Cities with 'slums': From informal settlement eradication to a right to the city in Africa
, bidonville, quartier informel, informal settlement, renouvellement urbain, politique urbaine, droit à la ville, Africa, Afrique, slum clearance, Huchzermeyer Marie, habitants
<div><b>Organisers' description:</b></div> </div> The UN’s Development target to improve the lives of 100 million ‘slum’ dwellers has been inappropriately communicated as a target to free cities of slums. Cities with ‘Slums’: from informal settlement eradication to a right to the city in Africa traces the proliferation of this misunderstanding across several African countries, and explains how current urban policy, with its heightened focus on urban competitiveness and associated urban policy norms, encourages this interpretation. The cases it presents cover a range of conflicts between urban residents and the local and national authorities that seek to curtail their ‘right to the city’.<br /> <br /> It offers disturbing insights into post-apartheid South Africa’s urban trajectory, with uneasy parallels in other African countries, both in the form of ‘slum’ eradication drives and in ambitious, but flawed, flagship pilot projects.<br /> <br /> The book aims to inspire a wider understanding of, sympathy for and solidarity with struggles against informal settlement eradication in South Africa and beyond, and argues that the right to the city, in its original conception, has direct relevance for urban contestations in Africa today.</div> </div> <b>Marie Huchzermeyer</b> is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.</div> </div>
Marie Huchzermeyer
UCT Press
2011
256
Ouvrage
Tenement cites: From 19th century Berlin to 21st century Nairobi
tenement, logement, politique du logement, quartier défavorisé, immeuble de grande hauteur, aménagement urbain, densité urbaine, droit à la ville, droit au logement, histoire urbaine, Berlin, Nairobi, Huchzermeyer Marie
<div><b>Abstract from the publisher:</b></div> </div> Nairobi today has over 10,000 multi-story tenement buildings, many of them offering single rooms and up to eight stories high. Privately owned and exploiting urban space to the maximum, these bear similarities to housing in rapidly industrializing 19th century tenement cities- New York, Glasgow, Berlin and others. This book explores the emergence of tenement markets across time and space. It focuses on two contrasting cities: Berlin, the largest and densest concentration of tenements in the 19th century, and Nairobi, a city today increasingly shaped by tenement investment that exploits urban space to the maximum, displaying pockets of what may well be the highest residential densities on the African continent.<br /> <br /> In examining similar themes in the history of Berlin and Nairobi, Huchzermeyer asks what legitimizes tenement markets over time. She interrogates the role of the late 19th and early 20th century housing discourse in Berlin, within its turbulent context. There is no explicit discourse on Nairobi's present-day tenements. The city's modern urban plans, housing policy and city-region strategy wish tenements away. However, Huchzermeyer finds traces of a pragmatic argument for Nairobi's tenement typology in the approaches that some municipal officials have adopted. This recognizes the convenience and economic buzz of tenement districts and their absorption of unrelenting housing demand. In relation to Nairobi's tenement-dominated context, which is shaped by pragmatism and enterpreneurialism, but also regulatory breakdown, corruption, growing vigilantism and ethnic division amid renewed hope for democratization, Huchzermeyer raises important questions for right to the city.</div> </div> <b>Marie Huchzemeyer </b>is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.</div> </div>
Marie Huchzermeyer
Africa World Press
2011
288
Ouvrage