By Patience Adzande, Steve Commins and Lucy Earle

Many residents of African cities are vulnerable to widespread manifestations of violence, including crime, political and ethnically motivated intimidation, and threats to property, both housing and land rights. These residents thus feel insecure, due to the risk of personal and communal harm and loss or damage to property.  

The recognition that safety and security are matters of primary concern for urban households, especially low-income and vulnerable groups, is grounded in the lived experiences and perceptions of these people. In conflict-affected states, insecurity also involves the resolution of conflicts and armed insurgencies which have taken to the streets of the city, resulting in the forced displacement and integration of internally displaced people (IDPs) in urban areas.

For residents to feel secure, they need to have their lived experiences and perceptions included at the heart of approaches addressing the challenge of urban security. Such approaches would be designed to tackle the problems that underpin different impacts of violence, rather than treating its symptoms. 

When residents experience insecurity and see themselves at risk of both structural and interpersonal violence, the normalisation of violence can increase the gap between citizen and state, as well as between citizens. These interdependent relationships are often complex because the same context can be secure or insecure, depending on the time of day or the identity of the individual, including their affiliations or connections.

Violence undermines economic growth, deepens mistrust of security and justice institutions, and frequently leads to the emergence of non-state organisations that enforce forms of “street justice”. Distrust of the state grows when security forces are heavy-handed, and this can lead to a breakdown in the ability of public institutions to maintain order.  Young people are often the target of harsh policing, and there is also a widespread lack of facilities for juvenile justice.

Insecurity and vulnerability have impacts at the individual, household and neighbourhood levels in urban areas. Perceived and real threats of violence in various forms, for example, exposure to crime or the threat of political or ethnic militias, can limit mobility – particularly for women and girls, and various ethnic groups – with knock-on impacts on education, livelihoods and general wellbeing. Levels of insecurity and vulnerability are influenced by the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of residents, the physical conditions of urban areas and the existence of governance gaps in cities.

Marginalisation of informal settlements

Safety and security can be maintained and promoted by both state and non-state actors. However, security may be absent in part because of the social, spatial and political marginalisation of a city’s informal settlements. In many cases, this marginalisation has led to “local government voids”, which further contribute to a crisis of governance, trust and inclusion. Such voids emerge when different forms of everyday insecurity come together: basic services, police protection and political attention disappear or require bribes or favours.

When these voids exist for long enough, other powerholders or power seekers will step in opportunistically. “Hybrid governance” arrangements evolve, where certain areas of a city are governed by various informal community organisations, clan-based militias, gangs or other manifestations of non-state powerholders. Elsewhere, residents may rely on private security to protect life and property, or create community-based mechanisms for policing and justice. Different forms of “co-production” can evolve, some based on coalitions of private and public security services, and others based on instances where political actors are connected to or negotiate with cartels that control basic services.

At a city-wide level, urban areas that are perceived to have particularly high levels of interpersonal violence and/or are considered to have significant problems with militias, gangs and organised crime, may be unattractive to international business and investment. There can also be stigma attached to residents of such areas, which can generate insecurity for them outside of their own neighbourhood. Local enterprises may be hampered by threats and extortion. Charges for rental units, water and electricity may all be extracted by threats of violence. Where informal community organisations or criminal networks are involved in service provision (such as transport, water, electricity), local authorities suffer loss of revenue and may struggle to improve access to or restore basic services.  

Experience of and levels of safety and security, or of violence, are strongly correlated with livelihoods, gender and ethnicity. Violence may be used by city actors (including elected officials) to achieve political or narrowly constructed “development” goals, for example through “slum” clearances that are often accompanied by brutality and wanton destruction of personal possessions. In African cities, policing that aims to reduce crime in middle- to high-income neighbourhoods may involve violating the rights of those living in low-income settlements, including through harshly enforced and inequitable curfews and extra-judicial executions.

Community characteristics and insecurity

Additionally, the characteristics of low-income urban communities are closely connected to a lack of safety and security.  For example, forms of insecurity may include:

• Houses constructed of temporary materials that do not adequately protect occupants or property from the elements or from physical threats.
• Insecurity of tenure, which may increase the risk of eviction.
• Displacement, where populations have arrived from rural areas, due to conflicts, climate change, lack of livelihoods and access to land.
• Weak governance and lack of voice for low-income and disadvantaged people.
• Highly unequal access to services, with inadequate levels of service provision in low-income neighbourhoods.

Violence may contribute further to the lack of access to services, and to further weakening social cohesion and trust. Many low-income people live at a physical and social distance from formal NGOs or government agencies. Thus, when they face pressures from different forms of violence, hindering access to schools and livelihoods, they may lack formal systems of support. They may also mistrust the response of duty bearers such as police, judicial and other state actors. In addition, gender-related violence includes not only household violence but threats that prevent access to sanitation and water services. For young people, the key elements of the transition to adulthood are often truncated by the experience of or exposure to violence.

Understanding and improving security: ACRC research intervention

Initially focusing on Freetown, Maiduguri, Mogadishu and Nairobi, the security domain will consider different forms of “everyday insecurity”, along spatial and temporal lines, as well as how the same urban area can contain spaces that are relatively secure and those that are highly insecure. The domain will take a “street politics” approach, reflecting urban residents’ lived experiences and perceptions of insecurity and different sources of violence. The domain will seek to move away from discourses of security as control, to an understanding of security according to the experience of city residents.  It will contribute towards an exploration of measures that reduce the prevalence of violence, and attempt to address the lived perceptions and fear of violence.

The initial research will contribute to a better understanding of how addressing these issues relates to urban policies that increase residents’ trust in their public officials, delivering basic services, and designing urban plans that are flexible in the face of continued in-migration and local insecurity. Governance based on the perceptions and experiences from the street can then help to forge a link between increased trust of citizens, including young people, and access to basic services, a perception of a fair judicial system, and trust in redefining the roles and authority of accountable policing on the street.

Header photo credit: Peeter Viisimaa / Getty Images. Lagos street seen through wire fencing.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

“Forget planning, politics first.”

As part of the Development Studies Association Annual Conference, the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) hosted a roundtable discussion exploring ‘The political opportunities and obstacles associated with Africa’s urban challenges’.

Bringing together the expertise and perspectives of grassroots social movement leaders and academics, the discussion strongly emphasised the need to rethink the conventional African urban development trajectories of imposing infrastructures and urban models that do not address the needs of the majority African urban citizens. Instead, the panellists advanced the necessity of working with the informal settlement residents, informal/popular economic actors and the natural environment to address African urban challenges.

The panellists identified that African cities are faced with housing, transport, education, health, food security and employment related challenges. Joseph Muturi provided an example of Mukuru informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, which has only two legally recognised schools serving more than half a million people. He also noted that they found hundreds of informal schools and health centres staffed with unqualified professionals in their assessment of the settlement.

In most parts of Africa, development priorities and policy responses to urban challenges are shaped by city managers, urban professionals, politicians and developers, with urban development planning mostly focused on infrastructural expansion with minimal input from, or benefit to the majority urban poor. For example, Shuaib Lwasa of Urban Action Lab stated how many African urban governments invest heavily in motorised transport infrastructure, which mainly serves less than 10% of city dwellers.

The panellists highlighted political exclusion as the major obstacle to addressing urban challenges in African cities. One such group facing persistent political exclusion is refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs), who are considered transient residents despite their permanent resident status. As a result, tens of thousands of refugees and IDPs live in African cities – mostly in informal settlements – without the necessary support or full citizenship rights. Lucy Earle of IIED stated that in Mogadishu, Somalia, for example, IDPs are denied voting and other citizenship rights, which exposes them to forced eviction as land value increases.

Political competition to control urban rents for personal enrichment and patronage was discussed as another key barrier to addressing African urban challenges. Many African politicians consider urban services, infrastructures and land as private or group asset accumulation sources. This has led to intense political competition to control these resources, resulting in poor service delivery and skewed resource allocation.

Even democratic multiparty electoral competition has limited effect in ensuring accountability of politicians, the panellists noted, due to entrenched identity-based political mobilisation of the majority illiterate electorate. Notably, the representatives of social movements on the panel expressed that the tendency of some politicians to prioritise personal enrichment from every project has made it difficult for them to build long-lasting partnerships with authorities to address the needs of the urban poor.

The roundtable also highlighted the increased recognition among many African governments of the role that urban centres and urbanisation play in their national development plans. For example, Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai of the University of Ghana Business School talked about the increased political significance of urban centres, especially Accra and Kumasi, in Ghanian party politics, national development planning and resource allocation.

However, the panellists also identified four significant limitations with this increased emphasis on urbanisation in Africa. Firstly, most national development plans view urban and rural areas as distinct spatial categories and fail to consider the particular features of peri-urban spaces.

Secondly, there is a tendency to focus on large and capital cities at the expense of secondary cities and smaller towns, which are rapidly urbanising.

Thirdly, in most parts of Africa, urban local governments are constrained from allocating resources based on local priorities, due to limited fiscal decentralisation. Patience Mudimu, director of Dialogue on Shelter, noted that limited fiscal decentralisation in cities administered by an opposition party tends to exacerbate the discord between the city and national government, with significant adverse impact on service delivery, citing Harare, Zimbabwe as an example.

Finally, most African national development plans heavily emphasise flagship infrastructure-led development without considering the needs of the majority of urban residents living in informal settlements. Accordingly, the panellists suggested rethinking how urban development is integrated into national policy formulation and development planning.  

The panellists underlined the necessity of doing urban development differently by shifting the focus from infrastructure-led to people-centred development, and capitalising on the creativity and improvisational skills of the majority urban poor. People-centred development involves bringing excluded segments of the urban population (such as slum dwellers, refugees and IDPs) to the table, to set the development agenda for their settlement and cities.

However, inclusive development and participatory planning should not be done as a box-ticking exercise, by inviting a few community leaders into five-star hotels for photo opportunities. Instead, the urban poor need to be in charge of collecting and analysing information about their communities and prioritising their development needs. Joseph Muturi shared his experience of the Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) in Nairobi, Kenya, to demonstrate the potential of informal settlement residents and their grassroots organisations in planning the largest informal settlement upgrading projects ever in collaboration with multiple development partners.

Crucially, with the advent of Covid-19 health emergencies and climate change impacts, the panellists also emphasised how urban development planning also needs to be geared towards building the environmental and socio-economic resilience of communities.

Overall, the roundtable enabled the panellists to talk about the key urban challenges facing African cities, share their own experiences of addressing them, and provide ACRC with examples of avenues to do urban development differently. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the panel is that African urban socio-economic problems are political, and so the solutions must also be political

Panellists

> Patience Mudimu (Director, Dialogue on Shelter, Harare)
> Joseph Muturi (grassroots leader from Kenya, chairperson of Slum/Shack Dwellers International)
> Shuaib Lwasa (Urban Action Lab, Makerere University, Global Adaptation Centre)
> Lucy Earle (IIED)
> Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai (University of Ghana Business School)

Convener

> Diana Mitlin (Professor of Global Urbanism, The University of Manchester and CEO, African Cities Research Consortium)

Photo credit: Muungano wa Wanavijiji / Know Your City TV. Ongoing removal of housing structures located on roads by residents to pave way for construction of road network at Mukuru Kwa Reuben.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.