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- Hansen, Karen Tranberg, et al.
(author)
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Reconsidering informality : perspectives from urban Africa
- 2004
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Book (pop. science, debate, etc.)abstract
- 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. Africa’s 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.
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