to what extent have international

ideas, institutions and practices of government in Africa reflected these principles? Foucault’s

analysis of governmentality and the shift, within Europe, from disciplinary to liberal and then

neoliberal modes of government and techniques of power provides a framework which helps

in revealing the politics in what are often supremely technocratic policy discourses. Yet the

scope of analysis must be extended to include the specificity of colonial governmentality,

which was largely absent from Foucault’s historical analyses. This paper first provides a brief

summary of Foucault’s analysis, highlighting core points which can help to illuminate some

of the political logics of current international housing policy, and indicating the importance of

incorporating the colonial experience into this broader analysis. The rest of the paper explores

the changing contents and politics of housing policy and urban governance from colonial to

neoliberal times, with specific reference to Africa.

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Governmentality: disciplinary, liberal, colonial, neoliberal

Foucault’s studies of the history of governmental reason or governmentality identified a

series of significant shifts in techniques and mentalities of power characteristic of and

fundamental to liberalism. In Security, Territory, Population Foucault employs the notion of

security to indicate a set of features which distinguished the liberal forms and techniques of

political-economic power from earlier disciplinary forms of political-juridical power.2 The

classical political economists of the eighteenth century conceived of ‘the economy’ as having

natural dynamics and saw that the way to manage and govern the economy was to enable the

natural dynamics to proceed and operate.3 In this new approach, the role of government was

to facilitate and enable the operation of the natural dynamics of the economy, by allowing

and facilitating the free flows and circulation of goods and the flourishing of markets. In this

analysis Foucault highlights the historical shift from juridical-political mechanisms of

discipline of mercantilism which sought to control through imposing restrictions, binary

impediments and rules, to fix and prevent, to exclude, and thereby to establish and maintain

order; to administrative mechanisms of security, which did not seek to impose binary

impediments and rules, but rather to manage and channel natural processes, activities and

agents, not to prevent or eliminate undesirable activities, conditions and outcomes, but rather

to ensure they remain within a level of tolerance.4 He thus identifies

a complete change, or rather a phase in a major change in the techniques of

government and an element in the deployment of what I will call apparatuses of

security ... [which seem] ... to be one of the typical features of modern societies.5

At the heart of classical political economy was the idea of ‘the economy’ as a distinct realm,

with natural features, properties and mechanisms.6 The role of government, then, should be to

enable the economy to function naturally, unimpeded by artificial constraints and obstacles. It

is this specific and novel approach to government understood in terms of operating in and

with a given reality so as to enable that reality to function smoothly which Foucault

distinguishes as characteristic of techniques of security (as distinct from discipline) and at the

heart of liberalism:

security … tries to work within reality, by getting the components of reality to work

in relation to each other, thanks to and through a series of analyses and specific

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arrangements. … This fundamental principle that political technique must never get

away from the interplay of reality with itself is profoundly linked to the general

principle of what is called liberalism.7

This notion of working within reality, and getting the components of reality to work in

relation to each other, signifies an approach to governance which must attend to the various

components of social reality, including the population as such, the behaviours of people, as

well as the organisation of space. The liberal form of governance consists not primarily of

imposing constraints and impediments, but of seeking to guide and shape the behaviours of

subjects, and the environment in which they act – an approach which conceives of subjects as

politically free, rational, thinking and acting beings, and seeks to govern by working with and

through the active capacities of free subjects.8

Foucault’s analysis of the emergence and specificity of liberal governmentality in Europe is

important in its own right and, especially, in helping to historicise the particular features of

neoliberal governmentality. In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault explored the novelty of

neoliberal ideas and practices of governance, studying the emergence of neoliberal thought in

the twentieth century in France, Germany and the US.9 He showed that a distinctive feature

of neoliberalism, in contrast to classical liberalism, is that ‘the economy’ and, more

specifically, the market, are not assumed to be natural or quasi-natural entities. Rather, the

market requires construction, and this entails a very different approach to governance from

the laissez-faire principles arising from classical liberalism. Governance and policy must

assume a more interventionist form, in order to actively construct, assemble and cultivate the

appropriate environment for the competitive market to flourish and expand.10 The neoliberal

approach to the subject and the population is shaped by similar distinctions. In a departure

from classical political economy’s identification of rational economic behaviour as embedded

in human nature,11 neoliberalism perceives the necessity to actively cultivate the cultures,

habits and behaviours required of the political-economic subject if the market and enterprise

is to flourish. A second, radical feature of neoliberalism is that rather than seeing ‘the

economy’ as a distinct realm of society, all aspects of the social are seen to be encompassed

within and constituted through the economy. 12

The analysis of international policy sketched in the later parts this paper will suggest that

Foucault’s arguments are important in helping to make sense, especially, of the content and

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form of recent policy initiatives in housing and slum-upgrading in Africa. However, as many

have pointed out, Foucault’s historical analysis of the changing form and content of

governmentality focused on developments within Europe. A focus on governmental reason,

the exercise of power and the construction of order within European colonial empires

suggests a different historical trajectory. If disciplinary mechanisms of power gave way to

liberal technologies of security in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beyond

Europe the construction of colonial power was effected through the development and

intensification of disciplinary methods and technologies which sought to manage populations,

territories, spaces and subjects on the basis of exclusion, hierarchy, impediment and

containment rather than free circulation.

Building civilisation in colonial cities

It is possible to sketch in broad contours the changing content and rationale of colonial urban

governmentality while also recognising the considerable variation and specificity of actual

developments in different colonial contexts. The formal colonisation of Africa in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries was informed and legitimised by a set of discourses

centring on ideas of racial supremacy and hierarchy fused with ideas about civilisation. These

basic premises inflected a range of distinct colonial practices and institutions alongside

practical concerns arising from the economic, extractive and exploitative basis of colonialism

and the imperatives of maintaining social order.

The town or city was a space where these many ideological and pragmatic imperatives met.

In addition to being centres of administration, many of the main colonial cities were

established at vital nodes of the transport infrastructure constructed to enable the export of

Africa’s mineral and agricultural wealth to Europe, and the rapid mobilisation of armies in

defence of colonial borders. One central fact shaping the construction of urban order was the

inevitable proximity of the European and the native. Cities were centres of European

residence and colonial administration, while the physical construction and maintenance of the

city and servicing of the European population required an African workforce. This proximity,

in terms of working and living, had to be managed in a manner consistent with the

maintenance of social order and the demonstration of racial supremacy and civilisation. Ideas

about race and civilisation were fused with prevailing theories about disease, health and

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hygiene, and the theories and techniques of modern urban planning and architecture, in the

construction of colonial urban order.

Some colonial cities grew from and within already existing and long-established urban

centres; others were established from scratch, in positions dictated by new infrastructures and

transport routes.13 Within this spectrum of diversity some shared premises can nevertheless

be identified. The colonial construction of urban space was a physical demonstration of

civilisation. The European city was a place of order, function, facility and cleanliness, with

wide, tree-lined, paved streets, solid and impressive buildings, modern drainage and

sewerage, hospitals, schools, courts and offices, and spaces of recreation and leisure – parks,

race courses, golf courses, botanical gardens, beaches. The European population were

accommodated in large, one-storey houses in large plots, surrounded by a large garden. The

urban space of the city was organised according to plans which mapped distinct functional

zones: residential, administrative, recreational, commercial. The zoning of space assisted the

maintenance of order and hygiene and the demonstration of civilisation.14

The deliberate construction of space and distance between the European and the African, and

the periodic demolition of areas of native residence and commerce, was bolstered by the

discourse of health, hygiene and disease. Ideas about urban planning and segregation for

reasons of health were informed by experiences of urban development in India, and by new

medical theories which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when

new colonial cities were being established in African colonies.15 Prevailing medical

knowledge from the late eighteenth century focused on the spread and transmission of

disease, and the relationship between the body and its environment. The development of

germ theory from the 1870s, with the discovery of bacteria by Louis Pasteur, was later

applied specifically to tropical environments, especially through research into malaria.16

Various policies were recommended and pursued in Africa, in order to secure a healthy,

malaria-free environment for European administrators and settlers. These included the

location of European residential and administrative districts at elevated locations, the design

of houses to allow for ventilation and space, and the physical separation of European from

African housing.17 Conferences for the medical officers of the British West African colonies

were held in 1909 and 1912, at which a policy of residential segregation was supported.18

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, outbreaks of bubonic plague in coastal

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regions of Africa from Lourenço Marques to Dakar led to many specific attempts at urban

segregation which often met with considerable resistance.19

While segregation in residential areas and urban planning was officially recommended in

colonial policy the actual implementation of such ideas varied according to the ideas and

experiences of individual colonial administrators, and the level of resistance from African

residents. In Freetown, the new segregated suburb of Hill Station was constructed at a site

seven hundred and fifty feet above sea level, and four miles from the centre of Freetown.20

The colonial city of Accra developed from a long established coastal urban centre with a

relatively powerful, educated and well organised African population. The colonial

government was compelled, in the face of resistance, to withdraw a proposed lands bill in

1898, but the development of new areas for colonial administration and European residence

was designed according to ideas about segregation, with buffer zones separating areas of

European residence and work from areas of African commerce and residence.21 In the

colonial territory of Northern Nigeria, under Sir Frederick Lugard, segregation on grounds of

health was formally incorporated into colonial planning policy.22 In 1911, on the

recommendation of the medical advisory committee to the Colonial Office, the West African

Pocket Book affirmed “It has been proved that the separation of Europeans from natives is

one of the most efficient means of protection against disease endemic amongst native races.

Even partial separation, such as sleeping outside the native quarter at night time, affords a

very considerable degree of security.”23 In 1917 Lugard introduced the Townships Ordinance

according to which Europeans living in non-European zones could be subject to fines or

imprisonment.24 European residential areas were to be surrounded by buffer zones of 440

yards width where no building was permitted, and ‘no natives except the bona fide domestic

servants of Europeans’ could reside.25

The segregation of urban space in colonial cities was the product of the fusion of scientific,

racial and cultural theories. The development of medical 19th century theories about

contagion, disease and the transmission of germs emerged with the hardening of racial

theories, and incorporated ideas about race. For example, two doctors sent from the Liverpool

School of Tropical Medicine to conduct research about malaria in West Africa believed that

“African mosquitoes were race-specific in their taste for human blood, preferring the African

to the European variety.”26 Proposals and policies for urban segregation were also informed

by ideas of race, culture and civilisation. In the colonial imagination, the native African was

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located in the countryside, while the town and city was the realm of civilisation. W. J.

Simpson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine argued that

where the races are diverse and their habits and customs differ from one another ... it

has to be recognised that the standards and modes of life of the Asiatic do not

ordinarily consort with the European, whilst the customs of the European are at times

not acceptable to the Asiatics, and those of the African unfamiliar with and not

adapted to the new conditions of town life will not blend well with either. ... In the

interests of each community and of the healthiness of the locality and country, it is

absolutely essential that in every town and trade centre the town planning should

provide well defined and separate quarters or wards for Europeans, Asiatics and

Africans, ... and that there should be a neutral belt of open unoccupied country of at

least 300 yards in width between the European residences and those of the Asiatic and

African.27

In 1914-15 Simpson was invited by the colonial government to advise on the planned

development of Kampala, and his recommendations for segregation dominated the city plan

drawn up in 1919.28

While the rationale for segregation was not always so explicitly stated, throughout colonial

Africa the native presence in the European city was considered temporary and transitory. The

planning and construction of colonial urban space did not cater for the permanent presence of

an African population. Yet native labour was needed in abundance: the labour of physical

construction, of carrying and cleaning, of domestic service. Thus the historically modern

urban form of the ‘slum’ was the specific product of colonial urban planning. The areas of

African residence – the districts, locations, quarters, reservations, medinas, bairros and

zongos – were physically delimited, located at the edges of the city and where possible

separated from the areas of European residence, by the planning of buffer zones of parks or

administrative buildings. The construction of infrastructure (paved roads, drainage) and the

provision of services (piped water, electricity) did not extend to the native districts.

Where housing was provided for urban workers it contributed to the material and cultural

construction of colonial order in two senses. First, the limited provision of housing for

African urban residents cemented the civilisational hierarchy of colonial rule: housing of a

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reasonable material standard, in the European design but on a smaller scale, was in some

contexts made available for educated Africans working in lesser administrative roles of the

colonial state: those Africans considered civilised or assimilated. In this way the cultural

inclusion of a small African elite into the realm of civilisation was materially manifest in the

housing made available to them. Second, the most prominent form of housing made available

to African urban residents was the housing units provided by employers. This includes the

small servants or ‘boys’ quarters constructed within the compound of European residences –

small, very basic housing units located at some distance from the European house; and

housing units constructed by companies, mines, or branches of government service such as

the police, army, colonial civil service or native administration. In this case the housing was

often only in the form of single rooms in rooming houses, catering only for a temporary,

transient African population.29

If racial distinctions were not explicit in the zoning of urban space, the effect was realised by

other means, through planning regulations, building standards, and property law. If, within

the city, residential or commercial construction had to meet certain standards of size, layout,

building materials, and to be verified by the acquisition of legal permits, this would

automatically exclude the vast majority of African urban residents. In many cases African

construction methods and materials were not permitted in the centres or European areas of

colonial cities.30 Urban planning and zoning effected not just the spatial segregation of

European and African residential areas, but their physical differentiation. The regulations

regarding plot size, population density, building and room size and building materials were

sharply differentiated between European and African zones.31 In many cases, formal planning

regulations simply did not extend to the African areas at all.32 Just as the cultural inferiority

and lack of civilisation of the African native was asserted through urban planning, the

construction of the European areas affirmed cultural superiority, civilisation and modernity.

New areas of European residence were established “as showpieces of modern planning and a

contrast to traditional development”.33

While restricting the residential space of the native, his presence and movement within the

European city was further limited and managed, especially through labour regulation and

policing. To legitimately circulate within the European city, in many cases the native was

required to hold a pass law, a certificate of formal employment, or documentation

demonstrating payment of taxes and fees.34 Natives found without valid documentation could

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be fined, imprisoned or removed on charges of vagrancy. In some cases, such as Brazzaville

and Leopoldville, Africans were forbidden from remaining in the European town after dark.35

More generally, the policing of movement in space arises as an inherent and necessary

corollary of the zoning of space through the governmental technologies of planning.

Thus in the early period of formal colonial rule, from the late 19th century to the 1930s or 40s,

the essential logic of colonial urban government was that of exclusion, hierarchy and

difference. The city was the realm of the civilised modern; the presence of the uncivilised

native was strictly limited and physically contained, separated or excluded. Fanon described

this fundamental condition of the colonial city:

The settler’s town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-

lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the

leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. … The settler’s town is a well-

fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. …The town

belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the

medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of ill repute. … It is a

world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are

built on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat,

of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees,

a town wallowing in the mire.36

Adjustments to this exclusionary logic of urban government were compelled for a wide

variety of reasons in different contexts. In many contexts from the early days of colonial rule,

European urban planning and attempts to realise segregation were met with considerable

expression and organisation of protest and resistance on the part of established, educated

African urban residents.37 During the later colonial period, especially after the second world

war, the demands of veterans from the world wars, popular discontent and the rise of

anticolonial nationalism compelled European powers to adopt a new approach to colonial

development which explicitly incorporated concern for improving the welfare of the colonial

peoples. 38 In 1940 the British government introduced the Colonial Development and Welfare

Act. This change in colonial policy, alongside very significant increases in urban population

in many African cities and the spectre of urban disorder and rebellion, led to shifts in urban

government and provision. This generally entailed efforts to improve the material conditions

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and welfare of African urban residents, often combined with a tightening of restrictions or

forced removals. These shifts in policy often included attempts at some form of provision of

housing for the native. In Uganda, Accra, Nairobi, Lourenço Marques and many other places,

the colonial governments embarked on limited construction of housing, often in estates, for

urban African residents.39 The physical demonstration of civilisational difference and

hierarchy was nevertheless maintained in such endeavours, while the actual extent, the

number or cost of housing units, would only ever cater for a small minority of African urban

residents.

International housing policy: building order and stability

The articulation of ‘international housing policy’ dates from the late colonial period, in the

context of the gradual shift from colonial rule to international development and the

geopolitics of the Cold War. While to a large extent representing sincere efforts to grapple

with the very real conditions and contradictions of urban inequality and inadequate urban

provision for the majority of urban residents in the cities of Africa, Latin America and Asia,

the emergent form of international housing policy nevertheless also reflected political

priorities, visions and projects, and carried strands of continuity from the era of colonialism

to that of development.

The colonial, postcolonial and Cold War origins of development policy determined a set of

concerns shared by European powers as they withdrew from their colonies and by the US as

it sought to establish and maintain international hegemony in the post-war era. One over-

riding concern was to establish stability and social order, and to prevent radicalisation and

revolution. Thus the possibility of material and social development and progress within a

capitalist economy was promoted, as an attractive alternative to communism or postcolonial

chaos. Understanding the origins and development of international housing policy in relation

to this broader politics illuminates the politics of housing, and provides a distinct contribution

to this critical analysis of development policy and the liberal project in general. For housing

is a core element of social and economic order. The specific content of international housing

policy can be partly understood in relation to these geopolitical imperatives, especially in

regard to notions of ‘self-help’ and the promotion of private property and home-ownership.

As it emerged and developed over the course of the twentieth century, international housing

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policy underwent numerous shifts in emphasis and influence. Nevertheless it is possible to

highlight certain core principles which have always been present in international housing

policy, and have increasingly come to the fore over recent decades. These principles – private

property and individual home ownership, encouragement and reliance on ‘self-help’ for

housing provision, and the promotion of housing construction and provision according to

market principles – constitute core building blocks of liberal social order. They enable the

literal construction of property in the material fabric of society and economy, provide the

material basis for the historical constitution of subjects as property owners, and help to secure

social stability through the materially based construction of conservatism on the basis of a

constellation of material and ideological interests.40

From its beginnings in the early twentieth century, ‘international housing policy’ has been

shaped by a constellation of actors at the core of which have been development and housing

agencies of the US and UK, international organisations – especially the UN and World Bank.

To a significant extent the emergence and consolidation of a set of shared priorities and

principles was due to the circulation of ideas and experiences through policy networks and

communities and the considerable role and influence of individual housing policy experts and

consultants.41 The early formulation of international housing policy, in terms of its content

and its institutionalisation and promotion, was shaped to a significant extent by British and

American aid agencies and the energy, experiences and ideas of British and American

housing and urban consultants. Many of the early ideas arose from experiments and

experiences in colonial contexts. In Britain the emergence of development policy exhibited

clear dimensions of continuity from colonial government, in terms of institutional

organisation, ideas, experience and individual personnel. In many cases the governments of

newly independent states sought the assistance of consultants from the former colonial

metropole in the design of development and urban policy. The origins of America’s

institutions and discourse of international development are traced to the post-war, cold war

context of the 1940s and 50s and Truman’s Point Four speech.42 The elaboration of ‘aided

self-help’ as the basis for housing for poor urban residents, and more generally the promotion

of home ownership, were the central strands of housing policy as it was developed in the

1950s and 60s by European colonial governments in Africa and the Caribbean, especially in

the British empire, and by American development agencies working in Latin America under

the Alliance for Progress.43

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In the 1950s and 60s, as noted above, the demands of war veterans and nationalists compelled

colonial governments to take more seriously the welfare needs of African urban residents,

and to recognise their permanent rather than temporary presence in the city. This political

imperative, perceived by colonial governments, was manifest not only in the articulate

demands of educated African middle classes and political leaders, but in the spectre of angry

urban masses forming a much broader and more dangerous base for radical political struggle

and disorder. In Kenya in the 1950s the Mau Mau struggle compelled the colonial

government to draw up new development plans which aimed to improve conditions for the

African population and encourage the growth of a stable African middle class in both urban

and rural areas.44 Sir Ernest Vasey drew up a Report on Housing of Africans in Townships

which proposed that in order to stabilise the African urban population the government should

encourage African-owned tenant purchase schemes “inasmuch as the African who built his

own house and owned property with its consequent chance of income would be more likely

to let go his hold upon his native reserve.”45 In many contexts during the late colonial period

the promotion of housing for African urban residents was intended, both by improving

conditions and promoting ‘self-help’ and home-ownership, to secure social stability and order

and strengthen an emerging urban middle class in the face of unrest and political

mobilisation. For example in the British colony of Tanganyika the problems of urban disorder

in the early 1950s were addressed in a report by M.J.B. Molohan, Labour Commissioner for

Tanganyika. In the context of advising a range of new welfare measures addressed at the

African urban population, Molohan emphasised the role of housing in the formation of a

stable middle class: “If we are to encourage the formation of a stable and contented urban

middle class African populace, house ownership must be encouraged in every way.”46 In May

1950 a meeting of colonial housing and planning officers was held in London, and “the

weight of the Colonial Office was thrown behind the idea”47 of self-help housing for native

subjects: “The consensus that emerged in London in favour of higher wages, market rents,

and permanent housing was seen to be of ‘fundamental’ importance to ‘long range policy’ on

the housing question across most of British colonies.”48

The policy of aided self-help housing for low-income urban (and rural) residents was

explicitly and energetically promoted by the United States.49 It was recommended not only as

being an inexpensive way of approaching housing provision for the poor, but also for

political, cultural and ideological reasons: unlike public housing programmes, self-help

approaches were consistent with private property and home-ownership and, it was argued,

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reinforced ‘pioneer’ values.50 The early promotion of international housing policy ideas was

undertaken by the international office of the US Housing and Home Finance Agency, headed

by Jacob L. Crane. Crane had been involved in a self-help housing scheme in the early 1940s

in Puerto Rico – then a territory of the United States. Crane headed the office from the mid

1940s to mid 1950s, and promoted the approach of self-help housing for the poor ‘with

missionary zeal’.51 On advice from Crane, the administrator of Housing and Home Finance

Agency, Richard Foley, lobbied for housing to be included within the remit of Truman’s

Point Four international development programme.52 By the early 1960s, the United States

Agency for International Development had initiated self-help housing programmes in

seventeen countries, twelve of which were in Latin America.53 Crane put tremendous energy

into promoting ideas of aided self-help housing throughout the world. He selected and

recommended like-minded housing experts to act as consultants in many contexts, from

Greece to India, and was influential in the establishment of a specific office within the UN

devoted to housing, cities and urban development.54 Crane’s early, prominent role in the

establishment of an international consensus in favour of aided self-help housing for the urban

poor was reinforced by subsequent figures such as Charles Abrams and John F. C. Turner

who also became widely influential in the formulation of international housing policy in the

institutional spheres of western development agencies and international organisations.55

During the 1960s and 1970s, many postcolonial governments in Africa as well as Asia and

Latin America undertook various forms of public housing provision. Initiatives ranged from

providing housing for public sector employees in the armed services, police, hospitals and

universities, building public housing estates for lease or sale to low income urban residents,

and slum-clearance projects. Generally such initiatives in fact tended to cater for the middle

classes and only a small proportion of the urban poor, and were never able to aim to meet the

broader needs of the urban masses. Often projects conceived as being designed for the poor

ended up serving the middle classes, for a wide variety of reasons. Where schemes were

actually delivered to the poor as intended, the level of subsidies were such that only very few

benefitted from such schemes. In many cases the actual achievements in terms of provision

were significantly lower than original intentions. Nevertheless such policies rested on some

basic concept of societal redistribution and public provision. At the same time, however, the

construction of formal housing was often accompanied by initiatives of slum clearance and

demolition.56

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Attempts and ambitions on the part of postcolonial governments to provide public housing

can be understood partly in light of similar initiatives in the late colonial period, and in light

of the quest for modernisation and the cultural and political values of the postcolonial elite.

The gradual abandonment of efforts to provide public housing for the poor was in part the

result of the failures of existing efforts, and differing political priorities and values as

governments changed.57 The growing economic problems and mounting indebtedness of

postcolonial governments rendered such policies increasingly unfeasible, and from the 1980s

under the conditions of structural adjustment programmes many African governments were

required to abandon or privatise what remained of public housing institutions. Within the

realm of international housing policy the consensus against public housing had long been

established, and from the 1980s the emphasis on housing provision within the market came

increasingly to the fore.58

In the 1970s the World Bank actively promoted what was known as the ‘sites and services’

approach, which entailed public, city- or local-council provision of demarcated plots

equipped with basic services such as roads and drainage, and required residents to build their

own house or modify and extend a basic low-cost core unit.59 Where the necessary clearance

or demolition of existing settlements to make way for such schemes proved too costly or

politically and socially difficult, other flexible approaches were devised to improve and

‘upgrade’ existing urban areas by providing basic infrastructural conditions of roads and

drainage. In the 1980s World Bank lending shifted from specific projects and programmes to

broader sector- and economy wide adjustment lending. The financial sustainability of sites

and services housing schemes was increasingly questioned,60 while housing and urban

development initiatives and policy models became more closely related to the coordinates of

structural adjustment lending. In this context housing economists in the Bank placed greater

emphasis on the relationship between housing and the economy as a whole, and the role of

housing finance systems.61 By the 1990s the World Bank was placing emphasis on questions

of governance, the role of the private sector and an active construction of markets. The goals

of housing and urban development were understood in terms of outcomes which could only

be realised as a result of well functioning markets; at the same time, housing and urban

development came to be seen as playing an important role in national economic growth. A

central concern, introduced by the World Bank and endorsed by the UN, was that of

‘enablement’62 – enabling markets to work, by ‘providing the legislative, institutional, and

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financial framework whereby entrepreneurship in the private sector, in communities, and

among individuals can effectively develop the urban housing sector’.63

Neoliberal urban construction and the civilisation of finance

This longer account of international housing policy from its colonial origins through the

context of decolonisation, development and the cold war sets the scene for a critical analysis

of more recent international initiatives with regard to housing in African cities. What

becomes apparent, when exploring the content of a range of recent initiatives, is the strong

emphasis on finance and financialisation at the heart of today’s international housing agenda.

The social order currently under construction – or at least, currently imagined in international

urban discourse – is, in a sense, the urban civilisation of finance.

Two examples which sit at either end of the spectrum illustrate the specificity and underlying

principles of international housing policy today: slum-upgrading, and the promotion of

mortgage markets. Projects, policy initiatives and pilot experiments in ‘slum-upgrading’ are

being undertaken, promoted or supported by a wide array of development organisations and

institutions. This includes international non-governmental organisations , philanthropic

funding agencies, international organisations, Western development agencies, and NGOs and

community organisations from the south: Homeless International, CHF, Shelter Associates,

Pamoja Trust, Oxfam, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UN Habitat, DFID, SIDA,

USAID, UN-Habitat, World Bank, Cities Alliance, Emerging Markets Foundation, Slum

Dwellers International, People’s Dialogue (Ghana), National Federation of Slum Dwellers

(India), and many more. The specific shape of slum-upgrading policies and projects varies

according to context and organisation. However many share core goals and principles:

namely, promoting the role of the private sector in slum improvement schemes, promoting

some basic form of home-ownership for poor urban residents on the basis of ‘self-help’ by

encouraging and facilitating savings and loans, some form of housing ‘micro-credit’ or

financial extension to the poor, and the ‘regularisation’ of tenure in slums and informal

settlements on the basis of private property.

The need for the involvement of the private sector in slum-upgrading is asserted persistently

by the main international actors at the core of the global slum-upgrading agenda: ‘without the

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active engagement of both slum dwellers and the private sector, slum upgrading programmes

are unlikely to achieve scale or sustainability’.64 At the level of national and city-wide urban

policy, the emphasis centres on increasing private capital investment in urban infrastructure.

At the level of slums and the poor, the emphasis centres on devising mechanisms to enable

the poor to access commercial credit. This ranges from developments in ‘housing

microfinance’, to designing institutional and financial models which can render specific slum

upgrading projects amenable to private commercial investment. Experiments and new

products in housing microfinance are being developed and promoted by international banks

and microfinance institutions, as well as by research and advocacy NGOs.65 Alongside this

new interest in housing microfinance is UN-Habitat’s slum-upgrading initiative, which is

designed centrally around private finance. UN-Habitat’s Slum Upgrading Facility,

established in 2004, aims to facilitate private investment in slum improvement projects and to

provide access to credit for residents of slums.66 The Slum Upgrading Facility is currently in

its Pilot Phase, during which a number of projects are being conducted in four countries

(Ghana, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Indonesia). UN-Habitat is also engaged in a number of other

slum-upgrading initiatives, including the Kenya Slum Upgrading Project (KENSUP) and the

development of a National Slum Upgrading Strategy in Uganda. The aim of these projects is

essentially to demonstrate the viability of the UN-Habitat model for slum-upgrading through

private financial investment, in the belief that having demonstrated that slums and slum-

dwellers are ‘bankable’, additional such projects on a larger scale will ensue without the need

for specific policy initiatives.

International concern for housing Africa’s urban residents is not restricted to the situation of

the ‘slum-dweller’, however. Alongside the focus on ‘slum-upgrading’ are other initiatives

which seek to promote homeownership more broadly, throughout society. Just as housing

microfinance and community finance packages are developed for the poor, regular mortgage

markets are energetically promoted for the middle- and upper classes. During his visit to

Nigeria in 2002 President George W. Bush, expressing his ‘desire to see mortgage markets

developed in Africa’, announced the establishment of the United States-African Mortgage

Market Initiative.67 Since 2002 American agencies have energetically promoted mortgage

finance and home ownership in Africa by various means. The US Department for Housing

and Urban Development (HUD) has co-organized and sponsored a series of conferences in

Africa addressing housing and housing finance. Through its Overseas Private Investment

Corporation (OPIC), the American government provides financial resources to American

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companies to support specific private sector housing projects and the development of

mortgage markets in Africa. OPIC ‘is involved in every aspect of housing development,

including construction, mortgage finance, mortgage-backed securitization, the manufacture of

building materials, and the provision of property-registration and brokerage services’.68 The

World Bank also actively promotes the development of mortgage finance in Africa, through

the International Finance Corporation. IFC launched initiatives to support and expand the

primary market in mortgages in Ghana and Uganda in 2007, and is pursing plans to develop

similar initiatives in Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Tanzania.69

Together, these policies and projects reveal defining features of the neoliberal project and

neoliberal governmentality in the realm of housing. This global discourse imagines the city

primarily and wholly in economic terms. The city is defined in terms of a physical, spatial

and social environment which hosts the economy and the activities of entrepreneurs. As such,

the city and its inhabitants must be managed so as to enable and nurture economic processes,

entrepreneurial activities and the circulation of finance. These attributes require active

construction. Thus the primary problem emerges as one of governance. The global agenda for

slums centres fundamentally on reforming the governance of cities and slums, in a

universalizing manner characteristic of the liberal project: “It is imperative that good urban

governance become globalized. … Governments need to review their urban legislation and

commit to the application of … internationally recognized principles of good urban

governance.”70 Governance is the mechanism through which the economic potential of cities,

and the entrepreneurial spirit of slum-dwellers, will be unleashed.

Conclusion

In contrast to the civilisation under construction during colonial rule, the contemporary

civilisation of finance is potentially far more inclusive. Colonial urban governance sought to

exclude the native from urban civilisation by various means, including through labour

legislation, policing, property laws, building standards, taxation and urban planning

regulations. Neoliberal urban governance opens its embrace to welcome the poor, the slum-

dweller, as micro-entrepreneur, property owner and micro-financial subject. And while the

colonial imagination restricted the idea of the city to the city of European civilisation, the

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neoliberal imagination, by conceiving of the city as an economy, expands to incorporate the

slum as a valid and rightful part of the city as such. The slum, just as much as just as the city

centre, shopping malls and business districts, is a proper and efficient part of the city’s

economy, with potentials and opportunities for entrepreneurship, investment and

accumulation.

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1 Alison J. Ayers, "Imperial Liberties: Democratisation and Governance in the 'New' Imperial Order," Political Studies 57, 1 (2009): 1-30; David Williams, The World Bank and Social Transformation in International Politics: Liberalism, Governance and Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2008); Tom Young, "'A Project to be Realised': Global Liberalism and Contemporary Africa," Millennium - Journal of International Studies 24, 3 (1995): 527-46; David Williams and Tom Young, "Governance, the World Bank and liberal theory," Political Studies 42, 1 (1994): 84–100. 2 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 3 Maurice Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 4 Foucault, 5 Foucault, , 34. 6 Foucault, , 349; see also Dobb, ; Andrew S. Skinner, "Economic Theory," in The Cambridge companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 7 Foucault, , pp. 47-48. 8 Colin Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Nikolas Rose, "Governing 'advanced' liberal democracies," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996) 9 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 10 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 , 120-121. 11 Dobb, 12 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 ; Gordon, "Governmental Rationality"; Thomas Lemke, "'The birth of bio-politics': Michel Foucault's lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality," Economy and Society 30, 2 (2001): 190-207 13 Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 14 Robert K. Home, Of planting and planning: the making of British colonial cities (London: Spon, 1997).

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15 Philip D. Curtin, "Medical knowledge and urban planning in tropical Africa," American Historical Review 90, 3 (1985): 594-613; Robert K. Home, "Town planning, segregation and indirect rule in colonial Nigeria," Third World Planning Review 5, 2 (1983): 165-75; John W. Cell, "Anglo-Indian Medical Theory and the Origins of Segregation in West Africa," American Historical Review 91, 2 (1986): 307-35. 16 Curtin, 596-600. 17 Curtin, 599-608; Frenkel S. Frenkel and J. Western, "Pretext or policy? Racial segregation and malarial mosquitoes in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78, (1988): 211-28. 18 Curtin, 602. 19 Curtin, 608-611; Myron J. Echenberg, Black death, white medicine: bubonic plague and the politics of public health in Colonial Senegal, 1914-1945 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002); Liora Bigon, A History of Urban Planning in Two West African Colonial Capitals: Residential Segregation in British Lagos and French Dakar (1850-1930) (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009); Maynard W. Swanson, "The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909," Journal of African History 18, (1977): 387-410. 20 Curtin, 600; Leo Spitzer, "The mosquito and segregation in Sierra Leone," Canadian Journal of African Studies 2, (1968): 49-61; Michael Banton, West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957). 21 Wordsworth Odame Larbi, "Spatial planning and urban fragmentation in Accra," Third World Planning Review 18, 2 (1996): 193-214; Kwadwo Konadu-Agyemang, The Political Economy of Housing and Urban Development in Africa: Ghana's Experience from Colonial Times to 1998 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001). 22 Curtin, 603-605; Home, "Town planning, segregation and indirect rule in colonial Nigeria," . 23 Minutes of the Nineteenth Meeting of the Medical and Sanitary Advisory Committee for Tropical Africa, January 11, 1911, cited in Curtin, 606. 24 Curtin, 606. 25 Home, "Town planning, segregation and indirect rule in colonial Nigeria," 166. 26 Curtin, 599, citing Christphers and Stephens ‘Segregation of Europeans’ in Reports of the Malaria Committee of the Royal Society, London, 1900. 27 Simpson, Report on Sanitary Matters in the East African Protectorate, Uganda, and Zanzibar. Cited in Curtin, 611. 28 Fredrick Omolo-Okalebo, Tigran Haas, Inga Britt Werner and Hannington Sengendo, "Planning of Kampala City in 1903-1962: The Planning Ideas, Values, and their Physical Expression," Journal of Planning History 9, 3 (2010): 151-69. 29 Richard Harris and Alison Hay, "New plans for housing in Kenya, 1939-1963," Planning Perspectives 22, 2 (2007): 195-223; Jeanne Marie Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican strategies and struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877-1962 (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1995); Konadu-Agyemang, 138-9; Robert K. Home, "From barrack compounds to the single-family house: planning worker housing in colonial Natal and Northern Rhodesia," Planning Perspectives 15, 4 (2000): 327-47. 30 Ambe J. Njoh, "Urban planning as a tool of power and social control in colonial Africa," Planning Perspectives 24, 3 (2009): 301-17; Curtin, 608. 31 Ambe J. Njoh, Planning Power: Town Planning and Social Controls in British and French Colonial Africa (London: UCL Press, 2007). Bigon, A History of Urban Planning in Two West African Colonial Capitals: Residential Segregation in British Lagos and French Dakar (1850-1930) emphasises building regulations regarding the distinction between flammable and non-flammable building materials as an effective vector of urban segregation. 32 See for example Carole Rakodi, "Colonial urban policy and planning in Northern Rhodesia and its legacy," Third World Planning Review 8, 3 (1986): 193-217; Home, "Town planning, segregation and indirect rule in colonial Nigeria," ; Boyowa Anthony Chokor, "External influences and indigenous social values in urban development and planning in the Third World: the case of Ibadan, Nigeria," Planning Perspectives 8, (1993): 283-306. In the planning of Lusaka, “the regulations were used to produce a low density, high standard environment, except in the African housing areas, in which the regulations governing the construction of ‘native huts’ specified a much lower standard.” Rakodi 1986, 205. In his analysis of colonial town planning in Nigeria, Home summarises: “The ‘modern’ or colonial towns were to be segregated from the ‘native’ or traditional towns (the planning of which was not considered), European residential areas were extensive land users and were segregated behind a cordon sanitaire ... while residential areas for the working Africans (as opposed to the ‘better class Africans’ do not appear at all.” 1983, 170. 33 Chokor, "External influences and indigenous social values in urban development and planning in the Third World: the case of Ibadan, Nigeria," , 294; see also Njoh, "Urban planning as a tool of power and social control in colonial Africa," .

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34 Jeanne Marie Penvenne, "'Here Everyone Walked with Fear': The Mozambican Labor System and the Workers of Lourenço Marques, 1945-1962," in Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Africa, ed. Frederick Cooper (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983) Njoh, "Urban planning as a tool of power and social control in colonial Africa," . 35 Njoh, "Urban planning as a tool of power and social control in colonial Africa," ; Curtin, 612; P. M. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 36 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967), 30. 37 Frederick Cooper, ed., Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Africa (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983). 38 Suke Wolton, Lord Hailey, The Colonial Office and The Politics of Race and Empire in The Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 39 Konadu-Agyemang, 141; Jeanne Marie Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism; Omolo-Okalebo, Haas, Werner and Sengendo, "Planning of Kampala City in 1903-1962: The Planning Ideas, Values, and their Physical Expression," 164; Harris and Hay, "New plans for housing in Kenya, 1939-1963," . 40 See Matthew Watson, "Constituting Monetary Conservatives via the ‘Savings Habit’: New Labour and the British Housing Market Bubble," Comparative European Politics 6, (2008): 285–304 for an elaboration of this argument with regard to Britain. 41 Richard Harris and Godwin Arku, "Housing and Economic Development: The Evolution of an Idea Since 1945," Habitat International 30, 4 (2006): 1007-17; Richard Harris and Ceinwen Giles, "A mixed message: the agents and forms of international housing policy, 1945–1973," Habitat International 27, 2 (2003): 167-91. 42 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: from Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed Books, 1997). 43 Richard Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," Habitat International 22, 2 (1998): 165-89. 44 Bethwell Alan Ogot and William R. Ochieng, ed., Decolonization and Independence in Kenya: 1940-1993 (London and Nairobi: James Currey and East Africa Educational Publishers, 1995). 45 Vasey 1950, cited in R.A. Obudho, "National urban and regional planning policy in Kenya," Third World Planning Review 6, 4 (1984): 363-87, p. 369. 46 Molohan, M. J. B., 1959, Detribalilzation, Dar es Salaam, cited in Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 231. 47 Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," , 183. 48 Harris and Hay, "New plans for housing in Kenya, 1939-1963," 203. 49 Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," 50 Hegemann 1936, 1938, cited in Harris 170. 51 Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," 171. 52 Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," 172. 53 Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," 178. 54 Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," 175-180. 55 Harris, "The Silence of the Experts. Aided Self-Help Housing. 1939-1954," , Cedric Pugh, "The changing roles of Self-Help in housing and urban policies, 1950-1996," Third World Planning Review 19, 1 (1997): 91-109; John F. Turner, "Issues in self-help and self-managed housing," in Self-Help Housing, ed. Peter M. Ward (London: Mansell, 1982). 56 Alan Gilbert and Josef Gugler, Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 132-137. 57 See for example Konadu-Agyemang, ’s analysis of the succession of differing and short-lived approaches to housing policy by Ghana’s successive governments, pp. 142-155. 58 Harris and Giles, "A mixed message: the agents and forms of international housing policy, 1945–1973," 2003; Cedric Pugh, "Housing policy development in developing countries: The World Bank and internationalization, 1972–1993," Cities: the international journal of urban policy and planning 11, 3 (1994): 159-80. 59 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), Sites and services projects (Washington DC: World Bank, 1974); O. F. Grimes, Housing for Low Income Urban Families (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); E. Jimenez, The economics of self-help housing: Theory and some evidence. (Washington DC: World Bank, 1980). 60 Stephen K. Mayo and David J. Gross, "Sites and Services – and Subsidies: The Economics of Low-Cost Housing in Developing Countries," World Bank Economic Review 1, 2 (1987): 301-35. 61 Pugh, "Housing policy development in developing countries: The World Bank and internationalization, 1972–1993," 62 Cedric Pugh, "The idea of enablement in housing sector development: The political economy of housing for developing countries," Cities: the international journal of urban policy and planning 11, 6 (1994): 357-71;

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World Bank, Housing: Enabling Markets to Work. A World Bank Policy Paper, with Technical Supplements. (Washington DC: World Bank, 1993). 63 Pugh, "The idea of enablement in housing sector development: The political economy of housing for developing countries," , 166. 64 Cities Alliance, "Annual Report 2004," Washington DC., 2004, (21 August 2007), p. 51. 65 Sally Roe Merrill, Microfinance for Housing: Assisting the “Bottom Billion” and the “Missing Middle” (Washington D.C.: IDG Working Paper No. 2009-05. Urban Institute Center on International Development and Governance, 2009) Annika Nilsson, "Overview of Financial Systems for Slum Upgrading and Housing," Housing Finance International 23, 2 (2008): 19-26 Kecia Rust, "The role of housing microfinance in supporting sustainable livelihoods," Housing Finance International 22, 2 (2007): 42-50 Bruce Ferguson and Elinor Haider, "Mainstreaming Microfinance of Housing," Housing Finance International 15, 1 (2000): 3-18, Sally Roe Merrill and Nino Mesarina, "Expanding Microfinance for Housing," Housing Finance International 21, 2 (2006): 3-11, Regina Campa Sole, Laura Moser and David Painter, "Scaling Up Housing Microfinance for Slum Upgrading," Housing Finance International 21, 2 (2006): 12-19 66 See UN-HABITAT, SUF Local Finance Facilities: what they are, why they are important, and how they work (Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Slum Upgrading Facility Working Paper 8, 2008) 67 John B. Taylor, The United States-African Mortgage Market Initiative (Under Secretary for International Affairs, United States Treasury: Remarks for the African Development Bank Round Table on the Role of Mortgage Finance in Developing Capital Markets, Kampala, Uganda, May 25, 2004). 68 OPIC, "Fact Sheet on OPIC Housing Investments and OPIC Supported Investment Funds in Africa and CAFTA," Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, 2007, <http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2007/May/20070531132448eaifas0.2515833.html> (17 June 2008). 69 International Finance Corporation, "SECO IFC Ghana Primary Mortgage Market Initiative," IFC Africa, 2007, <http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/gpmi.nsf/content/home> (12 March 2008); International Finance Corporation, "IFC Uganda Primary Mortgage Market Initiative," IFC Africa, 2007, <http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/upmmi.nsf> (12 March 2008); Estate Magazine, "IFC in Uganda: Creating opportunities for more people to own homes," Estate Online, Uganda, 2008, <http://www.estate.ug/content/ifc-uganda.html> (12 June 2009). 70 UN Millennium Project, A Home in the City (London: Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers, 2005) p. 4.