Unpacking State Practices in City-Making,in Conversations with Ananya Roy

• Published in: The Journal of development studies 2018-12, Vol.54 (12), p.2139-2148
• Main Author: Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ambition; Apartheid; Architecture, space management; Aspiration; Authoritarianism; Cities; Civil society; Civil war; Colonialism; Decolonization; Geography; Governmentality; Humanities and Social Sciences; Local politics; Political science; Politics; Postcolonialism; Postwar reconstruction; Power; Questioning; Reductionism; Resistance; Roy, Ananya; Space warfare; State intervention; State power; Urban areas
• ISSN: 0022-0388; 1743-9140
• DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2018.1460469

This special section originates in a reading group organised around the visit of Ananya Roy in the School of Architecture and Planning, at Wits University, in May 2013. Focused around the politics of informality and city-making, participants reflected on the echoes of Roy’s work with their own research. All authors were interested in interrogating state power, its modalities and its effects in building Southern African cities. They grounded their interrogation in a shared regional context, Southern Africa, where ambitions for the reconstruction of society and space, after apartheid in South Africa and a long civil war in Angola, are driven by relatively resourced and interventionist states. Those ambitions of reconstruction, however, stand in tension with accounts of neopatrimonialism, authoritarian temptations, and deeply rooted politics of resistance and contention, albeit in different ways in the democratic South Africa and authoritarian Angola. Engaging with Roy’s work helped us navigate these broad understandings of post-colonial states, at city level. There, the difficulty in understanding how state power shapes spaces and society is further complicated by several elements: the multi-layered nature of state intervention, the juxtaposition of bold and ambitious public interventions directly reconfiguring urban spaces, and evidence of state inconsistencies and efficiencies in shaping urban spaces, which cause some to dismiss its relevance (Landau & Monson, 2008; Simone, 2004). Roy alerts us to both the reductionism of these narratives, and their relevance as multiple facets of states’ interventions (2009a). Papers in this collection have approached this shared interrogation in two different ways that can aptly be described as the governability of cities on the one hand, and the uses of governmentality in cities on the other.