Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South 9781529204469

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“Not content to follow the usual tropes of urban studies, Myers challenges mainstream urban theory at a time of great uncertainty about urbanism on a world scale.” Martin J. Murray, University of Michigan

RETHINKING URBANISM

This book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism by using a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of who and what makes urban environments.

G ARTH MYER S

Garth Myers is Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies at Trinity College.

Myers explores the global hierarchy of cities, the criteria for positioning within these hierarchies, and the successes of various policymaking approaches designed specifically to boost a city’s ranking. Engaging heavily with postcolonial studies and Global South thinking, he shows how cities construct one another’s spaces and calls for a new understanding of planetary urbanism that moves beyond Western-centric perspectives.

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ISBN 978-1-5292-0445-2

RE T HI N K I N G URB AN I SM L E S S ON S F ROM P OSTCOLON I AL I S M AN D T HE G LOB AL S OU T H G A RTH MY E R S

RETHINKING URBANISM Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South Garth Myers

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bristol University Press         North America office: 1-​ 9 Old Park Hill            c/​ o The University of Chicago  Press Bristol                1427 East 60th  Street BS2 8BB               Chicago, IL 60637,  USA UK                 t: +1 773 702  7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940             f: +1 773-​ 702-​ 9756 www.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk      [email protected]                     www.press.uchicago.edu © Bristol University Press 2020 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​0445-​2 hardcover ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​0447-​6  ePub ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​0446-​9  ePdf The right of Garth Myers to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of The University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Blu Inc Front cover image: Ink Drop / Alamy Stock Vector Printed and bound in CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

To William Strous Myers and Beverly Graham Myers

Contents List of Figures List of Acronyms Glossary of Foreign Terms Acknowledgments Preface

vi viii x xii xv

Introduction: Rethinking Urbanism from the South 1 Southern Processes of Planetary Urbanization in Hartford 2 Villages in the City: Patterns of Urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, Dakar, and Zanzibar 3 The Useful and Ornamental Landscapes of British (Post)colonialism 4 Submarine Urbanism: Cities People Make in ‘the Here and the Elsewhere’ 5 ‘The Whole World Is Made in China’: Products and Infrastructures of Dis/connection 6 Urban Politics and Policy in a Southern Urban Planet Epilogue

1 23 49

References Index

77 105 131 155 179 183 221

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List of Figures I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Archipelago of cities discussed in the book Memorial to Samuel Colt, Coltsville National Historical Park, Hartford Sequassen Street, Coltsville, Hartford North End mural, Scott’s Jamaican Bakery, Albany Avenue, Hartford Hartford’s downtown skyline, reflected in the ‘Boat Building’ Starbucks and the hammer and sickle, Shenzhen Nanshan District’s ‘Wakanda’ skyline, Shenzhen Thin-​line sky and handshake houses, Shenzhen Hubei Village, Shenzhen Street scene, rush hour, Gangxia Village, Shenzhen Street scene, rush hour, Futian Civic Center, Shenzhen Street scene, Pikine, Dakar Abandoned houses, Pikine, Dakar Kapok tree, football pitch, Migombani Botanical Garden, Zanzibar Kapok Valley, Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain Sunset, Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain Laventille Hills, Port of Spain Saman trees along Mnazimmoja Park, Kikwajuni, Zanzibar Mnazimmoja Park, Eid celebrations, Zanzibar Migombani Botanical Garden, Zanzibar Waste piles up under a sign that reads, ‘You Must Not Throw Waste Here’, Zanzibar Temple in the Sea, Trinidad Port of Spain skyline, Trinidad Old San Juan, Puerto Rico Cape Coast Castle and beach, Cape Coast, Ghana

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xvi 31 32 36 46 52 56 59 61 62 63 67 68 84 90 91 96 98 99 99 101 110 112 114 121

List of figures

4.5 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2

Amamoma, Cape Coast, adjacent to the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana New drainage infrastructure, Zanzibar New shopping mall under construction, Raha Leo, Zanzibar CPS Live Fumba Town, under construction, Zanzibar Old San Juan, under reconstruction

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123 143 146 167 175

List of Acronyms AAM AfDB AGSCF ASP BRI BRICS BRT CCM CGA CRJE CUF CUGS DoURP DRR FDI FIRE GaWC GBA GSCF HART LAP MSA NAACP NECAP NU PANAFEST PB

African Architecture Matters African Development Bank Africa Global Sister Cities Foundation Afro-​Shirazi Party (Zanzibar) Belt and Road Initiative Brazil Russia India China South Africa Bus rapid transit Chama cha Mapinduzi, Party of the Revolution (Tanzania) Clove Growers Association (Zanzibar) China Railway Jianchang Engineering Company Civic United Front (Tanzania) Center for Urban and Global Studies Department for Urban and Rural Planning (Zanzibar) Disaster Risk Reduction Foreign direct investment Finance, insurance and real estate The Globalization and World Cities research group Greater Bay Area (China) Ghana Sister Cities Foundation Hartford Areas Rally Together Local Area Plan (Zanzibar) Metropolitan Statistical Area (US) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People North End Community Action Project Neighborhood Unit (1982 Zanzibar Master Plan) Pan-​Africa Festival (Cape Coast) Participatory budgeting

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List of acronyms

PRD PROMESA SCI SEZ SMOLE TANU TMN WISC ZANSDI ZIFF ZILEM ZNP ZSSF ZUSP

Pearl River Delta Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act Sister Cities International Special Economic Zone Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment (Zanzibar) Tanganyika African National Union Transnational municipal network West Indian Social Club Zanzibar Spatial Data Infrastructure Zanzibar International Film Festival Zanzibar Integrated Lands and Environmental Management Zanzibar National Party Zanzibar Social Security Fund Zanzibar Urban Support Program

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Glossary of Foreign Terms Allée Arrondissement Balozi Boricua Borinquen Chef de quartier Chef de village Chengbiancun Chengwaicun Chengzhongcun Commune d’arrondissement Cun Esusu Feng-​shui Fitina Hukou Jouvay

tree-​lined promenade, French. urban district, French. Ambassador, also ten-​house cell leader, Swahili (Zanzibar). brave lord, Taino (adapted as the Puerto Rican word for the people of Puerto Rico). Puerto Rico, Taino. head of the urban quarter, French (Senegal). head of the village, French (Senegal). Village on the edge of the city, Mandarin. Village in the suburbs, Mandarin. Village in the city, Mandarin. communal district, French (Senegal).

small settlement, Mandarin. credit system, Yoruba. balance of energy forces, Mandarin. discord, Swahili. registration, Mandarin. daybreak [carnival], Afro-​Trinidadian English (derived from French, j’ouvert). Kiunga (pl. viunga) suburban farming estate, Swahili (Zanzibar). Kwinitekw Long river, northern New England Algonquian. Mabalozi plural of balozi, ambassador, Swahili. Masheha plural of sheha, government representative at the ward level, Swahili. Mitiulaya European trees, Zanzibar Swahili for saman trees. Mtaa (pl. mitaa) neighborhood, Swahili. Pikinité Pikine-​ness, Wolof and French. Quinniktuket (Anglicized to Connecticut) Long river, southern New England Algonquian. Sachem (male) settlement leader, Algonquian languages.

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Glossary of foreign terms

Saunksqua Sheha Shehia Sisi-​kwa-​sisi Sou-​sou Tout-​monde Vincularidad Wampum Wangunk Waqf

(female) settlement leader, Algonquian languages. government representative at the ward level, Swahili (Zanzibar). ward, Swahili (Zanzibar). Us-​for us, Swahili. credit system, Afro-​Trinidadian English (derived from Yoruba, esusu). whole-​world or all-​world, French. bound-​togetherness, Spanish. belts of shell beads, Algonquian languages (derived from wampumpeag). river bend (and ‘people of the…’ and ‘settlement at the…’), Algonquian. charitable property endowment in Islamic law, Arabic.

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Acknowledgments The research for this book has included an extensive literature review, archival research, fieldwork, interviewing, policy analysis, literary analysis, and photographic interpretation in eight countries on four continents. While I have experience and familiarity with Hartford and Zanzibar, my knowledge base for them and for the other cities here has been heavily reliant on learning from other people. I would like to thank all those people whom I have interviewed or who conversed with me about the project, or who have helped me in locating sources, archives, gray literature, or photographs. This includes archivists at the Wethersfield Historical Society in Wethersfield, Connecticut, Watkinson Library at Trinity College, the British Library, Zanzibar National Archives, the Commission for Lands of the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, the University of the West Indies at St Augustine, Trinidad, and Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. I acknowledge the financial support of the Paul E.  Raether Distinguished Professorship, a Luce Foundation Faculty Development grant from the Center for Urban and Global Studies, and a grant from the Center for Caribbean Studies, all at Trinity College, as well as the Urban Studies Foundation for support for an International Workshop grant at which initial ideas for several chapters were explored. Even more of these initial ideas emerged at a small conference at the National University of Singapore in 2013; parts of the introduction, Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 of this book were published in the resultant article, ‘From expected to unexpected comparison: changing the flows of ideas about cities in a post-​colonial urban world’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35(1):104–​18. A portion of Chapter 2 was published in 2018 in ‘The Africa problem of global urban theory: Reconceptualizing planetary urbanization’, International Development Policy/​Revue internationale de politique de developpement 10: 231–​53. I have benefited from many intellectual conversations with my colleagues at Trinity College, too many to name, in developing this

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book. Most obviously, I  wish to thank Xiangming Chen and Julie Gamble. Colleagues across the campus have read various segments of this book, heard me present parts of it, or talked about it with me, and I thank them for their advice over the last few years, particularly Robert Cotto, Tim Cresswell, Monique Daley, Pablo Delano, Dario Euraque, Luis Figueroa, Megan Hartline, Zhengli Huang, Anne Lambright, Seth Markle, Emily Mitchell-​Eaton, Gabby Nelson, Beth Notar, John Selders, Maurice Wade, Andrew Walsh, Tom Wickman, and Johnny Williams. Pablo deserves special mention for his advice about both Hartford and San Juan, and technical advice and assistance on photographs. Dario’s expertise on the Caribbean proved extremely helpful in several chapters. My understanding of and knowledge about Hartford expanded greatly from conversations with or talks from Veronica Airey-​Wilson, Lisa Brooks, Tony Cherolis, Art Feltman, Dollie McLean, Sasha Allen Walton, Annawon Weeden, and Damaris and Sabas Whittaker. My students at Trinity have been incredibly helpful, as research assistants, researchers on their own honors projects, or readers, especially Aboubacar Bakayoko, Tianshu Chu, Salima Etoka, Elisabed Gedevanishvili, Xavier Jackson, Giana Moreno, and Ruzhe (Ivan) Su. My former graduate students at the University of Kansas and those for whom I have served as an external advisor have also given me support and advice with the project, most of all Ken Aikins, Levi Gahman, Hilary Hungerford, Soren Larson, Mary Lawhon, Josh Long, Makame Muhajir, Joanna Ondruzek-​Roy, Jamie Shinn, Sarah Smiley, and Ang Subulwa. Colleagues all over the world have helped me to make this book a reality. Most often this has come through sharing their thoughts on drafts of chapters or presentations of various ideas. I am grateful, too, for the invitations these colleagues have offered to present what eventually became Rethinking urbanism, in one portion or another, at 12 universities or colleges in nine countries, as well as seven conferences or meetings. Many thanks to Marguerite Agard, Joyanne de Four Babb, Ellen Bassett, Walter Bgoya, Bill Bissell, Tim Bunnell, Padraig Carmody, Mailys Chauvin, Armelle Choplin, Martina Cibulkova, Liza Cirolia, Steve Commins, Eleni Coundouriotis, Chris Cozier, Kenny Cuper, Debanuj Dasgupta, Filip de Boeck, Bill Derman, Mona Domosh, Siri Ericksen, Laura Fair, Ken Foote, Till Förster, Marie-​Aude Fouere, Mohamed Habib, Josh Hagen, Tony Hall, Iddi Ali Haji, Haji Ali Haji, Juma Ali Haji, Phil Harrison, Tom Hanlon, Nik Heynen, Liu Hui, Jane Jacobs, Tariq Jazeel, Irmelin Joelson, Jay Johnson, Aboud Jumbe, Miguel Kanai, Roger Keil, Kjersti Larsen, Leilei Li, Johannes Lückenkütter, Brij Maharaj, Tim Mangin, Steve Marr, Munya Mawere, Jenny

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Mbaye, Richard Mbih, Prita Meier, Claire Mercer, Andy Merrifield, Ali Khalil Mirza, Sarah Moser, Muhammed Juma Muhammed, Jim Murphy, Martin Murray, Evance Mwathunga, Joe Nevins, Leonie Newhouse, Ebenezer Obadare, Sophie Oldfield, Ben Page, Danilo Palazzo, Aparna Parikh, Sue Parnell, Zarina Patel, Margaret Pearce, Deborah Pellow, Rita Pemberton, Edgar Pieterse, Bronwen Powell, Malini Ranganathan, Amy Richmond, Hamza Zubeir Rijal, Jenny Robinson, Ananya Roy, Byron Santangelo, Suzanne Scheld, Seth Schindler, Wolfgang Scholz, Bhakti Shringarpure, James Sidaway, Jon Silver, Maliq Simone, Jyotsna Singh, Jussy Singh, Parmukh Singh, Warren Smit, Wing Shing Tang, Jonathan Walz, Kevin Ward, Vanessa Watson, Christina West, Astrid Wood, and Chin-​Yuan Woon. I am especially thankful for Jenny and Martin’s careful critical readings of the first draft. My family has been, as ever, incredibly supportive and patient with my many absences  –​thank you for all of this, Melanie, Atlee, and Phebe. I could not do what I do or be who I am without you. Lastly, I would like to thank Emily Watt, Caroline Astley, Laura Vickers, and Sarah Bird for their work in bringing the book to fruition with Bristol University Press.

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Preface I want to begin this book with a personal explanation of what gave rise to its shape, and then a brief outline of that shape. The Martinican poet and writer Edouard Glissant, upon whom I  rely at numerous moments in the text, insisted throughout his career that, in J. Michael Dash’s (1995: 14) translation and rephrasing, ‘one must return to one’s place’, not in a desperate ‘longing for origins’ but in a ‘return to the point of entanglement’. In this book, I take that return to the point of entanglement seriously, on personal as well as academic-​scholarly and political levels. I start from where I stand, as a professor of urban studies in Hartford, Connecticut, and I move on to some of my place-​ worlds, circling back frequently to Hartford and to Zanzibar, Tanzania, where I conducted my dissertation research and have returned on six subsequent research projects over the last 30 years. When people first meet one another, one may ask, ‘where are you from?’ Like anyone, I have short answers ready for this occasion. But I  am made up of entanglements. I  am from the cities I  have lived in; I am from other cities where I have worked, for this book and others.  I  am  from the places where my ancestors lived. I  am, like everyone, from the planet. My identity is constructed from links between urban areas whose identities are similarly intertwined, in relation. My ‘point of entanglement’ is the ever-​shifting landscape of elsewheres and realms of debate in which I have lived and worked. The urban areas on which I focus in this book are tied to one another without me, but my positionality is part of why I chose them as geographic sites for illustrating my arguments. I concentrate on these urban areas: Hartford; Zanzibar; Port of Spain, Trinidad; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Cape Coast, Ghana; Dakar, Senegal; and Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou in China’s Pearl River Delta (PRD). I live and work in Hartford, where 34 percent of the population comes from Puerto Rico, with sizable Ghanaian, Trinidadian, and Chinese communities; this metropolitan area’s industrialization and growth came from its ties with the US South, the West Indies, and Africa. Hartford was built

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on top of deeply intertwined indigenous Algonquian settlements in a region that my direct ancestors played roles in seizing. Rather than using this to forge a path toward my ‘longing for origins’, to me, this historical geography is another ‘return to the point of entanglement’: in several real senses, my ‘place’ on the map of American urbanism is a Hartford story (Figure I.1). And then, to further the entanglement: Hartford’s ties with Africa were arguably strongest historically with Cape Coast and Zanzibar, the latter being a place I consider as ‘home’. Dongguan is Hartford’s only Asian sister city, and Cape Coast has also been a sister city to Hartford; Figure I.1 Archipelago of cities discussed in the book

Source: Angela G. Subulwa.

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San Juan and Port of Spain have many ties to Connecticut’s capital. I direct the Center for Urban and Global Studies (CUGS) at Trinity College, a center dedicated to bridging the urban and the global, seeking alternative ways of researching how they are brought together; our newsletter is even called The urban planet. CUGS has strong ties with urban centers around the world, including the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Shenzhen University in Shenzhen, and I run a field course in Zanzibar. CUGS has a major program of research and teaching about urban environments in East Asia, and I am part of this in the Pearl River Delta. The cities on which I focus make logical sense together as nodes of what urbanism and urbanization look like from global South perspectives –​but they also make logical sense because my life is entangled with them.

Outline of the argument and outline of chapters This book asks two broad central questions: what has shaped contemporary urbanism and urbanization on the planet? and what are the shapes that urbanism and urbanization take? I tackle these questions in six content chapters. The first two chapters after the introduction address these central questions by analyzing discussions of processes and patterns of urbanism and urbanization. The other four chapters explore aspects of grand shaping forces: colonialism and imperialism; human migration and movement; trade and economic relationships; and policies and politics. As I wrote this book, I short-​handed these in my head as dealing with six Ps: to the processes and patterns of the first two chapters, I added postcolonialism, people, products, and policies in the next four. These ‘six Ps’ are ultimately more than an organizational device. Taken together, they manifest a web tying the urban planet together, through historical, geographical, ecological, socio-​cultural, economic, and political themes. Among the cities I discuss, all but Hartford are typically mapped as cities of the global South seldom regarded in global urban studies. Shenzhen is the only one mentioned in the recent International handbook of globalization and world cities (Derudder et al. 2012a). It is likewise the only one discussed in books with titles like Planet of cities or Global cities (Abrahamson 2004; Angel 2012; Gottlieb and Ng 2017); in all such books, it is not a central focus. Six of the urbanisms have under three million people –​the exceptions being the three PRD megacities –​ but all nine vary dramatically. Tiny Port of Spain, with fewer than 40,000 people at the heart of a metropolitan area of a bit more than half a million, is the central ground for producing and reproducing

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what it means to be Trinidadian; massive Dongguan, with more than eight million people producing high percentages of the world’s shoes, cell phones, and furniture is still hardly known outside of southern China, overshadowed by its larger neighbors on either side, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Yet all these urban areas can be starting places for conceptualizations built from postcolonial and Southern thinking. I  am tracing connections and comparisons within the urbanization processes of these seemingly disparate urban stories. I do so through concepts and thoughts generated out of postcolonialism or from the global South, rather than from global North conventions. My goal lies in providing practical, empirical illustrations and thick descriptions of the applicability of postcolonial and Southern thought for addressing this new era, which the contemporary literature that sprang from the French urbanist Henri Lefebvre’s (1970: 113) hypothesis of ‘the planetary nature of the urban phenomenon’ terms the era of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2012, 2014 and 2015; Merrifield 2013 and 2014). This book builds on the many recent works of postcolonial and Southern urban studies contesting the universalizing and reductive tendencies of global North urban theory (for example: Chattopadyay 2012a and 2012b; Derickson 2018; Escobar 2018; Lawhon and Truelove, forthcoming; Mignolo 2002 and 2012; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Parnell and Oldfield 2014; Robinson 2002, 2003, and 2006; Roy 2011a, 2011b, and 2014; Roy and Ong 2011; Ruddick et al. 2018; Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti 2013; Simone 2001, 2016, and 2019; and Simone and Pieterse 2017). My aim is less to repeat these many critiques of Northern theory and more to genuinely build from them to discuss different ways that the urban areas which I examine manifest postcolonial, Southern urbanism, and connectivity. The introduction that follows this preface, however, situates the exploration that ensues by outlining the parameters of how the discussions and debates in urban studies about global connections and circuits of urbanization emerged and evolved over the last half-​century or so. Chapter  1 examines historical processes of urbanization, with my focus on Hartford, seen from indigenous, postcolonial, Caribbean, and African/​African-​American remappings of its metropolitan geographies. The second chapter centers on patterns, specifically the geographic land-​ use and housing patterns common to rapid urbanization that overtakes the surrounding countryside. The chapter uses the Chinese concept of chengzhongcun, or urbanized village (de Meulder et al. 2014), along with the related concepts of chengbiancun and chengwaicun, villages on the city-​edge and in the suburbs, and Chinese scholarship analyzing

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what happens to them in the PRD. I apply these ideas to other similarly rapid urban transformations in Dakar and Zanzibar, with references to the comparability in other cities of the book. The third chapter examines global urbanism as postcolonial. (Following conventions in postcolonial studies, I  use a hyphen to distinguish between the temporal era after colonialism (that is the post-​colonial era) and literature, thought, or action to move beyond the colonial (that is postcolonialism)). I concentrate on colonialism’s role in physically, ecologically, and culturally restructuring cities around the world, emphasizing the colonial shaping of urban landscapes  –​parks and botanical gardens –​in Zanzibar and Port of Spain. I work to show the divergent, contested, and reshaped character of the urban ecologies of these two settings in post-​colonial times. The fourth chapter discusses people and migration. I reverse the typical analysis of the socio-​cultural experiences and identities of transnational or translocal migrants from the global South, by illustrating contemporary cultures of urbanization through literature and the arts in questions of translocality in Port of Spain, San Juan, Zanzibar, and Cape Coast. Taken together, these two chapters illustrate the ways in which ordinary people and creative artists in the global South work to reframe colonial experiences and reimagine postcolonial cities and landscapes. The fifth chapter, on products, deals with the global urban literatures around infrastructure, including both physical infrastructure and the economic understanding of infrastructural interconnections of the global urban system. I  concentrate on trade and investment from China in Africa, with a case study of Zanzibar. I then examine the experiences and socio-​material infrastructures of African traders in Guangzhou and the PRD. The sixth and final content chapter examines the urban studies literatures on urban politics and policy mobilities, from postcolonial Southern perspectives. The specific policies examined include participatory budgeting, bus rapid transit, enclave urbanization (new towns or satellite cities), sister-​city relationships, and climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Case study material from Hartford, San Juan, Zanzibar and Dongguan helps to show different ways in which South–​South connectivities shape politics, governance, and urban cultures at both ends (Jayne, Hubbard and Bell 2017). These two chapters combined analyze the agency of global South urbanites and policy makers in shaping the political economy of urbanization and urbanism in this emerging era. The growing interests in both Southern urbanism (inclusive of postcolonial approaches) and planetary urbanization represent, arguably, the two greatest growth areas of urban studies in the last decade; their

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growth is so great that I cannot possibly cover them comprehensively. Taking on what still ends up being a huge task inevitably means there are omissions. Southern urban theory can be Anglo-​centric, under-​ utilizing Francophone scholarship, and engaging in a limited way with Latin America and scholarship in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, or Arabic, from the global South (Mabin 2014). My empirical examples have limited nods to Francophone (Dakar) and Spanish-​language (San Juan) urbanism, and none to the Lusophone world. But my conceptual arguments rely heavily on a major voice of the Francophone Caribbean (Glissant) and dovetail comfortably with findings, concepts and philosophical arguments from many Latin Americanist thinkers on colonialism or Southern theory (Escobar 2018; Mignolo 2002, 2005, 2011, and 2012; Vainer 2014;). Carlos Vainer, Walter Mignolo, and Arturo Escobar have all argued against what Vainer (2014: 53) calls the ‘colonial claim of universalism’ in decolonizing projects toward the concept of a ‘pluri-​verse’ that is akin to Glissant’s idea of the ‘tout-​ monde’, or ‘whole-​world’, which I explore in several chapters. Walsh and Mignolo (2018: 1) draw on the indigenous Andean concept of vincularidad, ‘the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms… with territory or land and the cosmos’, in line with Glissant’s ‘tout-​monde’. Similarly, while I have no South or Southeast Asian case study cities, I have been inspired by much postcolonial and Southern scholarship from these regions, including the postcolonial work on ‘subaltern’ studies discussed in Jazeel and Legg (2019) and Jazeel (2019), and Simone’s (2019) recent work in Jakarta. There is much less material here about global North cities; partly, this is an attempt to subvert the prevailing order of both planetary urban hierarchies and the flows of scholarly ideas. Patel (2014: 45) argued for the enduring thread of Eurocentrism even in the radical works of Manuel Castells and David Harvey that have been so fundamental to global urban studies for the last half-​century, and the continuing ‘need to deconstruct the provincialism of European universalisms’ –​ but also to reconstruct the content, concepts, and forms of knowledge. Patel contends that one need not throw out everything that originates in the global North as ‘wrong’, but instead situate Northern conceptualizations as providing ‘only partial and often… flawed understandings’. I do utilize one ostensibly northern city, Hartford, as a key site for the inter-​relations and circuits of urbanity, showing in several chapters its interconnections with –​and ways in which it can be seen as an instance of –​southern urbanism. I seek to contribute to the emerging recognition that many global North cities display facets

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of Southern urbanism (Devlin 2017; Harris 2017; Kreibich 2000; Marr 2016). In the words of the Glissant-​inspired Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe (2017: 179): ‘Thinking through what must come will of necessity be a thinking… in circulation, a thinking of crossings, a world-​thinking.’ This book is a tangible illustration of how smaller or lesser-​studied urbanisms in both the global North and South impact one another’s cultures and spaces in the circulations and crossings of this world-​thinking.

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Introduction: Rethinking Urbanism from the South Introduction Over the last few decades in urban studies, a considerable critique and a vast opening of comparative urbanism arose out of postcolonial studies and Southern theory, challenging universal understandings emanating from European and North American cities. This critique energized a reconsideration of the need to construct global hierarchies of cities, the criteria for positioning on such hierarchies, and the desirability of policy making aimed to boost a city’s rankings on them. This literature called into question the meaning of urbanism and the roles, functions, and shapes of urban areas, when accepted understandings for these derive from Euro-​American contexts and all other cities are measured against them. This has led to an ongoing rethinking of how to do global urban studies. This is an exciting time for urban studies, but an unsettling time. Part of the excitement and unease rests with this rethinking going on around the field, but another part involves what is going on, on the ground, for urban areas. These two parts are inseparable: scholars are rethinking urbanism because urbanism itself is changing so quickly. This book builds on the opening toward recentering global urban studies, through engagement with postcolonialism and global South thinking. I work toward empirical illustrations of how lesser-​studied urbanisms in the global South relate to one another. The argument builds from postcolonial studies and Southern theory. The aim is an analysis of select urban regions that have mostly remained off the map of urban studies and perceived as disconnected from one another. I use the case study urban areas, and themes which link them, to engage debates in global urban studies about urbanism and urbanization –​debates that have still largely been shaped by theories from the global North, even when empirical analysis extends to the global South.

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My title is Rethinking urbanism, and my main interest lies with both meanings attached to the word urbanism:  the more common understanding of it as a way of life, and the architecture and planning deployment of it as a spatial pattern or urban design. Urbanization is the multifaceted process creating urbanism –​both cities and metropolitan regions. The study of urbanism and urbanization is staggering in breadth and complexity. In the dense thicket of debates in urban studies, one finds defenses of a canonical critical urban studies, or of scientific-​statistical approaches; arguments centered on and extending from Lefebvre; or contentions from a broadly conceived notion of the global South. That latter zone of the thicket is the main home of this book, but I do spend some time in the other zones. Moreover, I move beyond the thicket, to account for relevant Southern thought outside of urban studies and for perspectives from urban residents. I seek a rethinking of discussions surrounding urbanization via fuller engagement with global South thinking. The global South is an admittedly somewhat fungible delineation originating in the so-​called Brandt Line of the 1980s separating richer and poorer countries on the world map. The resultant map was already and remains problematic for many reasons, including its geographical errors –​like placing China, as a somewhat poorer nation that extends far into the North, with the global South. Lumping hundreds of countries ranging in physical size or population from China or India to Barbados or Burundi is ridiculous on the face of it. Simone (2019: 12–​13) even calls the global South a kind of ‘science fiction’ given its diversity. Some South American scholars want to reframe the conversation around a ‘decolonial’ world, and scholars focused on eastern Europe or the Middle East may want a reformation as the global South/​East. But ‘global South’ is still a working concept, built around regions where a vulnerable majority population resides in conditions of comparable marginality. When one reviews ‘the global urban condition with a southern sensibility’, one sees beyond the massive diversity of the designation (Parnell and Oldfield 2014: 3). If one sticks to the old map of the global South and thereby includes China, South Korea, India, Brazil, and other large middle-​income economies, then the prominence of the global South in 21st-​century urbanization is unmistakable, and the ‘sensibility’ of what comprises urbanization now on the planet emerges much more from what are still frequently termed the ‘developing countries’ or peripheral and semi-​peripheral states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America than from the minority trends of slow growth or even shrinkage for cities across the more ‘developed’ global North. Southern urbanization is full of vitality and vibrancy, shock and disorder, spontaneity and fluidity.

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Introduction

It is also rife with pains from histories of injustices and inequalities, racism and state incapacities, grand dreams, and colossal failings. But there is an imperative for balancing any shared sense of things with the divergences and specific, distinct trajectories of becoming urban. I am mindful of Chambers’ (2017: 28) argument that the global South ‘clearly exceeds any simple geographical location’, since displacement, migration, racism, segregation, and inequality produce ‘a South within every metropole’. As Sparke (2007: 117) put it, ‘the global South is everywhere, but it is also always somewhere, and that somewhere, located at the intersection of entangled political geographies of dispossession and repossession, has to be mapped with persistent geographical sensibility’. Simone (2019: 12–​13) situates the global South in a ‘long-​standing series of projects by Black people [and, I would insist, other people of the “South”] to write themselves into a future foreclosed to them’ and a route by which ‘residents pass in and out of all the histories that attempt to generalize them’. In the US context, Hunter and Robinson (2018: 4) make the case for seeing ‘the South’ not as a reference point for the southern states of the US but instead as a ‘frame for understanding and analyzing the striking similarities across Black communities and neighborhoods’. They link their map of the US as different regions of the ‘South’ with other non-​White understandings of urban geography, as well as Black geographies from Africa and the Caribbean (Hunter and Robinson 2018: 18–​28). One might expand the ‘South’ of Hunter and Robinson, in some broad sense, to cities everywhere that have a marginalized and vulnerable majority, while remaining cognizant of distinct variations and particularities and the dangers of generalization that worried Simone. These kinds of links across a reimagined, multiple South are central to the rethinking of urbanism in my book. Postcolonialism offers a crucial link for any attempted mapping of the global South. European (and in some cases American or Japanese) colonialism and imperialism in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries had important influences on the shape of urbanization in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and, to some extent, East Asia (King 1976). Even China, which was never fully colonized, experienced concessionary colonialism in dozens of cities, most famously Hong Kong, Macau, Qingdao, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. Even with the generally earlier date of independence from European colonialism for many Latin American territories in comparison to most European-​held colonies in Asia or Africa, informal

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European/​American imperialism continued to play a prominent role in urban processes into the 20th century. The implications of colonial or imperial legacies vary greatly across the global South. But postcolonialism means much more than just societies living in the aftermath and with the scars of colonial rule. Postcolonialism is a ‘mode of intellectual work’ pushing ‘past and beyond the condition of coloniality in its widest sense’ (Jazeel 2019: 5–​ 6). To be sure, ‘any definition of postcolonialism’, writes Tariq Jazeel (2019: 1) ‘must be partial, provisional and attenuated to new, unthought strategies for thinking and living through and past the inequities of colonialism in the present’. Yet I share with Jyotsna Singh (2017: 3) the contention that ‘postcolonialism continues to remain viable as an ongoing historical category’ and as a ‘mode’ for intellectual work within that category. This is extremely significant within urban studies, because many urban areas throughout the world continue to wrestle with colonial legacies, and postcolonial settings continue to display a range of outcomes in terms of ‘strategies for thinking and living through’ that wrestling. One key facet of the postcolonial approach in the book rests with how to trace the circuits of connection across and between cities. The concept of a transversal, technically a line that connects two lines on the same plane, has been deployed in recent urban geography stemming from the philosophy of Felix Guattari (2003 and 2015) as a means for articulating the flows and networks that tie together urban development processes in different regions (Bunnell 2016; Goffey 2015; Massey 2007; Sullivan 2014). But transversal identities and geographies have been discussed in a somewhat different manner in postcolonial studies and Southern thought, particularly in Caribbean and indigenous studies (Glissant 1989; Jung 2007; Soguk 2009; Yuval-​Davis 1999). This book examines transversal links between urbanization dynamics using the vision of transversality from Martinican poet Edouard Glissant (1989: 67) as an ‘invisible presence’ at the ‘roots of a cross-​cultural relationship. Submarine roots… not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches’. Glissant had a long friendship with Guattari, so it is perhaps tricky to separate their versions of transversality. Glissant was also in dialogue with many Caribbean thinkers, including C. L. R. James, Sylvia Winter, and Kamau Braithwaite. Likewise, scholars of Glissant can be broadly divided into those who analyze (and generally praise) his earlier work and those who analyze (and generally criticize) his later, more abstract work (Wiedorn 2018). Yet as Wiedorn (2018:  xxxv) has shown, Glissant’s postcolonial Southern vision of

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Introduction

transversality evolved over time, as he ‘remained visibly engaged in the political sphere’ on behalf of decolonization. Glissant enables one to see what he called the ‘whole-​world’ or ‘all-​world’, not as universally the ‘same’, but as a planet of different but interconnected places, an archipelago of creole urbanisms where the task of ‘bringing the multiplicity of the world’s cultures into respectful and enriching contact’ takes precedence (Mbembe 2019: 9; Wiedorn 2018: 121). It is common now to think of how cities are connected to one another across the world. It is equally common to think of an array of cities as being global or world cities, sites of intersections of myriad variety. Still, most discussions of globalization in academic urban studies concentrate on links, networks, and intertwined economies of the world’s major global North metropolitan centers; non-​economic dynamics and most urban spaces of the global South are shortchanged or seen to be effaced within a universal, Northern-​dominated urban world. Smaller secondary cities and towns even in the global North gain far less attention, and the broader realities of this globalism and intersection too often fall away (Bunnell 2017). There is a steadily growing list of exceptions to my general claims, where scholars emphasize relationality of secondary, Southern urban areas (for example Harrison and Hoyler 2018a; Kanna and Chen 2012; Quayson 2014; Söderström 2014; Spencer 2015). But scholarship still must do more to show the complicated life of transversal histories and geographies across and between places that increasingly define our existence as, and hope for, human beings in the 21st century. It is imperative to attempt to start the discussion from ‘Southern cities’ as ‘those that create global connections’ (Roy 2014: 17), in terms of what Simone (2001: 17) called ‘worlding from below’. Seeing cities as collections of ‘beings bound to the game of the… relational world’ (Glissant 2010: 24) requires scholars to move beyond ‘speak[ing] with the language of the Occident’ (Glissant 2010: 36). I am thus arguing for the importance of conceptualizing with the global South  –​Southern intellectual thought, urban patterns, artistic expression, historical experiences, everyday urban life, and comparisons –​when examining contemporary global urbanization and urbanism anywhere, rather than simply studying Southern urbanism with Northern concepts. However, in this introduction’s next section, I discuss debates about what makes urbanism planetary, retracing the examination of the global and planetary dimensions of urbanism and urbanization in mainstream (Northern) urban studies. Although many urban scholars have worked toward global analysis attuned to this differentiation, here I examine the emphases and legacies

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of the Chicago School of urban studies, and then four among those most often credited with creating the Anglo-​American foundations for urban studies’ obsession with globalization’s impacts on, networks in and inter-​relations between cities –​John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, Doreen Massey, and Peter Taylor. A second segment follows a prominent contemporary trajectory extending partly from those foundations, in scholarship analyzing planetary urbanization, under influences from Henri Lefebvre and from the Los Angeles School. I  then move to Southern and postcolonial thinking on global or planetary urbanism to emphasize how I believe that this can help to produce a rethinking of what urbanism and urbanization are about in the 21st century.

Debates on global and world cities All cities of course are and have almost always been global in some sense –​made up of connections across space, and palimpsests of centuries of history. But in urban studies, they were not always understood in these ways. The Chicago School of urban studies represented a sustained attempt to understand how cities grow (Burgess 1925). Chicago School scholars opened powerful lines for research into factors shaping cities. Their emphases ranged from the spatial form of urban areas to the investigation of human behavior in cities. Scholars affiliated with the School emphasized the physical and social organization of cities, as well as urban culture (Park and Burgess 1925). Famously, the Chicago School’s central figure, Robert Park (1925a: 1), called the city ‘a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition’. Almost all of their empirical and conceptual work focused –​at least in the first half of the 20th century –​ on cities in the US (particularly Chicago, and, secondarily, New York) and Western Europe. While Park (1925b, 1925c) and Louis Wirth (1938) focused on immigrants and race in the city and, to a limited degree, Caribbean culture, they were not necessarily analyzing what might make cities global or planetary, because they were working toward ‘universal principles that could be applied to cities everywhere’ (Murray 2017: 3). Although this book has some interest in the urban ‘state of mind’ or racialized experiences in cities, I am more interested in what factors make global cities and planetary urbanization processes distinctive and comparative. Mao Zedong may have been the first thinker beyond the Chicago School to write about ‘world cities’ (Smith 2003), but most Northern scholars see the world cities hypothesis in the 1980s as an opening salvo

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Introduction

in contemporary debates on globalization and urbanism (Friedmann 1986; Friedmann and Wolff 1982). The hypothesis concerned how cities were incorporated into the world economy. Certain urban regions emerged as nodes for a ‘worldwide system of control over production and market expansion’ (Friedmann and Wolff 1982: 310). These nodes were clusters of high-​end financial services and transnational elites, places where global capitalism’s key decisions were made, and to which global capital flowed. Friedmann and Wolff also saw world cities as sites of deindustrialization and growing socio-​spatial divides between elites and the poor. They characterized this divide as a crucial feature of emerging world cities. Following on from Friedmann’s and Friedmann and Wolff’s works, Sassen (1991) used ‘global’ cities as the descriptive in her alternative framework, with an arguably more empirical emphasis on the development of urban networks. Friedmann (1986) highlighted interconnections between cities, but Sassen (2001: 6) took the analysis further, emphasizing the ‘practice of global control’ in the workings of global firms. Like Friedmann, she emphasized inequalities socio-​spatially produced in globalizing urban areas, with squalor accompanying wealth concentrations around financial districts. Some early analyses of globalization and urbanization suggested that they produced an erosion of place and belonging, and Massey (1991) developed the idea of a global sense of place in cities as a response. Massey was cautious about the reactionary leanings of conventional defenses of place. Instead, she created an ingenious image of her streetscape in London, articulating how thoroughly connected it was with the world. Making global cities, Massey (2005:  140) argued, was about the everyday world of people producing urban places in a ‘throwntogetherness’ with other places. There are valuable insights in the works of all these foundational scholars. Their first wave of world/​global cities research helped to generate a massive and expanding array of studies. But the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research group’s work is perhaps the most widely known of the follow-​on studies. Long led by Peter Taylor, this research group’s importance lies in its development of data-​r ich empirical assessments of interconnections between cities in the world economy. In rigorous detail, they filled out hierarchies and links previously intimated by Friedmann, Sassen, and others. Global cityscapes, to the GaWC, result from competition between elite enclaves striving for economic command and control (Beaverstock et al. 1999 and 2000; Derudder et al. 2012a; Taylor et al. 2012). This led GaWC’s scholars to an ever-​widening cartogram/​chart of cities, rated as Alpha, Beta, or Gamma cities, with sub-​levels within these categories and a sort of

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‘honourable mention’ tier of High Sufficiency and Sufficiency cities. Despite expanding the list of urban areas studied, the GaWC still produces charts dominated by select global North cities, with some East Asian (mainly Chinese) cities creeping up the tables (in keeping with research on urban globalization generally, according to Kanai, Grant and Jianu’s 2018 literature survey). The GaWC’s earliest results shaped a critique of their approach from global South scholars (Robinson 2006; Roy 2011b; Roy and Ong 2011). Jenny Robinson (2002 and 2006) contended that the GaWC neglected the cities ‘off the map’, assumed globalization and urbanization to be universal, global North-​driven, economistic, and worked out from a playbook of terms that missed key dynamics of globalization and urbanization across ‘ordinary’ cityscapes in the whole world. All this, she argued, set policy makers in cities on mistaken paths of development that shortchanged glaring basic needs for most urbanites and largely ignored histories and specificities. Criticisms from Robinson and others led the GaWC researchers to expand their criteria for globality and worldliness, but also to push back (McNeill 2017; Parnreiter 2012; Smith 2013; Taylor and Derudder 2018). This counter-​critique often centered on the alleged ‘absence of evidence’ in the work of ‘ordinary cities’ scholars (Smith 2013: 2301) and the vagueness of concepts in postcolonial and Southern urban theory. It is important to recognize the ‘ongoing diversity and developments within world city network research’ (Taylor and Derudder 2018: 45), and to acknowledge that the main purpose of GaWC research has been to assess ‘the degree to which different cities are enabling the reproduction of globalized capitalism’ in the contemporary moment (Taylor and Derudder 2018: 46). Given these points, there is much to build on with the GaWC group –​but there remains also much to criticize, despite claims that its scholars have incorporated or surpassed the postcolonial critique. This is most notable for urbanists who focus on Africa. Globalization’s impacts go far beyond the range of cities in Africa that GaWC includes in its surveys, to secondary and much smaller cities (Choplin and Pliez 2015; Mainet and Racaud 2015). GaWC scholars Caset and Derudder (2017) analyze the ‘cultural’ manifestations of global-​and-​world-​city status, but their criteria for cultural significance are global North-​ driven. No city in Africa surfaces either in the top 30 of their statistical index or among their 51 global arts ‘financial centres’ (Caset and Derudder 2017). Urban Africa’s absence is a result that any globally minded comparative understanding should find implausible, given the central, global importance of Africa for urban culture (Simone 2010).

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Introduction

Here, the GaWC framework for research into what constitutes urban culture does take note of the rise of Chinese cities as ‘cultural’ centres, but the framework cannot see African urban culture, or globally significant cultural institutions in Africa (or throughout the global South) that do not adhere to European criteria of culture. Cursory examination of the appearances on the GaWC rankings for the nine cities I discuss hints at further inexplicable puzzles in their approach. Guangzhou had an A-​(Alpha Minus) rating in 2016 and an A in 2018. But Shenzhen, more than twice the size of neighboring Hong Kong and home to several of the world’s largest high-​technology corporations, merely rated a B (Beta) in 2016 and moved up in 2018 only to A-​. Dakar earned a Gamma Minus ranking in 2016 but fell to High Sufficiency in 2018. San Juan, shrinking dramatically long before 2017’s Hurricane Maria, somehow earned a Beta Minus score in 2016 and 2018, where Hartford is merely a High Sufficiency city. Port of Spain (despite its city-​center population of fewer than 40,000) managed to show up as a Sufficiency city, while Dongguan, Cape Coast, and Zanzibar do not appear. The GaWC has produced ways in which one can see a ‘relational urban studies’ (Derudder et al. 2012b). They have opened opportunities for further empirical and conceptual analyses of global urban interconnections, notably in economic and political terms (Harrison 2012; Taylor 2012; Wall and van der Knaap 2012). Beyond rather narrow economistic measures, though, the GaWC rankings tell less than the charts and cartograms suggest about how cities are or became world/​global cities, or how the reach of their urbanization processes is planetary.

The Los Angeles School, Lefebvre and planetary urbanization A smorgasbord of richly global-​planetary urban studies emerged from the Los Angeles School of urban studies, especially through its scholars inspired by Lefebvre. This School took in many scholars seeking to move on from the Chicago School and from structuralist confines of Marxist thought, to get at the driving features making global cities in a way that could contest the rights to the city for all its residents (Soja 2000, 2010). The facilitative spirit of LA School scholars in fostering ideas and debating concepts, and their nimbleness in thinking aloud in classrooms, bore many fruits for many scholars. The geography department and what was once the graduate school of architecture and urban planning at UCLA had a tremendous diversity of students who took the LA School’s ideas with them, challenged them, and

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changed them as they went around the world. Many of us built on the openings offered by this mythical LA School, which were genuine vistas onto alternative theorizing. While many of their views were in conflict, Friedmann, Ed Soja, Allen Scott, Michael Storper, and other LA School thinkers became key facilitators and generators of pathways toward a more global urban studies. I would never have contemplated making this book without their inspiration. Arguably, Lefebvre provided the most well-​known pathway, partially owing to Soja’s influential deployment of his ideas. From Lefebvre’s lead, Soja took analysis of the making of global urbanism in new directions. In Postmetropolis (2000), he merged a rethinking of the historical geography of ancient world cities with an appreciation of postcolonial cultural critiques of intersections between globalization and urbanization. With his six discourses of the postmetropolis, he brought together Friedmann, Sassen, Lefebvre, and postcolonial studies to remap how cities are made in the age of globalism (Soja 2000; see also Soja 1989 and 2010). Soja, with Miguel Kanai (2007: 54), used analysis of Amazonian urbanization in Brazil to suggest that urbanization was having ‘spreading impacts… across ever more extensive territories’. LA School urbanists recognized that urbanization was becoming ‘one of the primary vectors directed at the systematic integration of the planet’ (Murray 2017: 109). Other scholars building at least in part from LA School insights, such as Neil Brenner, also turned to Lefebvre to analyze what makes cities global. Researchers in this latter vein productively sidestepped debates between GaWC and global South scholars, via their thorough and nuanced analysis of Lefebvre’s work (McNeill 2017). Lefebvre’s (1970) claim that the world had entered an era of ‘complete, planetary urbanization’ thus gained new life and great traction in urban studies well beyond the LA School (Brenner and Schmid 2012, 2014 and 2015; Merrifield 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2018; Millington 2016; Ruddick 2015; and Schmid 2016). Brenner and Schmid (2015: 166) offered seven theses on planetary urbanization, the most relevant of which here is thesis 3: that ‘urbanization involves three mutually constitutive moments’, which they called concentrated, extended and differential urbanization. They argued that in this era, ‘the city’ was no longer the only or the central concern –​ concentrated urbanization, the production of citiness, was but one of three processes of urbanization taking place. Extended urbanization and differential urbanization were occurring in under-​examined processes across the planet. Through theses 4–​7 that emphasized the ‘multidimensional’, ‘planetary’, ‘variegated’, and ‘contested’ character of these three processes of urbanization, respectively, they invited exploration

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Introduction

of the diversity of processes in both global North and South urban regions. In part, this book is a reply to that invitation. Brenner and Schmid were hardly alone in exploring the relevance of Lefebvre’s idea of planetary urbanization for the 21st century. Andy Merrifield (2013, 2014, 2015, and 2018) analyzed many facets of Lefebvre’s thesis. This work included careful sifting through the ‘slippery’ multiple interpretations and myriad directions Lefebvre allows for –​even to the reversal of the translation into English. Merrifield (2015) noted how one might interpret Lefebvre’s phrase as the ‘planetarization of the urban’. In such a reversal, ‘the urban doesn’t so much spread per se as it becomes a vortex for sucking in everything the planet offers’ (Merrifield 2015). Yet the planetarization of the urban also ‘expulses a residue whose ranks are swelling as we speak’ (Merrifield 2015; see also Millington 2016; Ruddick 2015). Eurocentric and universalizing tendencies in older world/​global cities studies have not been eradicated with this strong enthusiasm for Lefebvre, however. Lefebvre did offer brilliant conceptual insights worthy of exploration in contemporary urbanization in his many works, as many of my mentors and contemporaries have argued. My own journey in the discipline of geography began with two of Lefebvre’s (1976, 1979) essays that formed the theoretical backbone of my UCLA master’s thesis on pastoralism in Kenya under the direction of Soja and Gerry Hale. Lefebvre is more than merely ‘inspirational’, and he is often unfairly maligned for an absence of empirical research, when he had a long career of engagement with the empirical worlds of architects and planners (Stanek 2011). In The urban revolution, though, Lefebvre was clearly writing about the urban world from the specific context and vantage point of France. He defined urbanism there as ‘the physical trace on the land of human dwellings of stone, cement or metal’ (Lefebvre 1970: 151): how relevant is that in global South urbanisms where ‘dwellings’ are not always primarily composed of ‘stone, cement or metal’? Lefebvre (1970:  151) did discuss other facets of urbanism as ‘happiness, a lifestyle, a certain social standing’, and he contended that any ‘unitary character’ of urbanism ‘when examined closely, breaks into pieces’ that he characterized as consisting of ‘humanists, of developers, of the state and its technocrats’. But when he discussed the urban outside of Europe in The urban revolution it was with brief vignettes and broad strokes. Africa never appeared at all; parenthetical references to revolutionary Cuba aside, neither did the Caribbean. His limited analysis of the urban US reflects the specific narrow window in time at which he was writing, wherein he claimed that ‘blacks in

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the United States, who are locked in urban ghettos by a form of social segregation… have resorted to desperate acts’ and ‘want to unleash violence in its pure state’ (Lefebvre 1970: 145). New York was ‘typical’ in that it was ‘uncontrollable, ungovernable, a knot of problems’ (Lefebvre 1970: 146), phrasing that seems quite far away when read from 50 years on. Despite claiming that ‘we have a great deal to learn from the East’ (Lefebvre 1970:  83), his discussion of China amid Mao’s cultural revolution or the ‘enormous numbers of peasants’ who ‘mask the urban problematic’ became irrelevant after the late-​1970s policy transformations there (Lefebvre 1970: 111–​13 and 146–​7). His notion of ‘complete urbanization’ (Lefebvre 1970:  1) in The urban revolution was not as simplistic as a claim that ‘the planet was already fully urbanized and rurality forever gone’ (Smith 2003: xxii), but the ‘planet’ he looked at then was more provincial than his still-​sweeping language might suggest. Lefebvre’s stunningly creative productivity meant that he touched on and ultimately inspired many different lines of inquiry. One might say, as Brenner and Elden (in Lefebvre 2009: 196) do, that his essay on ‘the worldwide and the planetary’ in many ways ‘anticipates key strands of contemporary discussions of globalization’, but that 1973 essay in French did not appear in English until their translation more than 35 years later, so its reach in the Anglo-​American urban studies debates was rather limited. The contemporary push to conceptualize planetary urbanization, while it may begin with Lefebvre, is much more genuinely global in its geographical reach, and inevitably more aware of global South urbanization. As Schmid (2016: 30, 33) acknowledged, the ‘classic model of urbanity… has long been overtaken by worldwide urbanization processes’, and ‘we are living in a completely different urban world’ than Lefebvre in 1970. Brenner and Schmid (2015: 160) worked to address that completely different urban world while engaging with postcolonial urban theory, which they saw as highlighting ‘the urgency of elaborating alternative categories for understanding the contextually specific patterns and pathways of urbanization’ in global South contexts. They emphasized the ‘equally urgent task of deciphering’ the way ‘contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalist urbanization are unfolding across the North/​South divide’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015: 162). They argued, however, that postcolonial urban theory’s emphasis on thick descriptions of everyday life and unique global South specificities left out or over-​generalized urbanization processes in global North contexts. The various returns to the North in this book, through Hartford, as well as my insistence on underlining

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Introduction

thick descriptions of the everyday and the unique, are responses to this criticism. There remains much to be enthusiastic about in the wave of work exploring planetary urbanization. As Merrifield (2018:  1603) eloquently put it: ‘to envision the world through the lens of planetary urbanisation has certain distinct advantages’ because it is ‘a viewpoint expressive of commonality rather than difference, of a mutually shared planet in which people who look different, who talk different from one another, who don’t know one another, who may even hate one another, have more in common than they might think’. Nevertheless, it is also evident that the dominant voices and perspectives of this literature still have belonged thus far largely to the global North, and efforts to reach into the global South for analysis or to engage with postcolonial urban theory have not aimed primarily at relocating conceptual starting places or vocabularies there (Shaw 2015; Sheppard, Leitner and Maringanti 2013). Many global South-​oriented scholars have different emphases in mind when exploring the ‘planetary’ (Gilroy 2010; Jazeel 2011 and 2019; Mbembe 2017). Tariq Jazeel (2018: 5) contended that the literature on planetary urbanization seems to argue that ‘there is nothing beyond urbanization’, when there are many ‘planetary processes beyond and before urbanization’ which are ‘at work in the socio-​spatial dialectic’ of Lefebvrean thought. What lay ‘outside’ of this new literature, in Jazeel’s (2018: 7) reading of it, included ‘culture and its textualities… Empire and its world-​forming residues’ and many matters ‘routinely taught and debated in fields like cultural studies and cultural geography, historical geography and imperial history’. Certainly Schmid (2018) and Schmid et al. (2018) were quite aware of this line of critique and have responded with provocative efforts to develop new vocabularies for understanding urban change around the world. This work marks a significant, still-​ongoing step toward the relocating of vocabularies of theory ‘southward’. Some critiques of Brenner and Schmid’s works build from a somewhat ungenerous reading of their provocative opening (Derickson 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). Still, a cautionary voice lingers in the background for many postcolonial and global South urbanists reading planetary urbanization scholarship. There is a potential danger of erasure of ‘differences among cities’, a tendency to still locate ‘the essence of urbanity in the global North’, and the sense that in Southern urbanism the ‘political economy’ critique of neoliberalism upon which this Northern work often rests does not provide ‘the overriding context within which urban processes unfold’ in the South (Schindler 2017:  47). I  am mindful of this especially when thinking of Glissant’s understanding of

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the ‘planetary’, with his caution over the possibilities for ‘the universalizing force’ in Western thought ‘to reduce everything to “the same” ’ sitting uncomfortably with the planetary urbanization analytical lens (Britton 1999: 12; Derickson 2015; Glissant 1990: 205; Jung 2007; Oswin 2018). Well before the literature on planetary urbanization blossomed, Glissant (1989: 22) critiqued the ‘ “planetarization” of thought’ as an outgrowth of Western thinkers’ belated ‘recognition of ‘those “parts” of humanity [t]‌he[y] hadn’t needed to “consider” ’ when the West ruled them. This new ‘ideational globality… was not at all the totality of the world’ (Glissant 1989: 23). Glissant (2010: 64) frequently emphasized, in different phrasings, the ‘rooted necessity of the relation to the world’ for any city and culture. This need to more fully reflect something closer to the ‘totality of the world’ and the relation of one urbanism to another without the ‘narrow imposition’ (Glissant 1989:  33) of Eurocentric ideas brings me to the ‘rethinking’ at the core of Rethinking urbanism, as a path toward reimagining what planetary urbanization might mean (Keil 2018; Wilson and Jonas 2018).

Thinking with ‘the South’ There are ways of rethinking the discussion that build from outside of global North urban theory, foregrounding postcolonial understandings like ‘culture and its textualities’ or ‘Empire and its world-​forming residues’, in Jazeel’s (2018:  7) terms. ‘While the twentieth century closed with debate and controversy about the shift from a “Chicago School”… to a “Los Angeles School” ’, Ananya Roy (2014: 13) wrote, ‘the urban future already lay elsewhere: in the cities of the global south’. This book is an effort to think with that urban future, to ‘think with the South’, but with a broadly inclusive sense of where ‘the South’ is, remembering that there is ‘a south within every metropole’ (Chambers 2017: 24, 28). Likewise, ‘postcolonial’ conceptualization can be found within global North and global South contexts, across different types of colonial and (within a larger dialogue) indigenous experience (Britton 1999; Bunnell 2016 and 2017; King 2000; Wilmer 2009). A  wide assortment of Southern and postcolonial thinking in this broader sense can be drawn in, from scholars whose work has been based in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America, for deployment in critiquing canonical global North ideas of the production of global or planetary urban space. Postcolonial thinking of this sort can generate new possibilities for urban comparativism; these have yet to be genuinely, fully,

14

Introduction

operationalized. These possibilities are for ‘unexpected comparisons’, whereas the ‘expected’ variety of comparison still entails the comparative study of urbanism within the global North, comparative analysis of global South urbanism using global North-​origin theories, parameters, and metrics, or even South–​South comparativism if it is informed strictly by Northern urban studies (Myers 2014). Expected comparisons are increasingly inadequate for articulating the dynamic meanings of urbanism in the world. More than 15 years ago, Robinson (2003: 274) suggested a helpful set of ‘pragmatic steps’ toward ‘postcolonializing the discipline’ of geography that are equally relevant to postcolonializing or decolonizing urban studies. Among these steps was a call for learning from and about, and engaging ‘with understandings generated in other places’ (Robinson 2003: 280). She also challenged geographers to think about ‘far more than reversing the lines of formal colonial influence in scholarship’, aiming for ‘a complex reimagining of international scholarly practices’ (Robinson 2003: 281). Robinson (2003: 274) argued that the ‘dynamics of power and the tracks of exclusion and inclusion in the production of geographical knowledge’ are too complex to be subsumed under the banner of an illusory, uniform ‘postcolonial moment’, arguing instead for a ‘cosmopolitan’ sort of ‘transnational production of scholarship’. The best way to proceed in a cosmopolitan manner is via a cosmopolitanism which ‘emphasizes the multiple geographies through which different forms of cosmopolitanism are constituted [and]… diverse forms of political identity and agency’ (Featherstone 2007: 434). As a way of testing out challenges conjoining alternative comparisons in urban studies under this cosmopolitan ethos for decolonizing the field, this book begins by shifting from intra-​regional comparative urban studies to the exploration common ground or reciprocal and reverse idea flows between global North and global South urban contexts (McFarlane 2010)  –​and, further, to South–​South comparativism and growing ‘global South knowledge networks’ (Pieterse 2012). While working toward such a goal, it is vital to turn critical comparative ambitions toward overcoming pitfalls of potential parochialism and to continue to speak back to the still-​dominant Western-​oriented universalisms on global urbanism (Robinson 2003, 2011a, and 2011b). That is where we might find ‘shared concerns’ between those working on global North cities without the ‘partial, biased and imperious assumptions’ of ‘Western-​centric urban theories’ and those ‘attempting to bring the specificity of emergent urbanisms in the South into the frame’ (Pieterse 2012: 7–​8; Lawhon

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and Truelove, forthcoming). This book is attempting to work out one form for the empirical shape of comparative work emanating from this line of thinking. To decolonize the field, South–​South comparativism needs concepts that originate outside of the North as starting places for comparison. It is vital ‘to allow urban voices from, and in, the global South a form of expression and conceptual amplification that refuses to be sublimated by a theoretical modernity prescripted in the global North’ (Jazeel and Legg 2019: 25). There are scholars who have been vital to efforts for expanding vocabularies and conceptualizations in new ways. For instance, Kuan-​Hsing Chen (2010: 212) worked toward a ‘deimperialized’, decolonized, and ‘de-​cold war’ reorientation of urban studies, ‘shifting’ the ‘point of reference to Asia and the global South’, building from Asian case studies outward. From outside of urban studies, Achille Mbembe (2017:  181) analyzed ‘black time’ and space in the long aftermath of the slave trade and colonialism, coming around to Glissant to find tools for ‘sharing the world with other beings’. To Mbembe (2017: 181), the heart of Glissant’s argument for postcolonial thinking lay in the insistence that ‘the durability of our world… must be thought from the underside of our history, from the slave and the cannibal structures of our modernity… built on countless human bones buried under the ocean’. Katherine McKittrick (2006: xxii) likewise saw in Glissant a means for reconciling ‘the black subject to geography’, a ‘humanization’ and a ‘naming of inevitable black geographic presence’. In poetic language not far from Glissant’s ‘mode of lamentation and mourning’ (Nesbitt 2013: 144), Abdoumaliq Simone (2004, 2007, 2010, 2016, and 2019) has brought forward accessible and deployable notions like people-​as-​infrastructure and the trans-​territorial city from global South contexts that make sense in ostensibly global North contexts (see also many chapters in Parnell and Oldfield 2014). Simone, with Edgar Pieterse, cleverly built on the ‘makeshift character’ of most people’s urban lives in the postcolonial world to contemplate a ‘make+shift city’ (Simone and Pieterse 2017: xi). As cities become ‘intensively and extensively linked to each other’, they argue, ‘it is the character of the articulations among cities that is increasingly critical’ (Simone and Pieterse 2017: 62, italics mine). It is through analysis of these links that scholars may ‘redescribe’ Southern cities, as cities with vulnerable majorities, using ‘vernaculars that can convey their singularities and also their possible relevance in relation to other settings’ (Simone and Pieterse 2017: 63). I aim in this book for a redescription of urbanism where ‘links among supposedly disparate places, people,

16

Introduction

histories and materials… can be interwoven and reworked’ (Simone and Pieterse 2017: 63). Beyond these scholars, many other urbanists and urban geographers have engaged with postcolonial studies for more than 20 years (for example Jacobs 1996; Slater 2004; Roy 2011a, 2011b, and 2016). Recently, an argument emerged that ‘postcolonial perspectives lost some vigor… within the context of geography’s fast-​changing theoretical predilections’ (Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs 2014: 4). A series of essays in 2014 in Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography sought to advance new directions for geographers to reinvigorate postcolonial perspectives. These essays took five ‘speculative pathways’ toward understanding geographies of postcolonialism (Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs 2014: 4). The most intriguing for my purposes is that toward ‘planetary indigeneity’, a (re)valuation of ‘indigenous ways of being’ in light of Gayatri Spivak’s ‘embrace of indigenous and planetary rhetoric’ in postcolonial studies (Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs 2014: 10). Spivak argued for conceptualizing the planetary as a ‘species of alterity’ distinct from globalization, which she saw as inseparable from oppressive imperialism (Spivak 2003: 72). She contended that radical alternative planetary thinking ‘is perhaps best imagined from the pre-​capitalist cultures of the planet’ (Spivak 2003:  101). And, in doing so, she foregrounded these ‘indigenous ways of being’ (Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs 2014: 10). Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs (2014: 11) note potential ‘contradictions’ and pitfalls in Spivak’s planetary-​indigenous turn, such as questions of whether planetary thinking can be balanced with ‘indigenous aspirations’ or specific histories of ‘indigenous dispossession’. But many scholars argue for further exploration of this speculative pathway, or pathways near to it. Robinson (2003:  280) advocated prioritizing ordinary ‘understandings generated in other [formerly colonized] places’ beyond the West. Indigenous scholars have long engaged the connectivities with and challenges to postcolonial thought in indigenous space (Brooks 2008, 2018; King 2000; Wilmer 2009). Lisa Brooks (2018: 4) argued for a ‘decolonizing process of expanding the strategies through which we might do the work of history’, or geography. In African studies, the move toward ‘reclaiming the human sciences and humanities through African perspectives’ is rooted in various manifestations of planetary indigeneity, whether in postcolonial anthropology, philosophy, or urban studies (Lauer and Anyidoho 2012; Mawere 2014; Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh 2011). While also building from Lefebvre, Ato Quayson (2014: 30) sought to show in his study of the everyday life of Accra’s Oxford Street that ‘urban space has an

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inherently rhythmic quality that can only be ascertained from modulating our perspectives along diverse vectors of interpretation’ that incorporate everyday experiences of ordinary people. The potential is boundless for insights with global implications arising from interrogation of the quotidian details of indigenous ways of being and place-​making in everyday life as a part of planetary urbanization from Southern perspectives. Postcolonial and/​or Southern thinking does not solve every issue. The commonplace, everyday world of the contemporary global South’s changing cultural and urban geographies and intense contestation of identity challenge any easy solutions; the renewed stress on local indigenous knowledge in African contexts, for instance, is a humble, honest response to the daunting array of enduring stereotypes of ‘Africa-​ in-​the-​world’ (Ferguson 2006: 6–​7), but this turn toward planetary indigeneity also returns the debate to the foundations of postcolonial cultural studies, in works like Fanon’s (1961) The wretched of the earth. Fanon offered warnings of problems which could inhere to planetary indigeneity as a postcolonial, anti-​imperial tactic. As he watched the African colonies gain independence, Fanon (1961:  213) cautioned that the ‘unconditional affirmation of African culture’ seemed to have ‘succeeded the unconditional affirmation of European culture’. This process would lead African cultures ‘up a blind alley’ of essentialism; this left the national consciousness of the newly independent states as ‘an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what might have been’ (Fanon 1961: 213). Fanon sought to ‘combat both imperialism and orthodox nationalism by a counter-​narrative of great deconstructive power’, but without falling victim to ‘nativism used as a private refuge’ (Said 1993: 274–​5). This struggle against both the empty shell of a false consciousness of constructed elite nationalisms and the reactionary tendencies of nativism is powerfully present in the postcolonial world and therefore implicit in my approach in the book. Although it is hardly without its own pitfalls, the pathway to the liberation of consciousness may lead through the ‘possibility of a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world’ that is built, not from nativism, but from a rooted-​yet-​ worldly sense of place that valorizes everyday indigenous, postcolonial and Southern worldviews (Said 1993: 230). Edward Said’s reading of Fanon sought to move beyond rendering him as the prince of anti-​ colonial violence, and to redeploy his work for ‘reconceiving human experience in non-​imperialist terms’ (Said 1993: 276). To Said, ‘moving beyond nativism’ with Fanon entails ‘thinking of local identity as not exhaustive… not being anxious to confine oneself to one’s own sphere,

18

Introduction

with its ceremonies of belonging, its built-​in chauvinism, its limiting sense of security’ (Said 1993: 229). In the chapters that follow, I use a variety of critical postcolonial, Southern and indigenous arguments that attempt to move beyond the ‘nativism as a private refuge’ that concerned Fanon. Glissant, a fellow Martinican who was in some ways a disciple of Fanon and in other ways moved beyond him to create what Nesbitt (2013: 239) called the ‘single most developed and philosophically sophisticated body of work in the tradition of Caribbean critique’, provides inspiration for much of this navigation. Indeed, the whole spatial structure of my argument follows Glissant in two specific ways: (1) I use his ‘method’ of ‘a spiral retelling’ for the story of the urban areas of this book (Wing 1998: 1); and (2) I do so through the ‘thorough, thick experience of the world’ (Wing 1998: 1), thus ‘preserving’ as much as possible ‘the infinite quantity of all particularities’ (Wiedorn 2018: 113) that define the ‘archipelago’ of cities I discuss. Storper and Scott (2016) challenged ‘postcolonial urban analysis’, for three main reasons: overgeneralizing the Eurocentrism of global North urban studies, selectivity in criticizing modernism, and the unstructured character of its methodology for comparativism. Some global South-​focused scholars offer similar criticisms of Southern thinking as ‘woefully vague’, lacking in ‘empirical data’, and ‘lacking in attention to the economic and political structures in which the poor are located’ (Rizzo 2017:  5–​7; see also Mabin 2014; Spencer 2015). Some of these criticisms have validity, and some Southern urbanist thinking can indeed be prone to poetic flights of fancy  –​in Glissant’s case, this is deliberate, as an embrace of the poetic as a tool of relationality (McKittrick 2006; Rosemberg 2016) –​and yet his insistence that ‘with archipelagic thought, we know the rivers’ rocks, without a doubt even the smallest ones’ means that empirical data lies at the heart of the spiral retelling (Glissant 2009: 45). My first instinct as a Glissantian thinker is to make a similarly poetic or literary turn, for instance toward the late Zanzibari writer Muhamed Said Abdulla (Bwana MSA) (1968: 66), describing an imaginary Zanzibari tower with a light that had been lit, without being extinguished, from the ancient days until the recent era when Western education filled the world… And there was a man called Mr. Light –​ who was a scholar of lights –​who made great efforts to research how the light was able to stay eternally lit… But his research destroyed things, meaning while he investigated the light went out and it has not agreed to be lit again until today. All of his efforts and those of the others he sent for

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from Europe to help him didn’t do a thing; the light refused, it just refused. (translation mine) I return several times in this book to Bwana MSA. But in ‘light’ of Glissant’s ‘river rocks’, I  mostly take a more empirically grounded, less ethereal approach in the chapters which follow, while attending to political–​economic or structural dynamics where relevant. Yet for every obtuse or vague argument in Southern thinking, there is also a conceptualization that enables new lines of reasoning, like Bwana MSA’s recognition of how Western research can ‘destroy things’. Mabin (2014: 24, italics in original) points to the ‘overwhelming need for profound and substantial research on what is going on’ in Southern cities, and on ‘attempts at bringing together cities across the world’. Even Storper and Scott (2016: 1121) agree that ‘urban theory must now range over the entire world for its sources of data and evidence while remaining fully open to new conceptual insights generated out of the experiences of the cities of the global South’. There is still much ranging across Southern thinking needed, and openness to its insights for developing global urban studies, to challenge the conceptual and historical–​geographical assumptions and places of origin for explanations that remain embedded in the field. The goal is ‘seeing from the South’, and not bringing Mr Light and ‘the others he sent for from Europe’ to a grand tour of how the North perceives the ‘light’ to work in the Southern urban world (Abdulla 1968; Carolini 2018; Watson 2009: 2260). In Chapter 1, I illustrate the validity of this claim in an historical–​geographical study of greater Hartford as a site for the processes of a rethought, indigenous, postcolonial, and Southern planetary urbanization, and I come back to central Connecticut in most chapters. This ‘return to the North’ (Chambers 2017:  62) is also in response to criticisms of global South thinking from Brenner, Schmid, Storper, Scott, and others, by recognizing the complexities of global North urban contexts while offering historical–​empirical depth alongside Southern concepts. Southern thinking enables scholars to see the immense impacts of global historical forces –​genocide, slavery, colonialism, and resistance to all three –​on the shape of cityscapes in both the global South and North. Storper and Scott (2016:  1122) found my initial exploratory piece looking at Hartford from the global South (Myers 2014) ‘interesting and pertinent within its own limited terms of reference’, but they sought more conceptual and methodological clarity. To answer this critique, in different ways in each chapter, I build on Robinson’s (2016 and forthcoming) broad rubric for global urban

20

Introduction

comparativism. Robinson (2016) proposed remaking comparative global urban studies as multiple variations on ‘thinking cities through elsewhere’ or ‘thinking with elsewhere’. She provided elaborate means for developing robust, historical–​geographical comparisons. Comparisons, in her schema, can be genetic or generative, and scholarly tactics can involve tracing, composing, or launching the comparisons (Robinson 2016). Each chapter here is an exploration of a ‘launching’ comparison that is genetic or generative. The genetic launching starts with a singularity –​ such as Chinese ‘villages-​in-​the-​city’ in Chapter  2  –​but ‘inserting analysis of this case into wider conversations’. That chapter and others are generative, too, in that I take concepts, literary work, or policies out of East Asian, indigenous, Black, or Caribbean thought that are ‘put to work elsewhere’. Since ‘a revised comparativism would seek to deliberately stretch concepts’ even to the point of breaking them, the experiment here is ‘highly revisable’, and I have conducted it with what I hope is a ‘modest authorial voice’ (Robinson forthcoming). The book is firmly rooted in experimental postcolonial approaches. Urban studies carries a legacy of dividing the world into types of cities forward into the contemporary era of globalization and increased interconnectivity, and these divides have serious consequences (Robinson 2006, 2011a, 2011b, and 2011c). These divides continue to mean that scholarship gets divided by world regions, and by ideological economistic categorizations into developed/​developing world, first/​third world, or, global North and South. Robinson (2011a: 2) further notes that ‘when comparisons are undertaken, they are highly circumscribed in the range of cities attended to’. Her criticisms are aimed mostly at urban studies in the developed/​first/​North side of the divide, in the dominant comparative frameworks that analyze, say, Paris, New York, or London, and then expect these cities to speak to the concerns of cities everywhere. It is also, surely, a steep challenge to expect any scholar, particularly working alone as I have, to move beyond his/​her region of expertise, so that even a non-​Eurocentric comparative framework might end up as too circumscribed, and, as Robinson (2011c) suggests, even the very idea of making urban comparisons might be seen as a European colonialist invention. That is clearly not my intention here. My comparisons are openings onto rethinking what it means to speak of planetary urbanization when the starting places are the margins and elsewheres. This means reliance on what Glissant (1990: 76) termed a ‘poetics of relation’, a world of cities ‘constituted by the contact of cultures’, but seeing these from the places that are ‘cut in our world’ (emphasis mine), a world that

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continues to see these cuts ‘renewed… amid colonial alienation’ (see also Nesbitt 2013: 144).

Conclusion Many new ways of doing urban studies have been brewing over the last few decades, spurred on by the increasing urbanization of human society worldwide. Lefebvre was clearly on to something nearly 50 years ago:  urbanization is at the planetary scale, and there is an ongoing planetarization of the urban. This is an age of ‘throwntogetherness’, to use Massey’s term. Scholars of global cities, world cities, globalization-​ and-​world-​cities, the Los Angeles School, and planetary urbanization all seek ways of understanding what throws urban areas together. But because so many theoretical driving forces in urban studies had been dominated until recently by scholarship on cities in western Europe and North America, postcolonial and Southern critiques have brought multiple means for recentering the field, rethinking the whole enterprise from below. In the next six chapters, this book offers illustrations of one shape that this reconstitution might take, analyzing the links between cities in a remapped global South. I organized the chapters around a mnemonic device –​six words that begin with P: processes, patterns, postcolonialism, people, products, and policies. Each chapter takes on a different means by which global urban stories are threaded together, and each contains my take on conversations and debates in global urban studies around those six Ps. In order, the framework of my discussion takes in historical, geographical–​spatial, political–​ecological, socio-​cultural, economic, and policy–​political themes in the respective chapters. Neither the six Ps nor the nine urban areas that I write about present an even remotely exhaustive narrative of postcolonial Southern indigenous planetary urbanism or urbanization. That last jumble of words alone suggests why: there is so much to every word that could not be encompassed in one book. But the rooted-​yet-​worldly global sense of place from which I write this, with cities chosen because so many are marginalized and yet also because they represent such a variety of what is meant by a city, or what it means to be urban, is a launching place for generating debate about the nature of the field of urban studies and the purposes behind the research.

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1

Southern Processes of Planetary Urbanization in Hartford Introduction This chapter applies global South ideas to an examination of planetary urbanization in an urban area conventionally located in the global North –​Hartford, Connecticut. Southern concepts are highly relevant to understanding and remapping Hartford as a global urbanism. Developing an historical geography from indigenous, postcolonial, and Southern angles gives opportunities for detailing the specificities of planetarizing processes. Scholars need to look at longer-​term processes producing planetary urbanization from elsewhere, to erase blind spots that universalizing theorizations produce (Dantas and Hart 2018). Global South approaches provide tools to see the making of urban areas like Hartford from margins that run parallel to and connect with Northern understandings. It is still helpful to begin with those Northern understandings, to set the context for why Southern approaches are necessary. As of 2019, Hartford was the US’s 47th-​largest Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), with more than 1.2 million people. The city of Hartford is the MSA’s core urban area, with around 125,000 people. In the late 19th century, it was the US’s most prosperous hub of industrial wealth, but it fell into decline after 1960. Now, it is a shrinking post-​industrial city surrounded by flat-​lining suburbia (Myers 2014). Between 2010 and 2016, it was one of only four MSAs (with Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo) among the 50 largest MSAs in the US to be declining in population. Deindustrialization and shrinkage began in manufacturing  –​first with the suburbanization of production, and then with out-​migration

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RETHINKING URBANISM

to cheaper global regions, in the 1960s and 1970s (Walsh 2013). Some product manufacturing upon which Hartford built its industrial base, like typewriters, became obsolete, and Hartford did not become the manufacturing locus for replacement technologies (that is, for typewriters, computers). The initial blue-​collar decline was balanced for a time by Hartford’s continued strength in white-​collar, high-​end services, depicted in shorthand by the US census employment code FIRE: finance, insurance, and real estate. But the FIRE burned out; employment rolls in these sectors peaked in Hartford in 1988 –​‘the insurance city’ has been losing insurance companies, headquarters, and jobs for more than 30 years (Chen and Shemo 2013; Walsh 2013). Twenty-​first century Hartford presents a paradox. It is a world-​ leading urban area –​by the calculations of the Brookings Institution’s Global Metro Monitor, Hartford ranked first in the world in 2011 in per capita GDP, ahead of Oslo, San Jose, Abu Dhabi or Zurich (Bacon and Chen 2013). At the heart of that ultra-​r ich urban capital region for the wealthiest US state lies one of America’s poorest cities, tied for last with Detroit, Michigan, in incidence of child poverty in one recent survey (Simmons 2013). It is a prime example for analysis of deindustrialization, racial segregation, spatial inequality, environmental injustice, or the fiscal crisis of the state in US cities; yet it is also a rapidly globalizing urban region in its economic linkages, and the city itself is stunningly diverse culturally (Bauer 2013; Chen and Shemo 2013). Given these facts, it is intriguing to consider how some of the leading urbanists discussed in the Introduction might look at Hartford. Friedmann and Wolff (1982), in their analysis of world-​city formation, probably would have seen what they called the ‘citadel’ and the ‘ghetto’ of this urbanism, with a rich Central Business District (CBD) and suburban islands of wealth amid poverty-​stricken urban neighborhoods. Sassen (1991) would see the linkages of a globalizing city in the ever-​changing financial and corporate webs tying Hartford to cities in Europe or East Asia. The Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research group found enough advanced producer services present –​accounting, banking, legal services, and, of course, insurance –​to rate Hartford as a High Sufficiency city in its 2016 rankings of global cities, after being merely a Sufficiency city in 2008, 2004, and 2000 (and not being ranked in 2012). Massey (2005) would not have missed the ‘throwntogetherness’ of the place, nowhere more vividly than on Park Street. This ‘Main Street of Latino Connecticut’ showcases much more in its two-​mile transect across town, from the near-​downtown neighborhood of South Green through Frog Hollow and Parkville to the city’s western border. Puerto

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Southern processes of planetary urbanization in Hartford

Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Peruvian, Thai, Colombian, Brazilian, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, African, and African-​ American businesses, restaurants, cultural centers, and residences crowd the street. Other transects of the city –​Albany Avenue across the North End or Franklin Avenue through the South End –​are ‘alive with a multitude of cultural happenings, many of which remain “invisible” ’ outside of immigrant communities from Jamaica, Somalia, Ghana, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia, Cambodia, Burma, or other places (Bauer 2013: 163). Brenner and Schmid (2015), in applying their theses on contemporary manifestations of planetary urbanization to Hartford, perhaps would be less concerned with the city itself, paying attention to the extended urbanization that characterizes Connecticut, New England, or the Northeast US, and its highly differentiated, contested patterns linked to variegated regimes of urban neoliberalism. Merrifield (2015) might see the ways in which urban Connecticut ‘becomes a vortex for sucking in everything the planet offers’. Nearly any of these openings onto urban studies would offer potential for groundbreaking insights on Hartford as an urbanism, or on urbanization processes for the Hartford area. Even beyond the approaches mentioned earlier, perhaps the most logical and compelling approach could be to examine Hartford simply for what it most obviously appears to be an example of:  a shrinking post-​industrial American urbanism. In doing so, one might be able to argue for a much more complex conceptual map of ‘suburbs’, since many towns that appear on the map to be suburbs of Hartford are themselves shrinking post-​ industrial towns (New Britain, East Hartford, or Manchester) or rapidly shifting to be urban settings indistinguishable from Hartford itself (West Hartford, Bloomfield, or Wethersfield). Still, global North-​directed urban thought may not provide adequate means for articulating the character of Hartford’s planetarization. For that, one must look South, for several reasons. Bacon and Chen (2013: 3) characterize Hartford as an ‘outcast… misunderstood city… detached from theory’. It is outcast because it is disregarded by comparison to larger urban areas that dominate urban studies, even though most of the world’s urban residents are in smaller urban areas like Hartford (Bunnell 2016; Kanna and Chen 2012). Hartford is misunderstood to consist of an 18 square-​mile city instead of an extensive metropolitan region, so that this region’s complex character goes unappreciated. These two factors –​Hartford as outcast, Hartford as misunderstood –​feed their third claim: Hartford is not a site of urban theory building, nor does it adhere to conventional theories of cities and urbanization. To that point: no prominent theorist

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discussed in the previous paragraphs ever actually studied Hartford. Why would they have done so, given the ways in which one might dismiss Hartford as unimportant or non-​exemplary? But it can become such a site for urban theory building with a turn to indigenous, postcolonial, and Southern thought. My contention begins with the geography itself. Hartford is a bounded city of its own, capital of Connecticut, and an MSA that consists of three counties (Hartford, Tolland, and Middlesex). But Connecticut abolished county government in 1960  –​governments use relict county boundaries for data purposes only. Considering the urbanism’s powerful ties to dozens of contemporary towns around it, to all of Connecticut’s MSAs, to Springfield, Massachusetts (with which it shares its international airport), to New York, to Boston, and to many other places around the world, especially the Caribbean, the idea of Hartford as a bounded place is quickly dismantled (Chen and Bacon 2013; Rojas and Wray 2013). For Hartford to be recast, better understood, and reattached to urban theory, it needs to be remapped as a potentially generative place. Instead of using conventional urban studies parameters for characterizing Hartford, I start with themes about urban dynamics from its margins and elsewheres, dynamics that ground the narrative in genocide, slavery, and colonialism –​what Mbembe (2017: 181) termed the ‘underside of our history’ –​but also the endurance and persistence of marginalized people over the arc of Hartford’s historical geography. If Hartford ‘has been shaped and reshaped by shifting global flows of people, capital, and knowledge’ (Walsh 2013: 21), then why not take those flows as our base for weaving the urbanism together, deploying indigenous, Black, Caribbean, and postcolonial thought to remap Hartford? This is not a whimsical ‘add-​global-​South-​and-​stir’ exercise. This is postcolonial Southern urbanism in the global North.

Mapping Hartford as a Southern urbanism In part because a near-​majority of the city of Hartford’s population has Caribbean ties, my approach to Hartford relies on Glissant’s (1989, 1990) concept of ‘Relation’. For Glissant, relation is a form of comparison reliant on ‘equality with and respect for the Other as different from oneself ’ (Britton 1999:  11). Glissant’s vision of comparison is ‘nonhierarchical and nonreductive’, avoiding a ‘universal value system’, acknowledging the ‘particular qualities of the community in question’ and seeking ‘degeneralization’ (Britton 1999: 11; Glissant 1990: 75). Through Glissant, we encounter ‘a world without transcendence,

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Southern processes of planetary urbanization in Hartford

in which all differentiation occurs… [with] infinitesimal variation’ (Nesbitt 2013: 236). His is an ‘outward-​looking’ particularism, a ‘fluid’ approach that interrogates the ‘free play of interrelatedness’ (Britton 1999: 11; McKittrick 2006). For Glissant (1989), relation is central to the Caribbean’s role in history, as a place where people from all over the world are thrown together and connected to other places through ‘submarine’ and ‘subterranean roots’ (see also Soguk 2009: 34). Caribbean thinkers have long sought to contest the dominant white/​ colonial culture’s ‘drive for a mono-​root’ (Glissant 1997: 14). Glissant and other Caribbean thinkers resist the colonizers’ determination to subsume and excise the ‘roots’ of other peoples beyond the global North or the West in a universal vision originating in the West’s elite society. Here, my attention resides with central Connecticut’s historical geography, but going beyond conventional urban studies. Although Hartford city has a Caribbean cultural near-​majority, it is situated in the Connecticut river valley, the heartland of pre-​colonial New England’s Algonquian world. Algonquian communities are minuscule in number in today’s greater Hartford but fundamentally embedded in what this urban area is. Soguk (2009:  29), following Glissant, cites ‘historical transversality’ for indigenous peoples in a universe that ‘exists and works side by side, under and above, in and through’ the dominant settler culture to preserve ‘a certain transformative, even transgressive, autonomy’. Indigenous space is not produced merely from ‘massive political and economic devastation and cultural displacement, but also a centuries-​long refusal to be “absorbed” by modernity’s nationalizing and territorializing relations and institutions’ (Soguk 2009: 29). For Glissant and other Caribbean and indigenous thinkers, transversality ‘creates new networks of identity’, seeking to shore up ‘relations across peoples and places in movements and flows’ (Soguk 2009: 44). Rethinking urbanism here means rethinking with its indigenous, Caribbean, postcolonial, and global South relations. Hartford lives in the long, bloody shadows of English-​settler colonization of indigenous New England, Euro-​American Caribbean colonialism, the trans-​Atlantic slave trade, and the oppression of its non-​ White population. The central and southern Connecticut river valley was crucial to the pre-​colonial Algonquian world, and that world’s persistence in it is unmistakable. Nearly 40 percent of Hartford city’s population identify as African-​American or Black, one-​third of whom are foreign-​born Caribbean or African peoples. More than 40 percent of Hartford city’s population is Latinx and 34 percent is Puerto Rican. With 2016’s passage of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which stripped the island of

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its autonomy, and 2017’s devastation from Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic sweep, Puerto Rico’s neo-​colonial status is evident. Thinking of Hartford in Glissantian ‘relation’ with an indigenous, Black and Caribbean postcolonial global South makes complete conceptual sense. The English settlements from the 1630s in the Connecticut river valley provide evidence of this in what they ‘dismembered’ (Brooks 2008: 64). Indigenous historian Lisa Brooks (2008: 65), using terms from a lecture by Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, juxtaposed the ‘dismemberment’ of colonized peoples through the colonial project to separate them from their histories, with ‘ “re-​memberment” in the “quest for wholeness” that is decolonization’. Here, I work toward that re-​memberment as a building block for comprehending the past, present, and future of Hartford as a transversal Southern urbanism.

Indigenous Hartford The authenticity of indigenous identities is ‘especially fraught in cities’ in North America because indigenous peoples are mapped as ‘out of place’ in these ‘settler spaces’ (Peters and Andersen 2013: 1 and 3; Johnson 2013: 218). In New England, the long period of European occupation and demographic collapse of indigenous peoples mean the authenticity of indigenous identity at all is frequently questioned. Forced removals of indigenous peoples from Connecticut’s colonial cities began with their founding and continued through the 1770s, as the numbers of indigenous people in the colony dropped. Smallpox epidemics of 1616–​19 and 1631–​33, brought by the first Europeans, were estimated to have killed 90 percent of New England’s indigenous peoples (Andrews 1889). Wars fought as campaigns of annihilation added to the devastation (Brooks 2018; Lepore 1998). The official Native American population of Connecticut in 2019 included about 11,000 people in a state with more than three million. Membership in the five state-​recognized nations (Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Golden Hill Paugusett, and Schaghticoke) comprised only 4,243 people. Yet indigeneity is everywhere in Connecticut. The remaining reservations matter, especially those of the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan, whose gambling casinos at Ledyard/​Mashantucket and Montville/​Uncasville provide 25 percent revenue-​sharing with state government. It is hard to miss the ‘presence and persistence’ of Algonquians in this region over Hartford’s 400 years of White settlement (Calloway 1997; Richter 2001). The pre-​colonial Northeast was defined by its rivers, and much of New England by the ‘long river’, Quinniktuket in the Pequot-​Mohegan

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language, Kwinitekw to the Abenaki further north (Brooks 2008). The Long Island Sound coast on either side of the long river’s mouth was the source of all shells for wampum (shell-​bead belts), a valuable pre-​ colonial material form of cultural discourse and the colonial region’s currency until the 1670s. People of this region spoke mutually intelligible Algonquian languages (Bragdon 2009). They shared a sense of interdependence that Brooks (2008) called ‘the common pot.’ This common pot produced the pre-​colonial spatiality of human settlement practices (Bragdon 2009). The place-​world of Quinniktuket was one of fluidity and reciprocity. Brooks cautions against idealizing the reciprocity, as a form of the ‘nativism as a private refuge’ that Said (1993) and Fanon (1961) warned of in postcolonial studies, since conflicts certainly occurred among indigenous nations prior to 1600. Nonetheless, it is crucial to appreciate how the coming of White settlers shattered the common pot, and how the shards of the pot are all around today’s urban region. The territory at the center of today’s Hartford MSA was most associated with the Wangunks, an Eastern Algonquian ‘River Indian’ group. Wangunk, meaning ‘at the bend in the river’, was also the name of the Wangunks’ settlement at the Quinniktuket’s great bend, in today’s Portland, Connecticut. Mattabesset (Middletown), lay just across the river, 15 miles south of Hartford. Pyquaog (Wethersfield) was further north toward Hartford. These three Wangunk settlements were ‘equally important’; the smaller settlement further north, Suckiaug (Hartford), was less significant (Grant-​Costa 2017). In the 1630s, Suckiaug’s sachem and saunksqua (male and female leaders), Sequassen and Wawarme, were the eldest son and daughter of Pyquaog’s sachem, Sowheage, suggesting that Suckiaug was a northern extension of Pyquaog; they built the settlement north of a smaller one led by their cousin, Nepaquash. Wangunk urbanisms included a council house, sweat lodge, and family homes, which varied in character and permanence, across a dispersed cluster (Bragdon 2009: 155). Wangunks engaged in farming, fishing, hunting and gathering, in separate zones, moving between settlements near the river and those upland on the forested valley sides. They traded and intermarried with all Algonquians of Quinniktuket/​ Kwinitekw, and then with the earliest Europeans (Adams and Stiles 1904; Grant-​Costa 2017). All ‘River Indian’ communities like the Wangunks, combined, were still smaller and less powerful than nations around them when European contacts expanded in the early 17th century –​Nipmucs, Pequots, Mohegans, and Narragansetts. The ‘River’ groups navigated various alliances through trade and marriage with leaders of these larger nations, with the ideal of the common pot in

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mind. In 1631, for instance, Sowheage arranged Wawarme’s marriage to Massecump, son of the prominent Narragansett sachem, Miantonomo (Grant-​Costa 2017). Intermarriage was crucial to how settlements strengthened their interdependent destinies and both sachems and saunksquas sought power (Brooks 2008). The Algonquian removal from greater Hartford was both swift and slow, both thorough and never completed. The main Wangunk settlement at Suckiaug was located in what is now the northeast corner of downtown Hartford (Love 1935: 84). In 1637, it was removed to what settlers called South Meadows next to Nepaquash’s settlement. This Suckiaug settlement was attacked in 1643 by the English-​allied Mohegans in their conflict with Miantonomo and the Narragansetts, with whom Suckiaug’s Wangunks were allied after Wawarme’s marriage to Massecump. Miantonomo led a major uprising against the English in the early 1640s, but the Mohegans, under their sachem, Uncas, captured and executed him. Sequassen, Massecump, and Wawarme fled into exile during the 1643 raid, only returning to Hartford in 1650 to find that the English had sub-​divided their lands. The English removed all remaining Wangunks in 1663, save for one family who held on until 1723 (Love 1935: 88). Suckiaug’s last Wangunks were exiled to a Farmington, Connecticut reservation, then to Schaghticoke and eastern New York. A few descendants relocated to Wisconsin in the 1820s, no longer identifying as Wangunks. What had been Hartford’s last indigenous settlement became part of Samuel Colt’s firearms factory village in the 19th century; only the former factory area’s small streets mark the location now. Sequassen and Wawarme streets lie parallel to Masseek (for Massecump), Curcumbe, Weehasset, and Nepaquash streets. Coltsville is now a national park for its historical significance to US industrialization, and the spatial and symbolic heart of modern Hartford; not even a placard explains the names of these six streets, let alone the complex historical geography of Wangunk settlements at Suckiaug. This narrative is precisely what Brooks means when she argues that New England’s First Nations are ‘dismembered’. Wangunk removals from Pyquaog, Mattabesset, and Wangunk town followed similar dismembering trajectories, ending in final removals in 1671, 1765, and 1774, respectively (Adams and Stiles 1904; Andrews 1889; Ives 2015; Maravel 2005) (Figure 1.1; Figure 1.2). The Mohegan and Pequot nations’ dismemberment was more complex. The extensive English Puritan settlement wave from 1630 to 1642 exploited indigenous fluidity in identity and settlement, pitting one group against another in advancing White colonization (Walsh 2013:  24). The greatest early 17th-​century schism Connecticut’s

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Figure 1.1 Memorial to Samuel Colt, Coltsville National Historical Park, Hartford

Source: Author.

English colonists exploited was between Mohegans and Pequots, who had been one people until Europeans fomented their breaking apart (Brooks 2008; Weeden 2017). The Mohegans remained steadfast English allies throughout the state’s colonial era (1634–​1781), while the Pequots became the first adversaries of Connecticut’s English colonization. The Puritans’ response to a Pequot attack on White settlers at Pyquaog/​Wethersfield in April 1637 came swiftly and brutally. A  Mohegan–​English army killed more than 700 Pequot women, men, and children in their first campaign in May 1637; at least 400 were burned alive inside their stockade (Adams and Stiles 1904; Lepore 1998). Mashantucket Pequots were forced into servitude to the Mohegans until 1655, and then to the contemporary reservation in Ledyard in 1666. Other Pequot survivors relocated westward (like the Wangunks) with other indigenous peoples in Schaghticoke or Mohicans in New York, or were sold into slavery in St Kitts or Bermuda. A small group joined with Niantics (today’s ‘Eastern Pequot’ nation) on the Connecticut–​Rhode Island border. It would be tempting to characterize this dismembered indigenous landscape of today’s Quinniktuket as full of ghosts –​a classic stereotype of Native New England (Bergland 2000; O’Brian 2010; Weeden 2017). Seen from contemporary indigenous eyes, though, Hartford looks like

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Figure 1.2 Sequassen Street, Coltsville, Hartford

Source: Author.

a different sort of planetary urbanism. The fluidity and mobility foundational in Algonquian communities grew desperately as European incursions solidified into settlement colonies. But these notions of fluidity, mobility and interdependence also offer the contemporary urbanism a renewed way to remap itself through Glissantian ‘relation’. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999: 28) wrote of ‘a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence

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a world fragmented and dying’. A different, decolonized future for Hartford resonates with indigenous New England communities. The Algonquian drive to rebuild the common pot into a unified nation defending the region against White settlement and resource acquisitiveness  –​Brooks’s ‘re-​membering’  –​is the constant, persistent theme of indigenous New England over four centuries (Apess 1992; Brooks 2018; Cronon 1983; Lepore 1998; Richter 2001; Weeden 2017). But ‘re-​membering’ can also be a valuable imaginary for the dispirited, fragmented, and dying contemporary metro area of Hartford (Rojas and Wray 2013). Indigenous Southern thinking can enable a re-​vision of Hartford. In Algonquian settlement governance, a sachem’s ‘sovereignty’ depended on the capacity to facilitate reciprocity with other settlements such that the ‘common pot’ of the region and the ‘kettle’ of the sachem’s village were mutually reinforcing and stabilizing (Brooks 2008). As Brooks (2008: 138) put it: ‘Algonquians conceptualized Native space as a network of villages connected by rivers and relations… Algonquian identity was grounded in the place where you lived, the pot that fed you. Each village was both a ‘kettle’ unto itself and a part of the larger common pot that linked the communities together.’ The pot is open, ready for more links to other places. This was and is one whole settlement region, one planetary –​in Glissant’s sense of belonging to the ‘whole-​world’ –​urbanism. Its edges all round were and are fluid, in an interdependent riverine and coastal trading world. The Algonquian re-​ vision here links well to other indigenous, postcolonial and Southern ideas on spatiality. One is reminded of Anna Tsing’s (2000:  337) rethinking of the ‘circulations’ of globalization as ‘creeks’, for ‘if we imagined creeks, perhaps the model would be different; we might notice the channel as well as the water moving’. Re-​placing these ‘kettles’ and ‘creeks’ on the global cityscape of Quinniktuket begins with acknowledging the brokenness colonialism and genocidal violence wrought in that ‘channel’, as a step to re-​envisioning the metro area from Southern theory. ‘Hartford of the common pot’ consists of a series of interdependent towns all through the river valley with looser affiliations around it, including overseas. This re-​membering would override the settler mentality of border thinking, MSAs, or town autonomy, which have shown themselves to be unhelpful and unproductive for social justice, equality, or broad development gains for the marginalized minority–​majorities of urban settlements throughout Quinniktuket. To see the way these towns need one another and depend on one another in the post-​industrial age of decline, all the while forming new links to the rest of the world, is to

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see a way forward for Hartford that is at once new and centuries-​old, the root of human survival in the place.

Black and Caribbean transversal planetary Hartford The second step in this re-​envisioning and re-​membering entails seeing the greater Quinniktuket Hartford area as a Black and Latinx urbanism with submarine and subterranean links to Africa, the Caribbean, and the US South, engaged in ‘relation’ with a world of cities. These links form ‘poetic landscapes’ of ‘black [and brown] geographies’, but they are ‘imaginatively real’ (McKittrick 2006:  21). To begin, the lower reaches of Algonquian riverine Hartford have powerful historical links with Africa through ivory and slavery. The world’s two largest ivory-​ manufacturing companies during the 19th and early 20th century produced millions of piano keys and billiard balls from East African ivory in Ivoryton and Deep River, Connecticut, 25 miles downriver from Hartford, within the contemporary MSA. These companies profited mightily from the ‘involuntary labor of black people’ enslaved in East Africa’s Zanzibar-​dominated 19th-​century caravan trade (Farrow, Lang and Frank 2005: 202; Du Bois 1965: 68–​76). Some 75 percent of Zanzibar’s 19th-​century ivory exports came to greater Hartford for processing. Ivory supplied to Quinniktuket between 1839 and 1911 had the human cost of more than two million dead or enslaved Africans (Farrow, Lang and Frank 2005). Other industrial links with Africa abound as material elements of Hartford’s planetarization  –​firearms, bicycles, agriculture, business machines, tools, and publishing all took Hartford to Africa (Bacon and Chen 2013: 1). But Hartford’s longest-​lasting industrial identity came from its concentration of insurance companies, and their initial growth is tied to African and Caribbean slavery. Hartford’s major insurance companies began in the early and mid-​19th century, when Hartford was classed as a seaport. Early and mid-​19th century Hartford received about 2,500 ocean-​going vessels a year, most trading with the West Indies (Farrow 2014; Hooker 1956). Really, this was an urban area with many ports, including Hartford itself but also busy downriver ports and slave markets at Middletown, Old Lyme, and Old Saybrook. These ports ‘prospered because of the enterprise of… citizens in shipping ventures along the coast, to the West Indies, and to other parts of the world’ (Ashmead 1954: 19). Much of colonial and early-​independence-​era Connecticut’s economy was agricultural and relied on trade with the Caribbean: Connecticut’s farms supplied food to Caribbean plantations. Most early Hartford insurance firms

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engaged in ‘slave insurance’ (policies protecting plantation owners in the US South from ‘runaways’; Ashmead 1954: 22), but many links to slavery were implicit: any ‘ocean marine’ insurance (the foundation of the early industry in Hartford) covering trade to the Caribbean or Africa had indirect ties, since many goods transported from there through at least the 1860s were produced by slave labor (Hooker 1956; Spivey 1994; Stone 2008). Connecticut’s own colonial-​era slave ships traded with Sierra Leone’s Bunce Island, Ghana’s Cape Coast, and slave markets in St Kitts and Jamaica (Farrow 2014: 16). By the beginning of the American Revolution (1774), there were still more than 6,000 enslaved Africans in Connecticut, far more than other New England states, most working on farms that fed slaves in the Caribbean (Farrow 2014: 82; Harris 2013). Roughly half of the enslaved African population earned freedom during or just after the Revolutionary War, but Connecticut was much later (1848) than other northern states in outlawing slavery (Strother 1962). In sum, after its founding atop indigenous dismemberment, Hartford was made planetary from African ivory and plantation slavery. Seeing it from the ‘South’, greater Hartford had more in common with Charleston, South Carolina, or Kingston, Jamaica as part of a greater Caribbean-​in-​the-​world than is ever acknowledged in mainstream narratives of its rise as an ‘ocean-​and-​marine’ urban area (Burnard and Hart 2012). Demographically, though, African-​American Hartford began to grow into a significant community in size only in the 20th century, well after emancipation. Connecticut had just 10,000 urban Blacks in 1910 but almost 25,000 by 1930 (Close 2013a). Many of the state’s new urban African-​Americans migrated out of the US South, but Blacks from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands came, too. Afro-​ Caribbean migration expanded dramatically in the early 20th century. By 1930, Hartford’s North End had significant African-​American and Afro-​Caribbean communities (Close 2013b; Miller 1994). Hartford’s Black population had its largest expansion after the Second World War, building to its peak of more than 54,000 in 1990 (Stone 2008). This community is a set of ‘kettles’ in a ‘common pot’, connecting Hartford with the US South, Jamaica, St Kitts, St Lucia, Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Zanzibar, and beyond (Figure 1.3). Simone’s (2010: 175–​86) idea of a ‘trans-​territorial city’ is an apt means for understanding the common pot for Hartford’s Black people amid globalization and cosmopolitanism. It is also appropriate for Hartford’s Puerto Rican community. The trans-​territorial city tying Hartford to San Juan has powerful connectivity with Caribbean

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Figure 1.3 North End mural, Scott’s Jamaican Bakery, Albany Avenue, Hartford

Source: Author.

thinking, especially from Glissant’s sense of relationality across submarine roots. Puerto Rico has a long association with the Northeast US. Puerto Rico’s trade and cultural ties to Connecticut stretch to New England’s colonial era (Cruz 1998a). Twentieth-​century migration forged more powerful human links that tie San Juan and Hartford into one trans-​territorial urbanism. Puerto Ricans were granted US citizenship in 1917 and have elected their governors since 1948, but the island’s dependent political–​ economy leaves it in neo-​colonial limbo (Whalen 2005). For more than 70 years, Puerto Rico has endured ‘freedom with a long chain’ (Luis Munoz Marin, cited in Acosta-​Belen and Santiago 2006: 75). For most of the US-​dominated era, Puerto Ricans’ economic opportunities on the island have been severely limited –​even as investments there were highly profitable for mainland US corporate interests. Although islanders were migrating to the US before 1898, the 1917 extension of US citizenship eased movement to the mainland, where the Puerto Rican population grew from under 12,000 in 1920 to more than 300,000 by 1950 (Whalen 2005). The island’s first elected governor, Luis Munoz Marin, led a fast-​paced program of modernization and

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industrialization, Operation Bootstrap, that was credited with raising the standard of living for many Puerto Ricans but displaced many others, leading to even more dramatic migration to the mainland in the 1950s and 1960s. While the 1970s and early 1980s saw a return to Puerto Rico from cities like Hartford and New York, out-​migration only accelerated from then on, and particularly in recent years. Some 40 percent of the island population departed between the mid-​1980s and mid-​2010s; by 2019 far more Puerto Ricans lived on the US mainland (more than five million) than on the island (3.6 million). Over 80 percent of mainland US Puerto Ricans resided in New York City in 1950, but that percentage has plummeted below 20 percent (Whalen 2005). One older Puerto Rican in San Juan put it this way in 2019: ‘in the old days, it was all about New York; now, we are everywhere’. Greater Hartford became a primary place for Puerto Rican migration after 1950, along with smaller New England industrial towns like Lawrence, Massachusetts (Barber 2017). An initial causative factor was contract labor in tobacco fields. The towns just north of Hartford have been known for tobacco for several centuries; ‘Connecticut seed’ produces an excellent cigar wrapper. From the Second World War onward, Caribbean peoples became the primary workers. Puerto Ricans soon became dominant among tobacco laborers, arriving with skills and experience gained in the island’s fields (Hutchins 2013; Pawlowski 1999). The city of Hartford also welcomed a considerable Puerto Rican population. Many early migrants worked in industrial jobs, notably in the Royal and Underwood typewriter factories (Acosta-​Belen and Santiago 2006: 99). The city became filled with islanders who came to Connecticut directly, migrated from New York, or left Connecticut tobacco fields. When agricultural work declined, even though industrial opportunities declined too, Puerto Rican migration into urban Hartford only gained steam. Hartford became the first US city to elect a Puerto Rican mayor (Glasser 2005). After 1990, many new Latinx residents came to Hartford from other countries, but the Puerto Rican community remained dominant in the 2010s (Dillman 2016). The community has a high degree of fluidity in connections with New York, Orlando, and San Juan, along with other Puerto Rican cities and towns. By 2019, only three flights from Hartford’s Bradley International Airport flew directly beyond the continental US, and, of these, the only one with a steady and significant daily passenger base was the JetBlue airlines flight to San Juan. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rican families in Hartford struggled immensely to welcome relatives from the island for long stays; it took three weeks

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for direct flights to resume, with many flights out dominated by permanent out-​migrants; and the state government established services for thousands of storm evacuees. More than 440 Puerto Rican storm-​refugee students were added to the Hartford public schools in the 2017–​18 school year, without sufficient resources for accommodating their needs.

People as infrastructure in north and south Hartford Southern thinking enables us to see the relations and connections, to re-​member the common pot tying Hartford and Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, the US South, and Africa. And these links can also provide paths for resistance and resilience. As with indigenous thought, seeing Hartford as a Black and Puerto Rican urbanism requires reckoning with historical geography. Like W. E. B. Du Bois’ (1903: 47, 49) Atlanta of 117 years ago, for Hartford ‘it is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream’, where African-​Americans are ‘unthought of, half forgotten’. Continuing the critique of this dream in the 21st century, Ta-Nahisi Coates (2015: 149) urged African-​Americans to embrace a ‘black power’ which ‘originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet’ and that ‘births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors’. This understanding ‘from a dark and essential planet’ has much in common with the movement for ‘black geographies’ in North America (McKittrick 2006), and with what Simone re-membered as ‘black urbanism’. Simone (2010: 278–​9) used the phrase to ‘bring certain dimensions of urban life from the periphery into a clearer view’ as a ‘tactical maneuver’. This is not Fanon’s ‘nativism as a private refuge’: Simone does not see ‘black urbanism’ being ‘only about black people’ (Simone 2010: 280); instead, he looks to everyday experience of Black residents of cities as key entry points for understanding urbanism, because ‘in many parts of the world blackness informs what it means to be “urban” in a cultural sense… black people have had enormous influence on the… styles of urban life everywhere’ (Simone 2010: 282; see also Myers 2011). Yet for the marginalized minority–​majorities of cities like Hartford, these realities have been essentially invisible to the power structure –​ hidden in ‘shadow worlds’ (Simone 2010:  300). There is a ‘radical contingency’ to everyday existence in these shadows, with ‘an accumulation of small yet relentless traumas’ (Simone 2007: 82). African, African-​American, and Caribbean communities ‘forced into invisibility’ have resisted it by reinventing it as a tool of empowerment (Carter

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2010: 129; Myers 2011). Examples exist for this creativity and inventiveness in shadow worlds across many cities (Woods 2017). It is evident in the interdependence with which people attempt to live their lives, the ‘rhythms of endurance’ (Simone 2019) within basic efforts to attain the benefits and services urban life is supposed to offer  –​utilizing ‘people-​as-​infrastructure’ (Simone 2004 and 2007). The construction of Hartford’s North End as predominantly African-​ American is a function of White suburbanization and attendant segregation. African-​Americans originally settled south of downtown, and only began to move to the North End after the Civil War; by the end of the First World War, ‘blacks were forced into the North Main [Street] area’ (Northend Agents 1992: 3). The North End’s Blue Hills neighborhood, west of Keney Park, was created as a streetcar suburb in the 1920s; its White population steadily moved westward into West Hartford and north into Bloomfield from the 1960s onward, leaving Blue Hills as the city’s most African-​American neighborhood by 1990, at 87 percent (Institute for Community Research 1991). The creation of the Interstate 84 highway separated the North End from the rest of the city, physically underscoring its isolation. Mansions are juxtaposed against housing projects ‘and foster homes for black and brown children flanking Hartford’s city line’ (Selders 2015). White suburbs like West Hartford, Glastonbury, and Simsbury developed covenants barring Blacks and tacit agreements among realtors to keep African-​ Americans out. As John Selders (2015) put it, ‘Hartford residents live amid the sometimes toxic rubble left in the wake of wealth extraction.’ Selders led a protest in October 2015 where the organization Moral Mondays CT lined the city boundary and closed a major commuter street into the city from West Hartford, to highlight the ‘poverty quarantine’ around the North End. North End neighborhoods’ public schools are weak and underperforming, roads poor, bank branches few, supermarkets non-​existent, solid waste prevalent, drainage terrible, poverty staggering. Half the children of Clay Arsenal, Northeast, and Asylum Hill neighborhoods, and 40  percent in Upper Albany, live below the poverty line. Upper Albany has experienced high turnover, high crime, low levels of community trust, and significant dislocations. And Upper Albany’s ‘residents have been the subject of many surveys and projects which begin and end without results’ (Institute for Community Research 1993: 9). Yet these circumstances also give rise to significant reliance on one another to meet basic needs, to ‘people-​as-​infrastructure’. Besides Moral Mondays CT, some examples exist in the Artists Collective, with its steadfast ‘commitment to a grassroots democratic vision of cultural

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access’ (Miller 1994: 41), and Hartbeat Ensemble, the North End-​based ‘theatre for a change’ with its ground-​breaking ‘neighborhood investigative project’ creating plays out of the everyday life experiences of neighborhood residents. More than 30 churches provide a wide array of community-​building services in the North End, which they renamed ‘Project Holy Ground’ (Hardy 2016; Taylor 2003). The churches have worked steadily in ‘Project Holy Ground’ on collaborative projects for social service delivery, such as ‘224 EcoSpace’ and ‘FaithWorks for Community Development’. The Institute for Community Research (1993: 10) found that, even amid some of Upper Albany’s toughest times, ‘residents retain a strong sense of optimism about their own and their neighborhood’s future and are, in general, willing to put considerable energy toward neighborhood improvement’. My research in 2016–​18 found similar sentiments in a much-​changed North End, with the beleaguered and underfunded leaders of the Artists Collective, HartBeat Ensemble, or the West Indian Social Club (WISC). Some strengths for the African-​American community specifically were rooted initially in deep connections with southwestern Georgia for Hartford’s earliest big wave of African-​American migration (Close 2000; Institute for Community Research 1991). Shared understandings and family connections from that region migrated northward. The WISC similarly worked to strengthen North End neighborhoods via institutionalized cultural practices from Jamaica and other West Indian islands –​cooking, dance, music, cricket –​as a ‘home away from home’ (Airey-​Wilson  2018). Institutions and organizations like the WISC also fit well with what Clyde Woods (2017: 14) characterized as the ‘Blues epistemology’. This is a ‘way of knowing rooted in the historic redistributive agenda of freedom and labor struggles’ as a ‘philosophy of development that has been expressed in the cultural productions of black working-​class organic intellectuals’ for 150  years (Camp and Pulido 2017:  xxvi). The challenges are massive. As Best (2016:  145) put it for ‘Project Holy Ground’:  ‘The ghetto is no accident for it is the result of institutionalized racism and public policy neglect’ where ‘fledgling, nonprofit organizations’ have marginal capacity to affect a broad ‘shift in public policy’. Without denying the dire circumstances of the ‘poverty quarantine’, one can also see the dedicated work of this Blues epistemology in the North End’s ‘shadows’. Radical political organizing is one manifestation of the Blues epistemology that proved difficult to sustain in the North End, however. In the 1960s, Hartford had an active Black Panthers branch, an activist Black Caucus, and a radical wing of the National Association for

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the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (Close 2001). John Barber, speaking for the Black Caucus in 1968 in opposition to the White elites’ plan to build a civic center in downtown Hartford, told these elites that poor Blacks did not have the money or votes to stop the civic center project and redirect the city’s cabal of White business leaders (who called themselves ‘the Bishops’) toward jobs and assistance programs, ‘but in a real sense we do have the matches in our hands’ (Hartford Times, 9 July 1968). The Black Panthers played a crucial role in North End community building in the late 1960s, even as its leaders later noted how all that was remembered was the group’s alleged links to violence (Lewis 2000; Morrow 1969; Mounds 1969). The North End Community Action Project (NECAP) connected civil rights activists in Hartford to struggles in the Deep South, but it foundered in the late 1960s (Chatfield 2003). Fractures between the radical left and mainstream, business-​oriented African-​American and Afro-​Caribbean Northenders deepened further in later decades (Airey-​Wilson 2018; Allen-​Walton 2018). One Bridgeport, Connecticut African-​American leader described Hartford’s internal Black politics in the early 2000s as ‘very, very unstable. It’s like watching a Shakespeare play. You never know who is on who’s side’ (Nahm, in Mason 2002: p B9). North End struggles have parallels on the Latinx South End, where 40 percent of the population lives in poverty. South End’s Frog Hollow and South Green neighborhoods rank in the top three among Hartford’s 18 neighborhoods in the percentage of children living in poverty. The North End’s experience of discrimination, unemployment, lack of adequate housing, poor schools, and poor social services are replicated on the South End. Urban renewal programs demolished 10,000 of the city’s 56,000 housing units during the 1970s, and Clay Arsenal, then the heart of the Puerto Rican community, was heavily impacted, as was South Green (Glasser 2005: 191). Frog Hollow’s Park Street became the ‘Main Street of Latinx Connecticut’ only after these successive displacements from Clay Arsenal and South Green (Pawlowski 1999). The so-​called Bishops’ 1974 ‘Greater Hartford [planning] Process’ was built around containing Puerto Ricans in overcrowded neighborhoods while restricting their suburbanization or movement into then White areas in the city (Backstrand and Schensul 1982; Campbell 2019; Glasser 2005: 195; Walsh 2013). In the 1970s and 1980s, Puerto Ricans suffered the ‘triple whammy of displacement, unemployment, and relative political invisibility’ (Cruz 1998b: 72). White flight from 1950 to 1980 left the South End, like the North End, a minority–​majority and poverty-​strapped ethnic enclave (Cruz 1998a: 26).

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Similarities also exist with the North End in the development of ‘people-​as-​infrastructure’. Life in Hartford South End neighborhoods was produced through ‘neighborliness in a difficult environment’, where ‘Puerto Ricans gathered in each other’s houses to dance, play dominoes and tell stories’ (Glasser 2005: 186). Small stores serving the community’s consumer needs (‘bodegas’) became central ‘sources of advice for new arrivals’ (Glasser 2005: 187). South End Catholic and Pentecostal churches have had roles similar to the North End’s Black churches. The city’s Puerto Rican community has played a role in radical leftist pro-​independence politics for the island (Cruz 1998a and 1998b). ‘Ethnic political mobilization’ served ‘as a counterweight to the forces of poverty and marginality’ and a form of resistance (Cruz 1998a: 4). Park Street’s Center for Latino Progress and Frog Hollow’s San Juan Center, as well as the state-​wide Connecticut Puerto Rican Agenda, became powerful platforms for fundraising, shelter, and community engagement with the destruction of the island in 2017 from Hurricane Maria. In the South End, the inspiring community organization umbrella group, HART (Hartford Areas Rally Together), lasted from 1975 through 2012. HART was created by residents and local clergy ‘to stem the tide of disinvestment that Hartford’s Southend neighborhoods faced in the mid-​1970s’ (Menatian and Koistinen 1994: 1). HART achieved successes in its nearly four decades of existence, particularly in Frog Hollow, such as in street sweeping, advocacy for city services, or the curbing of gang violence and prostitution (Campbell 2019). As happened with ‘people-​as-​infrastructure’ organizations in the North End such as Artists Collective, local and national government and foundation grants that sustained HART dried up, and no financial base remained for self-​reliance. La Casa de Puerto Rico, another anchor organization, fought against discrimination by landlords and the White elite Bishops. The conflict with the Bishops came to a head in 1973 when La Casa obtained a confidential memo from the Bishops arguing for reducing Puerto Rican migration: ‘efforts should be made’, the Bishops declared, ‘to consolidate the welfare-​dependent elements of this population in Clay Hill [the old name for now-​separate neighborhoods of Clay Arsenal and Asylum Hill] and eastern Frog Hollow, using section-​8 housing rehabilitation to provide relocation resources to these areas’ (in Pawlowski 1999: 5). One could not ask for more explicit proof of the active agency of White elites in Hartford’s segregation. Yet, Puerto Rican activism in Hartford undermined many of the Bishops’ other objectives for divide and rule, in the process realizing the Puerto Rican community’s

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expansion out of these elite-​imposed ‘ghetto’ boundaries (Pawlowski 1999: 5). Local leaders fought to solidify the community’s rights and expand its political–​economic power (Campbell 2019; Vargas 2000). Hartford’s Latinx and Black communities certainly faced severe challenges, just as they have been in conflict –​with each other and within the respective ‘ends’ of the city. Divisions exist between the Puerto Rican and Peruvian communities, between the Jamaican and African-​American communities, and within all four of those groups. The mixture of Puerto Ricans born in Hartford with New  York transplants, farm laborers from rural Connecticut, and migrants directly from the island has made for complicated relations within the Puerto Rican community (Romero 2018; Trafford and Ellington 1977). While these conflicts have their political scars, ultimately, sometimes ‘conflict brought progress to Hartford’ (Cruz 1998a: 9). In the early 1990s, the Hartford Vision Project, for example, sought to ‘break through some of the parochial boundaries which [then] characterize[d]‌ Hartford life’, working for 18 months toward ‘a more cosmopolitan sense of who we are’ (Walsh and Bingham 1992: 1). In 2017, Moral Mondays CT joined forces with the Center for Latino Progress in hurricane relief and activism for social justice for African-​American, Afro-​Caribbean, and Puerto Rican communities in Hartford. These communities encapsulate the lived realities of Southern thinking in urban studies. Transversality, trans-​territoriality, relationality, people-​ as-​infrastructure, an urban region re-​membered as an open common pot:  after near-​genocide, slavery, and colonialism, these alternative visions manifest themselves in greater Hartford every day. It is important not to over-​idealize the possibilities of any of these Southern ways of looking at Hartford. Collectively, however, they provide a richer and more grounded comprehension of how 21st-​century Hartford came to be –​and continues to be –​a planetary urbanism.

Conclusion For 40 days in Spring 2017, about 30 self-​identified ‘pilgrims’ (Morris 2017: B4) canoed the Quinniktuket from its source on the Canadian border to Long Island Sound. Although the trip was affiliated with the Episcopal church, the pilgrims included people of many faiths and ethnic backgrounds. Reverend Enrique Irizarry of the Church of the Good Shepherd coordinated the pilgrims’ time in Hartford. His church, with its overwhelmingly Puerto Rican congregation, was initially sponsored in the 19th century by Elizabeth Colt, wife of Samuel Colt. It occupies part of the South Meadows area to which the

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early 17th-​century Wangunk village of Suckiaug had been relocated. Irizarry held a special mass against violence, reading ‘the names of all the victims of gun violence in the past three years’ (Morris 2017: B4). This 21st-​century pilgrimage lies a long way from the river journeys of a different church almost 400  years ago. Where English Puritan pilgrims once shattered the common pot that had produced Hartford’s 17th-​century Algonquian place-​world, people of African-​American, indigenous, Puerto Rican, and European heritage now sought to restore the common pot with their paddles. Given the spot upon which Reverend Irizarry’s congregation read those names, one might have wished for a longer list, of the victims of colonialism, genocide, enslavement –​all the violence that shattered the common pot over four centuries. But that would have taken the 40 days that the pilgrims took to canoe the river. Hartford, reconceived as an indigenous, African, Caribbean metropolis, can become a setting for generating theoretical ideas of the urban, a testing ground for theorizations out of the experiences of formerly colonized peoples, whether Algonquian, African, African-​ American, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, or Peruvian. This chapter is an exercise in decolonizing the map, where decolonization is a quest for wholeness, a re-​memberment of common pots. That re-​memberment demands a thick description of particular cultural histories in relation to one another. What makes an urbanism or an urbanization process global or planetary? Certainly, economic significance in trade and finance, or political importance in control and decision-​making are crucial factors for most analysts. Historical geographers and urbanists attuned to Southern thinking can articulate the depths of the place-​worlds of urban regions and recenter the experiences of the marginalized in the processes producing that globality. Postcolonial studies enables the critique offered by Chattopadyay (2012b: 77) that ‘colonialism is the strong arm of capitalism, gathering raw materials and labour, creating markets and sites for investment with profit directed toward the metropole’. Mignolo (2002) similarly argued for seeing ‘coloniality’ as ‘the hidden face of modernity and its very condition of possibility’. The complex and long building processes of global-​and-​world-​ city formation or planetary urbanization are profoundly in need of broader and deeper analysis along these lines. Thinking with the South means being open to new insights from outside of the West. Genocide, slavery, and colonialism have played centuries-​long roles in shaping global cityscapes and planetary urbanization processes in the North and South alike. Southern thinking has kept these major

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factors in the foreground, refusing to subsume them in Northern maps or models (Palmer 2006; Williams 1944). Surely, one could take a more economic–​industrial approach to Hartford, since most urban scholars argue that this is what shapes planetary urbanization. But the industries and socio-​spatial structures of this economy, when seen from Southern eyes, are embedded in an exploitative historical geography that has juxtaposed marginalization with resistance since White settlement in the early 17th century. The very basic space–​economy of the region –​its interstate highways, secondary highways, rail lines, and ports –​rose on Algonquian trade routes, the bones of the Great Beaver’s Bowl, as Algonquians speak of the valley (Brooks 2008). The Insurance City of Hartford began with slavery, in slave insurance and ocean marine policies for ships carrying goods produced by enslaved Africans –​as did its formerly globe-​leading ivory industry. The ‘seed’ of Connecticut’s tobacco industry, and many of its 20th-​century urban factories and office parks, rested on Caribbean –​and particularly Puerto Rican –​  labor. Southern thinking can bring Hartford back from its outcast, misunderstood, and detached space in urban studies. I have explored several conceptualizations out of postcolonial and Southern thought here, and the overall approach builds upon Glissant’s postcolonial Southern ideas and methods in specific ways. First, I have insisted on particularity and the thick description of Hartford’s historical geography –​all the ‘rivers’ rocks’ in Glissantian terms –​to avoid the ‘reductive and homogenizing synthesis’ found in a more conventional rendering of Hartford’s urbanization process (Wiedorn 2018: 113–​14). Second, the chapter is a ‘spiral retelling’ of that process, outward from Hartford’s indigenous core geographically and historically, unfolding through the last few centuries and expanding around the river valley. The chapter aims to also exemplify what Glissant (2009: 45) called ‘archipelagic thought’, which encompasses particularity, diversity, creolization, ambiguity, and unpredictability –​all hallmarks of Hartford’s story –​and forthrightly embraces experimentation: this is an attempt, ‘resisting total explanation’ (Dash 1995: 149). Although it is not my task here to lay out policy maps for Hartford’s future, it would clearly be necessary to base such maps on understandings of Hartford’s historical geography from its marginalized majority. For example, as the city of Hartford prioritizes and basks in the supposed revitalization of its downtown in the 21st century, what would happen if the sense of what is downtown shifted to Upper Albany or Frog Hollow, the respective downtowns of the North and South Ends? What if the metropolitan center of gravity were resituated as multipolar, with those

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two downtowns linked to Connecticut Route 2, the road connecting Pequot Ledyard/​Mashantucket and Mohegan Montville/​Uncasville? Or what if the state’s and its many towns’ revenues were simply shared equitably as a ‘common pot’ in the pursuit of greater interdependence and reciprocity as the goal of urbanization? That would surely be the anti-​imperialist, postcolonial objective in working for ‘a world in which one is, quite simply, one agrees to be, with and among others’ on an equal basis (Glissant 1990: 128) (Figure 1.4). This chapter is a variation on Robinson’s (2016a) thinking with or through ‘elsewhere’. It is built around applying Southern ideas to Hartford, from indigenous and Caribbean concepts of relationality and transversality to African and African-​American notions of Black urbanism or people-​as-​infrastructure. It is experimental, and specificities will always vary:  Hartford’s story is distinct even from

Figure 1.4 Hartford’s downtown skyline, reflected in the ‘Boat Building’

Source: Author.

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those of other northeastern US cities. But in any setting, whether in the global North or South, comprehension of the urbanization process as planetary demands an historical–​geographical understanding built from Southern thinking that can recognize and see from the urban experiences of the marginalized.

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Villages in the City: Patterns of Urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, Dakar, and Zanzibar Introduction Urban theory still has a ‘Southern’ problem, despite two decades of sustained critique of global-​North-​centered theories of urbanization. The problem may be different in different schools of thought, but most paths leave an enduring lacuna where global South intellectual understandings and conceptualizations of urbanization and globalization processes would otherwise drive scholarly analysis. In the previous chapter, indigenous, postcolonial, and Southern approaches and ideas helped to ‘re-​member’ the historical geography of the urbanization process for Hartford, its ‘dis-​membered’ indigeneity, its Blues epistemology, its people-​as-​infrastructure, its trans-​territorial connections. The goal in this chapter is to explore an urban comparison across the global South, from southern China to two urban places in Africa (Dakar and Zanzibar), conceptualizing from outside global North frameworks when looking at land-​use patterns in urbanization. I assess the utility of the intertwined Chinese ideas of chengzhongcun, chengbiancun, and chengwaicun, translated as a village ‘in-​ the-​city’, ‘on-​the-​city-​suburb-​edge’, and ‘in the suburb’ in English, in scholarship analyzing rapid urbanization in China’s Pearl River Delta over the last 40 years, for analyzing similarly rapid processes in sub-​Saharan Africa over a similar period. The chapter ends with a segment exploring comparability for the terms and patterns in Port of Spain, San Juan, and Hartford.

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This book aims to highlight the importance of Southern urban thinking and insights for developing a truly global urban studies. This importance resonates in many contexts –​even in places conventionally mapped with the North –​but it is surely evident when studying Chinese or Sub-​Saharan African urbanization. Urbanizing processes in China and Africa are quite old, and quite planetarily far back in time, predating today’s neoliberal globalization (which is itself far too often understood only from global North conceptualizations; see Carmody and Owusu 2016). There is ample latitude for detailing the specificities of globalizing processes over centuries, as Meier (2016) and Prestholdt (2008) have done for the Swahili coast. The Pearl River Delta (PRD)  –​including Hong Kong, Foshan, Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Macau, Zhuhai, Huizhou, Jiangmen, Zhaoqing, and Zhongshan, a collection of cities also identified as the Greater Bay Area (GBA) –​has been a key node connecting China with the world for centuries. Three of the now urban village settlements in contemporary Shenzhen examined in this ­chapter –​Nantou, Gangxia, and Hubei –​were founded in 1394, 1400, and around 1500 CE, respectively. But this chapter is more concerned with present patterns and recent histories. In contrast to other chapters, here the focus rests with a comparison of global-​South geographic patterns of urban form, rather than with theories, ideas, or literary/​artistic visions from the global South. If, as Glissant (cited in Wiedorn 2018: 114) might have it, ‘every philosophy is a geography’, this tactic enables a comparison of how the geographic patterns come about in the three settings in relation to the political philosophies that govern these places. It is also a means, in Glissant’s (2009) terms, for assessing the ‘infinite quantity of all particularities’ to the three cases and the ‘creolization’ of the landscape patterns (Wiedorn 2018: 113). To challenge the argument that postcolonial approaches to urban studies are ‘vague’ and ‘convoluted’, I want to put empirically grounded emphasis into the dynamics of this comparison, ‘to know the rivers’ rocks’ and how they differ (Glissant 2009: 45). I examine the Chinese terms and patterns in terms of their potential relevance in Sub-​Saharan Africa. They arose as means for describing and analyzing what is happening to small settlements (cun) swallowed up all over the PRD’s megacities as they grew exponentially following southern China’s explosive industrialization since 1978 (Al, 2014; Altrock and Schoon, 2014; Chen, 2007; Chen and de’Medici, 2012; de Meulder and Shannon, 2014; Roberts, 2013; Schoon, 2013; Wu, Zhang and Webster, 2012). In the PRD, by 2019, hundreds of villages remain inside, on the edges of and in the outskirts of Shenzhen,

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Guangzhou, Dongguan, and other cities, but within a wide variety of trajectories for transformation. These concepts of villages in-​the-​city, on-​the-​edge, or in-​the-​ suburbs are fascinating for comparative purposes in Africa, to explore the ‘relation’ of cities to one another in a Glissantian sense based on mutual respect. As cities have grown throughout the world historically, they have swallowed up the farmlands and hamlets within and around them. In The urban revolution, Lefebvre (1970: 7–​8) wrote that ‘in many places around the world, and most certainly any place with a history, the existence of the city has accompanied or followed that of the village’. He was identifying something akin to what the Chinese terms aim to explain, but within an ultimately Europe-​centered framework. Lefebvre did critique the ‘ideology’ that he associated with the representation of ‘slowly secreted urban reality’, but less for the fact that it ‘generalizes from what took place in Europe’ than for its inability to see that ‘the general question of the relationship between the city and the countryside is far from being resolved’ (Lefebvre 1970:  8). Lefebvre’s limited analysis of China in The urban revolution concerned the Cultural Revolution that was occurring there at the time he was writing the book. But that became moot with the transformation of its economy over the last four decades –​a transformation that Deng Xiao Ping began in Shenzhen with its special economic zone, initiated experimentally in 1978 and formally launched a year later (Chen 2014). Four decades on, in Shenzhen, the Communist Party’s golden hammer and sickle resides on a billboard advertisement between the golden arches of McDonald’s and the green goddess of Starbucks  –​a café where everyone stares at smart phones made a few miles away, while using multi-​purpose internet platforms designed and headquartered in Shenzhen (Figure 2.1). Urbanists can no longer generalize from what took place in Europe or North America to understand global urban patterns. The processes and pathways by which villages evolve into cities or become enmeshed in urban realities have varied tremendously, as has the pace, around the world, with the PRD arguably leading the way into the current age. Even if the ‘relationship between the city and the countryside is far from being resolved’, absolutely nothing is slowly secreted about the urban reality of Shenzhen and the PRD. It seems logical that if one seeks to understand the patterns of 21st-​ century planetary urbanization, one ought to look at the places where those patterns are most rapidly transforming the landscape and find the language there that is used to describe and analyze them (Schmid et al. 2018). This chapter is a small experiment in doing so.

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Figure 2.1 Starbucks and the hammer and sickle, Shenzhen

Source: Author.

The other South: planetary urbanization and the Pearl River Delta The 2017–​18 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/​Architecture took as its theme, ‘Cities grow with difference’. The organizers situated the exhibits in Nantou, a walled city built in 1394 but now surrounded completely by the high-​technology and university research parks, upscale shopping, and high-​end housing of Nanshan District. They also explicitly situated the PRD in the global South and made South–​South comparison of urban villages the literal and figurative entry-​point into the exhibition. The Biennale’s South–​South exhibition guide maintained that labeling its six separate exhibits this way was not ‘a method of dividing the world’ but a means for highlighting the ‘crucial place of [the] southern world in a globalized planet’ (all quotations from here on are taken from the unpublished guide or placards at the Biennale itself). The South–​South exhibits centered on Nairobi, Havana, Paraisopolis, Skopje, and then cities in Asia and Latin America generally. They sought to prompt ‘thinking and discussions… on conditions which are outside [the] mainstream world, and their causes, opportunities and vitalities’. Most of the

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Global South building, and then the two remaining major exhibition spaces (Urban Village and Art Making City), concentrated on the PRD’s (especially Shenzhen’s) urban villages. Artistic interventions and innovations predominated alongside considerations of informality, spontaneity, regeneration, experimentation, governance, and practical urban planning issues for these villages. The Biennale further situated the PRD’s chengzhongcun within the ‘other South’, the south of China, a region long outside of the dominant power structure of the country, northern China. From what the Biennale claimed as the ‘dirty, messy, lousy, crowded, ugly and unsafe’ urban villages of the PRD, a work force emerges every day to make an urban world that is defined by its ‘Southness’, in ‘revolt against mainstream cultural centralism’, instead embracing ‘a heterogeneous conjunctive symbiosis’ (emphasis mine). This complicated phrase is valuable and worthy of some unpacking: every urban village has its own unique story and character, yet these are tied to one another and grow with each other; they ‘grow with difference’. Might this vision of planetary urbanization from the ‘Other South’ of south China be reflective of patterns across the global South? In Asia as Method, Kuan-​Hsing Chen (2010:  107) critiqued Soja and the Los Angeles School’s attempts to reorient urban theory by posing the question of why ‘postmodern geography did not originate in Cambodia or Burma’ or use Asian cities beyond Tokyo as the main ‘reference points’. He developed a rich historiography of ‘Asia as method’, a phrase that originated in a 1960 lecture from Takeuchi Yoshimi, as a means for moving beyond Eurocentric frameworks for knowledge production. His title might be read as an implicit opening toward replacing Eurocentrism with Asia-​centrism, but this was not Chen’s intention. It is, he says, ‘not a slogan but a practice’ (Chen 2010: 255). Through the practice of crossing horizons, multiplying perspectives, and enriching subjectivity, he hoped to transcend ‘Asian studies’ and ‘change the world’ (Chen 2010:  254). Portions of his argument veer away from the interests of this book, but the notion of making the practice of recentering analysis of Asian –​in this case Chinese –​urbanization on inter-​Asian comparativism from ideas originating in Asia must be a vital part of rethinking 21st-​century urbanism on the planet. It is a practice that can be extended to comparativism across the global South as a part of ‘new geographies of knowledge’ production in postcolonial studies (Roy 2011b: 309). That is quite distinct from any universalizing project starting from Asia; instead, in Glissantian terms, this is an experiment designed to ‘change our imaginaries’ (Glissant 2005b: 34).

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That idea of changing our imaginaries appears clear with the edited volume, Learning from Shenzhen (O’Donnell, Wong and Bach 2017). The authors use Shenzhen as a ‘pivotal case study from which important lessons can be learned’ for China, Asia, and the global South, in practice as well as in the conceptualization of cities and urbanization (O’Donnell, Wong and Bach 2017: 3). With that example in mind, the next segment takes these Southern Chinese urban patterns and applies them to two urban regions, Dakar and Zanzibar, comparing how their ‘urban villages’ have come to be. ‘Villages’ like Ouakam, Thiaroye, and Keur Massar in and around Dakar and Kikwajuni, Fuoni, and Mwera in Zanzibar are parallel with the three Chinese settings, respectively, as one moves out from the city boundary. Perhaps this tripartite conceptualization about the spatiality and pace of the urbanization process from China might be more relevant to the similarly rapid pace and broad sprawl one sees in sub-​Saharan Africa. What happens if one travels with the Biennale’s heterogeneous conjunctive symbiosis of PRD urban patterns into the heterogeneity of another Southern realm? In the interest of brevity and sharpness of focus, the concentration is on Thiaroye and Fuoni, as villages-​on-​the-​edge (chengbiancun) in the Dakar region and Zanzibar. These are compared with PRD examples in terms of land development, governance, and participation in housing and urban development. While these two African cases are different from each other and from the PRD cases, the comparability is more enlightening than an attempt to shoehorn either African case into Western-​defined processes.

Comparing the patterns in the PRD and Sub-​Saharan  Africa In Africa, ‘urbanites make their cities in ways that scholars have yet to comprehend’, especially in, around and across the city edges (Förster 2016: 7). The tripartite division of Chinese processes has the potential to take scholars toward such comprehension, even if there are notable differences. First, however, there needs to be a more basic case for comparability between the PRD, Dakar, and Zanzibar, particularly in edge settings. The logic of utilizing Dakar and Zanzibar arises not simply because I have conducted fieldwork in urban and peri-​urban ‘villages’ of both. These are also deliberately chosen for being much smaller than the PRD’s mega-​cities, and therefore representative of cities often left out of analyses of global or planetary urbanization; but they are also ones that –​like the PRD cities –​have been defined around their ‘planetary’ relationships for centuries. What Glissant would see

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as ‘submarine’ ties between these urban stories are evident across these centuries. As slave-​trading ports and entrepôts of global trade from the 1500s (for Dakar) and 1600s (for Zanzibar), links with Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the rest of Africa were as crucial to the formation of the urban identities of both cities as the ties to global trade for the PRD have been since at least the 1700s. Histories of such linkage make Zanzibar and Dakar (Scheld 2003) well situated for illustrating different starting places and understandings for ‘planetary’ urbanization. More immediately, all three urban regions (PRD, Dakar, and Zanzibar) have experienced rapid urbanization in the last half-​century. Within the PRD, the most profound narrative of rapid urbanization thus far arguably belongs to Shenzhen. Shenzhen’s urbanization and industrialization was transformed by the 1978 decision, ratified in 1979, to establish China’s first special economic zone (SEZ) there (Chen 2014; Chen and de’Medici, 2012). Shenzhen’s 241 existing villages contained at most 300,000 people when the SEZ began (Bach 2017; O’Donnell 2017). The overall metropolitan area is now is about 60 times larger in population than it was 40 years ago. Much of the growth has been in the population moving to Shenzhen for industrial employment, but with rural hukou (registration). People lacking urban hukou comprise almost 80 percent of Shenzhen’s population. Many of them reside in urban villages because the lack of urban hukou makes obtaining housing elsewhere more difficult; the lower regulation and cost in urban villages produce a market that is available for low-​income migrants (Hao et al. 2013). However, as urban villages are demolished or gentrified, Shenzhen’s floating population is pushed farther out to edge villages or suburban villages (Tian, 2008; Zhang, Le and Chen, 2016). The 2017–​18 Biennale even saw the PRD as defined by ‘drifting’ –​the drift of immigrants to the region, of Hakka and indigenous people out of the region, of global trade in and out, of the water of the Pearl River itself. The pace of this ‘drift’ is staggering in human terms. There is no escaping the reality that Shenzhen is far wealthier than either of the urban areas to which it is compared here. On the Globalization and World Cities research group’s 2018 charts, Shenzhen earned an Alpha –​ rating, below Hong Kong’s Alpha Plus rank, but well above my other cities. Dakar was listed as a Gamma Minus city in 2016 and just a High Sufficiency one in 2018, and Zanzibar does not even make the list. In 2018, I watched the Hollywood super-​hero movie, Black Panther, in Shenzhen’s Nanshan District; the movie is about a fictional African kingdom known as Wakanda that secretly leads the world in technological innovation because it controls the

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only supply for a miraculous substance called vibranium. I  walked out of that snazzy cinema onto a pedestrian mall a few blocks from the towering corporate headquarters of the enormous internet services, gaming and entertainment conglomerate TenCent, surrounded by tall buildings that reminded me of Wakanda’s skyline in the movie (Figure 2.2). If there is any vibranium in the world today, so to speak, the chances are good it belongs to Shenzhen, not to Dakar, Zanzibar, or any other actual city in Africa. Still, there is a magical substance to life in Shenzhen that has much in common with Dakar and Zanzibar, in the contrarian everyday world where the glitzy dreams and efficient order of planners clash with the sensibilities of ordinary residents, particularly those on the margins. A few hundred meters from that mall’s Cineplex on the fancy Figure 2.2 Nanshan District’s ‘Wakanda’ skyline, Shenzhen

Source: Author.

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pedestrian promenade lies a quiet park, accessible on one side through a tunnel under a major road. In the shadow of the master-​planned instant city, under the roadway, one can go to a barber or buy cheap food or cheap goods from a handful of peddlers and street merchants; in this ‘make+shift’ (Simone and Pieterse 2017) alley and in the park, on many days, numerous heated card games take place with dozens of passionate observers, alongside dancing lessons, or elderly citizens doing contemplative exercises. All the while, bicycles, electric bikes, and near-​silent scooters weave in and out of the constant pedestrian stream. This ‘drifting’ metropolis moves along a ‘symbiosis’ between village and urban that has ‘long since been detached from the binary system and the either-​or discourse’, in the 2017 Biennale’s terms (see also Bach 2017). Dakar and its satellite city of Pikine have experienced a similar drift, at a relatively slower pace and smaller scale, toward their own respective symbiosis. Dakar’s population is currently estimated at just above three million, more than nine times its size at independence in 1960 of around 350,000. Pikine at its initial establishment in 1952 was home to about 8,000 villagers, most in Thiaroye. Pikine’s population is more than 1.2 million now, and Thiaroye has more than 225,000 people –​about 40 times its size in 1952. Thiaroye has grown largely as a result of displacements from rising housing costs in Dakar, in combination with rural-​to-​urban migration caused by stress on Senegal’s agricultural economy –​rather than as a result of a massive wave of industrialization (Hanlon et al. 2018). Zanzibar has also experienced a relatively rapid urbanization of its edge, in places like Fuoni. The small city proper had a bit more than 49,000 people on the eve of independence in 1958, 115,000 in 1978, and 223,000 in 2012. But West District A and B, the edge communities that are now thoroughly morphological and functional parts of urban Zanzibar, grew from a set of rural farming villages with fewer than 20,000 people in 1958 to 370,678 in 2012 (Myers 2016). Fuoni went from a tiny village of fewer than 1,000 people in the 1970s to a village-​on-​the-​edge of 34,774 by 2012. I remember bicycling through coconut plantations with python-​r ich swamplands in Fuoni in 1991, and by 2019 it was essentially the new downtown of the Zanzibar metro area, regardless of planners’ efforts toward a different new downtown (discussed in Chapter 5). Fuoni, as with Thiaroye, owed its growth to the high costs of housing in Zanzibar city in combination with rural-​to-​ urban migration, rather than the Shenzhen sort of industrial explosion. The reasons for focusing on Thiaroye and Fuoni are as follows. The most thoroughly studied of the three Chinese categories (chengzhongcun,

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the village-​in-​the-​city or urbanized village) is self-​explanatory, but it is also technically the least similar to the African cases. This is because colonialism’s economic priorities, restrictions on migration and urban residence caused most cities in sub-​Saharan Africa to grow fairly slowly until the waning days of European rule. In that context, pre-​ existing urban villages either were demolished, slowly eroded away, or ossified. Only very recently, with for instance Huruma in Nairobi, Ouakam in Dakar, or Kariokoo in Dar es Salaam, do we see processes in Africa that might more precisely mirror the chengzhongcun of the PRD (Huchzermeyer 2011; Myers 2016; Seifert 2011). Massive, nearly instant processes of urbanization are more common straddling or outside the municipal boundaries in Africa, and they occur along the two broadly distinct trajectories identified by Chinese scholars as chengwaicun and chengbiancun –​villages on the city edge and in the suburbs –​most intensely right along the urban edges. To go anywhere with this comparison, though, one must recognize that there are important differences. Two overwhelming differences have been noted: the overall numbers between the PRD and African urban cases, and the absence of massive industrial employment growth. A third lies in the built environment and housing stock –​the ‘handshake-​ houses’ and ‘thin-​line sky’ characteristic of the three ‘village’ types in China (Al 2014; de Muelder and Shannon 2014; Roberts 2013) are less common in Africa (Figure 2.3). Handshake-​houses are tall, narrow apartment buildings built so close to one another that people say one could reach out a window and shake hands with a resident of the next building. The closeness of these towers leaves an observer in the alley a view of only a thin line of sky above, hence the ‘thin-​line sky’. There are the beginnings of high-​r ise developments of a comparable density in African chengzhongcun, but far less in the chengbiancun or chengwaicun. Still, all three edge village (chengbiancun) settings, in the PRD, Dakar-​ Pikine, and Zanzibar, have experienced rapid urbanization for at least some comparable reasons like overcrowding in the nearby city and in-​migration from both city and countryside. All three edge village areas then experience overcrowding in substandard housing. All three are woefully underserviced. All three have socio-​cultural tensions and rising inequalities between villagers and newcomers –​and within indigenous village societies  –​which sometimes spill over into politics. In housing terms, the parameters are similar even if the physical housing stock differs. Even greater commonalties can be found in land development, the fluid and variable roles of ‘village’ participation in governance and in the development processes in these edge areas, as examined in the following paragraphs.

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Figure 2.3 Thin-​line sky and handshake houses, Shenzhen

Source: Author.

In the PRD, the urbanization of land starts from the appropriation of agricultural areas by the government –​often the local or municipal government (Shin 2014) –​and private interests allied to it for factories and formally developed urban areas. This ‘entrepreneurial push for urban redevelopment’ through state-​led ‘strategic planning’ uses land as an accumulation strategy (Shin 2014: 269). However, because villagers retain the rights to their housing stock, when confronted with

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the subsequent loss of farming livelihoods, many village development committees of residents seek investors to build larger structures for rental to migrants on their housing areas. Some villages thus typically retain somewhat the morphological structure of pre-​existing villages, with much taller structures (Wiethoff 2014: 336). Open spaces that passed for a sort of public space between villages steadily disappear in a rapid pace of ‘everyday urbanization’ (Wiethoff 2014: 341). This is not a uniform or predictable pace for land urbanization, and it has a potent mix of ‘formal de jure permissions’ and ‘informal de facto reactions’ embedded in it, with highly varied degrees of villager agency (Hin and Xin 2011; Ma and Blackwell 2017; Wiethoff 2014: 341). The resultant patterns are a frenetic mixology of village-​style and urban grid, with occasional interruptions of something in-​between (Liu et  al. 2018; Wong, Tang and Liu 2018). Three urban villages, Nantou, Gangxia, and Hubei, illustrate well the ‘heterogeneous conjunctive symbiosis’ of Shenzhen. Nantou, the oldest and most significant of the three settlements prior to 1978 has also remained the most intact. It was a tiny ‘walled city’ created in 1394 by the Qing dynasty government as the court of the local governor of Bao’an County. Outside of the 14th-​century fort, there are nine streets crossed by several long alleys, a pattern intact since the 1600s. Just 11,000 residents live in Nantou, many of whom are not migrants, making for a striking contrast with most chengzhongcun of Shenzhen. It is surrounded by industrial parks, chic commercial zones, a massive modern museum and entertainment district, and Shenzhen’s main thoroughfares, but its historic significance led to its preservation as Nanshan District blossomed around it. Despite the fact that it served as the host venue for the Shenzhen Biennale for Urbanism and Architecture in 2017–​18 to showcase ‘urban villages’, Nantou is really quite a different sort of village, as one of the two historic 14th-​ century walled administrative forts of the area across which Shenzhen city has grown. Hubei is also quite old, but less intact in its original form (Figure 2.4). Hubei’s southern section of 200 or so houses make it ‘the largest remaining Qing dynasty village’ in Shenzhen, and the morphological pattern is ‘a typical Cantonese village with three vertical streets and eight horizontal alleys’. But the new segment of Hubei, which began in 1986, houses far more people and does not follow the old morphology. About 95 percent of Hubei’s 20,000 or so residents in the two segments combined are migrant tenants, mainly in the newer mid-​r ise structures. Hubei has been subjected to contentious planning interventions six times since 1986, with the old village shrinking each time.

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Figure 2.4 Hubei Village, Shenzhen

Source: Author.

Shenzhen’s Futian Civic Center replaced the original village of Gangxia after a 1988 governmental planning decision. Its villagers had already stopped farming in 1981 and lived from the rental incomes of buildings they built on the fields adjacent to their old village; they also built a dump-​truck business for transporting agricultural goods –​sometimes, reputedly, including smuggling across the Hong Kong border. Multiple, massive redevelopment projects ate away at the original farms of Gangxia and the post-​1981 village, most dramatically in the 2010–​16 extension of the Futian Civic Center. Still, more than 85,000 residents live in the chengzhongcun, only 1,300 of whom are its indigenous villagers; the rest are migrant tenants. Gangxia village is gated to prevent vehicular access, but also heavily policed and surveilled with CCTV, contained between Fuhua, Huanggang and Caitian roads and Shennan Boulevard (Shenzhen’s spine, running across the metropolis). It is a 0.5 square kilometer village surrounded by a forest of formal skyscrapers on three sides, with a modest government garden-​style apartment complex next to its handshake-​houses. Unlike some chengzhongcun with large apartment towers, most of Gangxia’s buildings are only between six and 12 stories, and its close-​knit migrant community has a vibrancy that is palpable –​and notably absent from the lifeless modernity of the Futian Civic Center in general (Figure 2.5, Figure 2.6).

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Figure 2.5 Street scene, rush hour, Gangxia Village, Shenzhen

Source: Author.

There are striking parallels here to West District of Zanzibar around Fuoni, and to some extent with Thiaroye and Pikine. The morphological structures of Fuoni and Thiaroye still retain, in segments, relationships to the built environment of the pre-​existing villages. The ‘everyday urbanization’ in both settings contains a mix of state-​led order and informal reaction in land distribution. For Fuoni, the 1964 nationalization of land –​initially for socialist ideological development

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Figure 2.6 Street scene, rush hour, Futian Civic Center, Shenzhen

Source: Author.

policy rather than the financialization of land as an investment –​eventually played a part in the urbanization pattern, but in a manner that is quite relatable to the PRD cases. The long, drawn-​out implementation of the 1982 Chinese Master Plan for Zanzibar (discussed further in Chapter 5) included development of planned and orderly neighborhood units (NUs) in Fuoni, but few of these grew in a manner anywhere near the planned form. In the 1960s, many properties had been allocated

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to revolutionary cadres in the government’s three-​acre allotments, and these were often the first areas to be informally urbanized –​a process often led, in Fuoni, by the informal plans of three-​acre plot-​holders themselves (Myers 2010 and 2016). Land control steadily slipped from a central government intent on allocating it in new planned NUs into an informal system where land rights became instruments of benefit in the hands of local party officials. Thiaroye experienced no strictly socialistic nationalization, but it nonetheless developed as a complex mixture of formally and informally organized and controlled urban lands, with segments of state-​led, grid-​like development surrounded by haphazard construction, particularly in marginal zones. The village-​ like character, dominated by high degrees of sociability and conviviality, often found in PRD urban villages, is evident in Fuoni in what I have elsewhere termed peri-​urban Zanzibar’s ‘sisi-​kwa-​sisi’ (us-​for-​ us) informal dynamics (Myers 2011 and 2016), and in Thiaroye and Pikine through what Pikine residents proudly characterize as Pikinité, Pikine-​ness (Etoka 2015; Hanlon et al. 2018). The participatory governance dynamics in relation to the state in these three contexts may present contrasts, but there is still room for comparability. In the PRD, and perhaps especially in Shenzhen, there is a degree of local government autonomy rare in much of urban China. This gives rise to flexibility in hukou, so that Shenzhen’s government has been able to grant certificates of residency that amount to a quasi-​legal urban hukou for many rural-​hukou residents (Florence 2017). The villages, while varying in the capacity for implementation of planning or governance initiatives in them, also contain governance units with effective opportunities for action, in the form of village development committees or holding companies. Some are just meant to serve as tools for state actions, such as in Shin’s (2014) case study of Enning Road in Guangzhou, where the old village area was slated to be demolished. Many village committees have more effectively organized villages for collective development action; even in Enning Road, sustained residents’ resistance slightly reduced the scope of demolitions and displacements (Shin 2014: 279; Zhang and Li 2016). Often, the process has resulted in the development of mid-​rise and high-​rise apartment buildings on the formerly single-​story village houses, as the examples of Hubei and Gangxia above demonstrated. In some cases, officials cite claims of extraordinary wealth flowing to village development committees. This is occasionally the case  –​ Gangxia’s migrant residents say that the original villagers have become greedy landlords, and the village holding company members of Dachong village, demolished for an upscale mall and condominium

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development, made considerable profits from apartments in the new buildings that they were given as compensation. Such tales are often used as a way of claiming that all villagers and new residents are benefiting. In reality, many villagers have seen few gains from the process, and few possess the sorts of skills needed in the new economies that replace their villages: once their profits from compensation are spent, or sometimes well before this, they move to Shenzhen’s cheaper margins. Migrant residents gain even less. They move to urban villages in the first place because these are the cheapest housing options they have in an expensive city, and village upgrading consistently forces them out to the margins, too. Inequalities long seen in chengzhongcun also began to rise in edge and suburban villages as the processes repeat themselves there (Zhang, Ye and Chen 2016). In Xiaohong and Schoon’s (2014) case study of Guangzhou’s Liede village, the villagers leading its joint stock company held the upper hand, but ordinary residents worked hard to participate in decision making during the redevelopment. There is a high degree of heterogeneity in capacity for negotiating powerful roles –​and the incoming migrants have even less power or capacity than lower-​status villagers (Wiethoff 2014; Zhu 2015). Still, there are numerous examples throughout the PRD of attempts at more participatory planning of village urbanization dynamics, variations on what Zhiqiang (2014: 221) refers to as ‘gaming’ the decision-​making process. A few smaller urban villages stabilized by developing a peculiar economic niche, such as Dafen, the ‘Oil Painting Village’ of northern Shenzhen (Wong 2017). In others, wholesale demolition has taken place or is slated for the future. In Hubei, the community maintained just over half of its neighborhood of single-​story, closely built humble homes in the shadow of a new shopping district. The local government long slated Hubei for complete demolition. Efforts to showcase the vibrancy of chengzhongcun –​in part by having villages host the 2015 and 2017 Shenzhen architectural bienniales –​helped local planners and activists to navigate toward a plan approved in 2017 that aimed to preserve approximately one fourth of the original residential space of the village (Fu 2017). By 2019, Hubei once again appeared slated for full removal. Local government and developers in the PRD, along with the local media, use the poor physical conditions of villages and their alleged association with informal, unsavory, or even illegal activities as discursive tactics to push for village demolitions, despite any push-​back (Schoon and Altrock 2014). Perhaps the most interesting example of this for this book is in Guangzhou, where the chengzhongcun of Xiaobei,

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derided in the local press as ‘Chocolate City’ for its considerable African population, faced intense pressure for redevelopment (Li, Ma and Xue 2009; Su 2016). And in the PRD, the forces for demolition and redevelopment allied with and often led by the state, eventually win almost all battles over chengzhongcun, which then leads to the further growth of chengbiancun and chengwaicun. It may be that the mindset of the powerful is adjusting to the idea of retaining some urban villages, possibly as an outcome of the recent biennales. And there is variation between the diverse urban contexts of the PRD in terms of the sense of belonging or the capacity for organizing by neighborhood (Feng, Breitung and Zhua 2014; Forrest and Yip 2007). But for most residents in the urban villages of all sorts, the belief is that whatever the state wants will happen, because, as one resident put it (anonymously), ‘they have the guns’. On the surface, Thiaroye and Pikine/​Dakar present something very different in governance terms. First, the framework for governance is built around a lively multi-​party democratic system, rather than China’s single-​party Communist system (even if there is a more freewheeling version of that system in the PRD). Since the 1998 reorganization of local government, Pikine is a city of its own in the Dakar Region, divided into three arrondissements, Dagoudane, Niayes, and Thiaroye. Below this are 16 communes d’arrondissements, five of which are in Thiaroye. Each commune has a chef de quartier. But there are elements of confusion and varying degrees of incapacity for this structure. For example, the chef de quartier of Thiaroye Gare in 2013 was at pains to point out that he considered himself a chef de village, thereby both naming Thiaroye’s pre-​1998 designation as a village and citing his long connection to that village. Yet whether it is in quartiers or villages, collective action has a strong foothold in Dakar and Pikine politics and governance (Brown 2015; Fredericks 2014 and 2018) (Figure 2.7). The local state is strangely both more responsive and sensitive to Thiaroye’s ordinary people than the local governments of the PRD in meeting people’s needs in urban and edge villages, and less capable, largely because of a major lack of resources. While a new toll road was built through Thiaroye without compensation to residents of the 60 or so houses that were demolished (Figure 2.8), the community suffers from near-​annual disastrous flooding, an absence of solid waste management, chronic shortages for electricity and water, a severe environmental health crisis, and haphazard construction. Yet it is, as its chef de village put it in 2013, ‘the heart of Pikine’. Its largely informal market is one of the largest in Senegal. Politicians, local officials and mosque leaders share with ordinary people a sense of pride in Thiaroye for

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Figure 2.7 Street scene, Pikine, Dakar

Source: Author.

its welcoming, cosmopolitan character balanced with Lebou village traditions. While a form of gentrification has certainly established a foothold (in the commune d’arrondissement of Thiaroye sur Mer), it is hard to imagine Thiaroye becoming like Hubei or Gangxia. It might have more in common with Dafen, the Oil Painting ‘bohemian’ village (Wong 2017), as its artists and musicians, such as those based at the artists’ cooperative, Africulturban, become genuine engines for the

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Figure 2.8 Abandoned houses, Pikine, Dakar

Source: Author.

populist development of many Pikine neighborhoods like Thiaroye (Mbaye 2014). There is also much that is parallel to Zhiqiang’s (2014) notion of residents’ ‘gaming’ the dynamics. In Zanzibar, the local government structures lie somewhere in between the more controlled hierarchy of the PRD and the more open democracy of Dakar. I return to this context again in Chapter 5 for the case of direct ties in urban planning and neighborhood development, given Chinese urban projects in Zanzibar from the city’s 1982 Master Plan to the program for infrastructure and neighborhood redevelopment in the 2010s. But the politics internal to Zanzibar itself have a relationship to the PRD case on their own outside of these direct ties. Since 1995, Zanzibar has had a multi-​party system, but the ruling Revolutionary Party has manipulated all five national elections to stay in power, while bleeding away the powers intended for elected local government into central government-​appointed units (Myers 2016). Zanzibar’s 2000 restructuring of local government reintroduced a colonial-​era local government representative, called a sheha, as an appointment from the central government working under the appointed district officer. But the inspiration for this new institution clearly lay in attempting to retain some flavor of one crucial dimension of urban management under single-​party rule built from the Chinese Communist Party example of the ten-​house cell leader, known in Swahili as the balozi (ambassador) to those ten houses. Masheha (pl.), like

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mabalozi (pl.) before them, have been principal agents of the continued chaotic urbanization of West District, particularly in Fuoni and other edge communities. The edge villages of West District, along the line of the official boundary with the municipal government, had by the late 1990s earned the local nickname the Gaza Strip, as a hotbed of sometimes violent opposition to the Revolutionary Party. In 2012, the government of Zanzibar sub-​divided West District into an A and a B, but its efforts to provide services in either District West A  or West B have been meager in every sector other than road-​building, just like the case of Thiaroye (Myers 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2016). In 2016 and 2017, Fuoni witnessed the widening of its main road, replete with the only partially compensated demolition of its small businesses, and the paving of many of its side streets. It lacks other basic services, but widening the main road greatly enhanced the central route to Zanzibar’s southern and central east coast tourism zone and provided an aesthetic mask for tourists over the conditions inside neighborhoods like Fuoni. That the Revolutionary Party remains modeled on the Chinese Communist Party is clearly reflected in its similar lack of allowance for oppositional voices in planning processes in edge villages. Yet even here there are pathways for the expression of non-​compliance, such as in what I have discussed elsewhere as spatial discourses of fitina (discord) (Myers 2016). For instance, in Fuoni and other parts of both West A and West B districts, one often finds deeper in the alleyways the light blue-​white-​and-​red banners and insignia of the opposition Civic United Front (CUF) hanging, tattered, years after an election campaign.

Can this idea be taken elsewhere? Nearly everywhere in the rapidly urbanizing portions of the global South in the early 21st century one can see places that look like villages in the city, on its edge, or in its suburbs. The variations are extensive within these patterns, but within other urbanisms of the global South, the Chinese concepts can similarly be of relevance in developing comparisons of the morphologies of urbanization. Port of Spain, Trinidad, discussed at length in the next chapter, may not be a rapidly growing metropolis like the other urban areas in this chapter. Yet it contains within it comparable versions of chengzhongcun, chengwaicun, and chengbiancun. The most prominent urban village of Port of Spain is known as the African Village or the Yoruba Village. Its origins lie in the formerly enslaved community of Yoruba and other West Africans who maintained their language and many religious and customary

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practices from Nigeria and Benin –​including the irregularly clustered, low-​density pattern of village settlement still evident in portions of Belmont and Laventille today, and calypso songs sung in Yoruba. It is among the poorest and most disadvantaged parts of the metro area in the 21st century (Cummings 2004; Gift and Kiteme 2013). The extended metropolitan region of Port of Spain is, in a sense, comprised almost entirely of villages-​in-​the-​suburbs that are in a constant state of becoming city. From Port of Spain to east to Arima, or west to Chaguaramas, or south to Couva, only municipal governance boundaries on a map would determine that one is in some local jurisdiction other than Port of Spain. Many of these other segments of metro Port of Spain could be considered chengbiancun or chengwaicun. For example, there is the ‘village’ of Sea Lots that straddles the eastern boundary of Port of Spain, hemmed in on three sides by an industrial zone (the fourth side is the sea). Its fate over several decades has resembled exactly that of the urban villages of the PRD, as the discourse of its unclean, crime-​r idden, and poverty-​stricken character in the Trinidadian public mirrors conversations about urban villages in the PRD. There is a comfortable sense of ‘heterogeneous conjunctive symbiosis’ present linking places like this across a great many 21st-​century Southern urbanisms. In San Juan, there are ‘villages’ that run parallel to the Port of Spain examples. Perhaps the most obvious is La Perla, a small informal settlement adjacent to the colonial-​era tourist attractions of Old San Juan. Its origins lie in the fact that it was the land around a slaughterhouse, next to a cemetery –​two land uses that Spanish colonialism did not permit within the walls of the city of San Juan. Therefore, La Perla, cut off from the municipality geographically, became a space of exception (Caldieron 2013). It has endured despite multiple efforts to demolish it over the last half-​century. But its residents take tremendous pride in the de facto ‘village’ in the city, and it is sometimes cited for its appeal to tourists given its unique and colorful architecture as well as its lively conviviality: ‘wandering through the winding and only partially paved streets, one feels he or she is in a village rather than in the heart of Puerto Rico’s largest urban agglomeration’ (Urban 2015: 495–​6). Yet it is directly adjacent to the rapidly transforming and gentrifying touristic ‘village’ of Old San Juan, where ordinary Puerto Ricans have been steadily priced out of residing. When we turn further into the global North, is there any comparability? The 2017 Biennale in Shenzhen made space for comparing PRD urban villages with Manhattan’s West Village, but some of that exhibit segment was more tongue-​in-​cheek than a serious effort to place the Chinese pattern into motion in New York experimentally.

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What happens if one takes Hartford, and experiments with the Chinese terms? Hartford is clearly in decline demographically and has been for this exact period in which Shenzhen and the PRD have exploded in population. But one can still discern variations on the southern Chinese sorts of ‘urban villages’. In greater Hartford, we might see a process that looks somewhat like the European process of ‘slowly secreted urban reality’. Even here, though, there are processes that distinguish the narrative from the European one. The most notable chengzhongcun of Hartford itself, the pre-​existing village-​in-​the-​city of Suckiaug, was, as discussed in Chapter 1, wiped from the map between 1636 and 1671 as English settlers usurped Wangunk farms. Algonquian settlements in the rest of today’s MSA were removed in similar fashion, even if a few lasted for a century or so, and tiny reservations still dot the Connecticut map. While there is therefore nothing left in Hartford to truly match the indigenous villages of the PRD, several of inner-​city Hartford’s neighborhoods are dominated by migrant communities living in dense apartment buildings in poor conditions. While their roads are wider and mostly grid-​like, neighborhoods like Upper Albany and Frog Hollow exhibit strong ties with African-​America, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, respectively. The street life and everyday worlds of Albany Avenue and Park Street, the main thoroughfares of these two neighborhoods, have much in common with ‘drifting’ settings in PRD villages like Gangxia or Hubei. That Frog Hollow’s Puerto Rican community contains many residents who have twice been relocated from urban renewal demolitions during the same timeframe of urban village demolitions in the PRD adds further to the comparability. These two urban villages of Hartford, the North End and South End of Chapter 1, manifest a pattern common to Black and Brown city communities in the US. Hunter and Robinson (2018) argue for the ‘village’ as the ‘fundamental unit or nucleus for chocolate cities or Black geographies’ and ‘a metaphor and evidence for the enduring practice and importance of place making for marginalized and oppressed citizens’ (Hunter and Robinson 2018: 59). This claim is evidenced in multiple interviews and conversations with Hartford’s African-​American, West Indian, and Puerto Rican residents over many years, interviews with me and with others. Butch Lewis (2000), a former Hartford Black Panther Party leader, in an interview with Trinity College’s Hartford Studies Project, explained his concern for the social breakdown he saw in his beloved North End of Hartford like this: ‘we’re in a world now where people don’t know who live next door to him or across the street… That breaks the village now.

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The village has to come back and rise up again, so we know who our neighbors are’ (Lewis 2000). Edwin Vargas, Jr. (2000), a longtime leftist political leader in the Puerto Rican South End, explained to the interviewer in that same oral history project the value of the ‘real brotherhood in the community’ that was only broken apart by ‘the gang wars that occurred in the [19]90s. That was the final wedge that separated the Puerto Rican middle class from the people living in the inner-​city neighborhoods.’ Built around the cafes, community centers and homes of activists like Lewis, Vargas, Maria Sanchez, Edna Negron Rosario, Dollie McLean, Veronica Airey-​Wilson, Yolanda Allen, Barbara Lindo, Olga Alfaro Mele, Alejandro La Luz, Juan Kimball, or Jose Cruzvazquez, these fluid communities have manifested the ‘political imagining and reimagining of the village as the site of past, present, and future resistance’ (Hunter and Robinson 2018:  88). Jamaica-​born Hartford resident Monique Daley (2018) saw the West Indian community as ‘one large family’. Sasha Allen-​ Walton (2018) recalled how safe she felt walking with her mates in the North End even in the height of drug-​fueled gang violence because of the esteem in which her father and mother, founders and owners of the Northend Agent’s African-​American newspaper, were held in the ‘village’. None of these people idealized the village, and all made references in one form or another to what one called the ‘tribal politics’ pitting the North End against the South End –​against one another, or dividing up communities within the two ends. But these villages viscerally represent examples of the ‘purposely created set of places, cultures and resistive practices that help forge bonds that are able to be sustained across space and time’ as a means for people of color to endure in White America (Hunter and Robinson 2018: 79). These chenzhongcun may not have the spatial patterns of the Chinese examples, but there are certainly parallels in social patterns. One might extend the comparison and application of the villages-​ in-​the-​city Chinese concepts to one other Connecticut context. While there exists an important 19th-​century legacy of southern Chinese migration to Hartford, and the late-​20th and early 21st century has witnessed an increase of Chinese settlement in the Hartford area, arguably the most vital Asian presence on the urban landscape of Connecticut lies just east of the Hartford MSA, next to and inside the Mohegan and Pequot casinos. The labor force of both casinos is estimated to be nearly 25 percent Chinese, and as many as 30 percent of the customer base is Asian (overwhelmingly Chinese). Architect Stephen Fan (2014) studied the transformation of this area in his exhibition, Casino Sub-​Urbanisms, which he extended, with collaborators,

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into the book, Sub-​urbanisms: casino urbanization, Chinatowns, and the contested American landscape. Fan (2014) turned his attention to both the subtle and the extraordinary architectural transformations of the urbanism surrounding Mohegan Sun as Chinese casino workers and their families established residency. The classic American suburban front lawns became vegetable gardens, with two trees planted on either side of the walkway to adhere to feng-​shui energy principles. Single-​family raised-​ranch homes became multi-​family and even communalized structures with a multitude of adjustments like shared kitchens, clothes-​drying spaces, and flexible or rotational uses of interior spaces. Fan argues that these principles of adaptive reuse demonstrate the flexibility and resilience of Chinese immigrant communities: ‘freed of normative American uses tied to such spaces, their lifestyles complicate any simplistic understanding of environmental determinism between physical forms and cultural norms’ (Fan 2014: 69). The urban edges of Mohegan Uncasville are becoming Chinese villages-​in-​the-​city.

Conclusion Globalization in cities, the globalizing of urban areas or regions, and the planetarization of the urban are all themes that have preoccupied urbanists over the last four decades. These largely global North-​driven discussions have been fairly late in coming around to urban Africa, and, when the attention does come, it is not generally seeking to build from existing African scholarship or Southern analyses or frameworks, instead attempting to fit them into Northern frameworks. One way to address urban theory’s enduring problems with Africa or the global South more broadly is to build South–​South comparisons that utilize concepts or frameworks designed for explaining Southern urbanization. The highly comparable rapid urbanization processes for previously rural village land on the edges of cities provide one empirical context for testing this premise. In these villages on the edge, one sees planetary histories and futures. The processes have great variability and fluidity within and between the settings of this chapter, but there is much to compare –​so much that, in fact, this example merely scratched the surface. For instance, while there is no hukou registration system for Senegal or Tanzania, new migrants to Pikine or West District find themselves similarly situated in a divided landscape of insiders and outsiders with varied capacities for belonging. Land development has resulted in notably different urbanizing forms, yet through comparably complex pathways

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that involve variations on limited capacity for local participation and gain from ‘gaming’ the mixed and corrupted systems. One might counter my examples by saying they are just variegated cases of the ‘extended urbanization’ of Brenner and Schmid’s (2015) theses on ‘planetary urbanization’. But the paths of these ‘extensions’ are markedly distinct in China, Senegal, or Tanzania, respectively, and from global North cases. It is precisely toward thick description of the difference that scholars must turn, especially if critics of postcolonial or Southern urban studies continue to speak of an absence of evidence or vagueness of concepts. The ordinary cities that are still too often ‘off the map’ are telling stories that should change the narrative. After all, if the narrative is about the urbanization of the planet, that is a narrative which, in the 21st century, clearly belongs to China and to sub-​Saharan African countries like Senegal and Tanzania with rates of urbanization that have topped the world for many consecutive decades now. In thinking with these urban elsewheres, putting the three village-​in-​ the-​city concepts to work in African cities, I have certainly stretched the concepts. I have attempted to do so while mindful of Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ and its aim of non-​hierarchical, mutually respectful comparison that rejects universality and makes productive use of particularities in the differences (Glissant 1997; see also DeLoughrey and Handley 2011; Rosemberg 2016). Obviously, there is much more that could be discussed regarding the potential comparability of these neighborhoods –​let alone the comparability of all three of the PRD types. The point is, again, that in fact there are so many realms of comparability. One might just as well start the story from the African settings and use conceptualizations of urbanization from Senegal or Zanzibar to see how they might help to explain urbanization in the PRD. There is even enough comparability in other urbanisms of this book to warrant further exploration of whether these patterns provide a basis for comprehending the multiplicity of ‘make+shift’ planetary urbanization in the 21st century. Cowan’s (2018: 3) work on urban villages in India suggests even further possible starting places for comparisons of the ‘uneven articulation of multiple, unequal logics of land, territory and value’ in these places. Postcolonial and Southern urban studies are now incredibly varied realms of thought, rife with myriad approaches. One of the few ideas one might see in some form across all the variations would be the notion that urbanists, in Glissant’s (1996: 136) terms, ‘must abandon the universal’. For Glissant, that meant attempting to navigate between ‘the particularity of place… and totality’ (Wiedorn 2018: 129). In this chapter, the ‘spiral retelling’ started from the ‘place’ of urban villages

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in the PRD, moving outward to the two cases from Africa, and then spiraling still farther to places with seemingly much different urbanization patterns, to see elements of comparability amid the rich details of distinction. At the same time, Glissant was fond of repeating and retelling perhaps his most central conceptual claim: that, in Wiedorn’s (2018: 117) translation, ‘the entire world is creolizing and becoming an archipelago’. This is the cartographic logic behind this book’s map. What the patterns in villages in the cities of this chapter show is an interplay between particularities and infinite varieties for postcolonial Southern urbanism, creolized morphologies connected to one another and apart at the same time, cities in a sea of cities, most with colonial wounds.

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The Useful and Ornamental Landscapes of British (Post)colonialism Introduction In 1927 and 1949, botanist Robert Orchard Williams produced compilations on the plants of two island colonies of Britain. In The useful and ornamental plants of Trinidad & Tobago and The useful and ornamental plants of Zanzibar & Pemba, Williams provided brief entries on these colonies’ botanical wealth. These books were encyclopedic tomes whose intentions were scientific and somewhat innocuous. This chapter subjects the broader colonial context of urban landscape-​ making around them to a critical reading. The concentration lies with the actual work of landscape-​making in the colonial regimes from the 1920s through the 1950s, shaping nature in urban Trinidad and Zanzibar in the interest of British colonial rule. British colonialism’s urban parks and gardens in both settings are the focus. This includes the botanical gardens that Williams oversaw in both colonies, and the roles these played in using space to shape colonial society. The chapter then travels through alternative landscapes and urban environments produced by the colonized peoples in both places, including into the post-​colonial era. As one looks at the relation of cities to one another in this era, one certainly sees the roles of colonialism in producing urban space and nature in its interests in many parts of the global South. A wide variety of colonialisms impacted the urban landscapes of the global South, including the ‘corporate colonialism’ of companies like United Fruit Company in the Caribbean and Central America (Martin 2018). Regardless of this variation, nearly everywhere

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one also sees that ordinary residents reframed and reconfigured these landscapes into something different. Where colonial mindsets endured into the post-​colonial period, they nevertheless were refracted into different urban environmental politics and urban cultures of nature. In both settings, the postcolonial urbanism is ‘thoroughly hybrid, [and] thoroughly corrupted’, and postcolonialism can be both ‘an urban condition’ and a ‘deconstructive methodology’ (Roy 2011b: 308). The post-​colonial stories of urban nature in Trinidad and Zanzibar offer another manifestation of the ‘heterogeneous conjunctive symbiosis’ discussed in the previous chapter for Southern urbanism in the 21st century: divergent urban contexts grow, together, into postcolonial landscapes where the ‘particular’ and the myriad variety of particularities appear (Glissant 2009). Robert Orchard Williams (commonly known as RO) embodied the colonial urban environmental project in the two colonies and can be a foil for reflecting on the colonial legacy’s different refractions in these two post-​colonial settings. Williams served as Curator and Director of the Royal Botanical Garden in Port of Spain, and later as Director of Agriculture for Trinidad and then Zanzibar, where he concluded his career with 11 years managing the quasi-​private Clove Growers Association  –​during an era when clove-​g rowing and processing comprised most of the value of Zanzibar’s economy (Ferguson 1991). The focus on parks and gardens underscores the roles that Trinidad and Zanzibar played as key nodes in the politically inspired reshaping of plant geographies across the British empire in tropical colonial cities and towns, especially those in smaller island colonies, during Williams’s career. The chapter examines central natural spaces in the two urban areas under colonialism –​for Port of Spain, the Queen’s Park Savannah and the Royal Botanic Garden, and, for Zanzibar, Mnazimmoja Park and Migombani Botanical Gardens –​and their post-​colonial trajectories. I expand beyond this to the alternative landscapes of these two urban areas in the post-​colonial era. The goals are: to illuminate the ways in which imperialism and colonialism structured the botany of cities, especially in parks and gardens, where plants and ideas about plants were held in common and considered to have socio-​political power; but also to show the agency of ordinary people in changing this environmental–​spatial structure over time. Through this, one sees the making of heterogeneous yet conjunctive postcolonial cityscapes around the world where the British ruled, a physical manifestation of Glissant’s frequent claim that the world is ‘creolizing and becoming an archipelago’ at the same time (Wiedorn 2018: 117).

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Postcolonial urbanism Postcolonialism is sometimes dismissed these days as ‘somewhat passé’ since ‘we no longer live in an age of empires and nor can we bask in the celebratory, grand narratives of decolonization’ (Singh 2017: 2). However, some of that churning discomfort with postcolonialism seems passé. Rather than revisiting a rather vast body of work, a more helpful approach may reside in coming up with new ways to make comparisons across what remains a post-​colonial world, to help construct ‘productively postcolonial spatial narratives’ (Jacobs 1996: 15). Exploring the postcolonial elements embedded in discourses of planetarity and indigeneity in contemporary urban studies can be vital to invigorating the debates –​especially because it is unquestionable that, when one approaches urban studies from the global South, it is still hard to miss colonialism’s legacies and aftermaths. Postcolonial urban studies provides means for seeing, in marginalized spaces, ‘how subordinated social groups oppose… the vision’ of urbanism provided by colonial mindsets, but also how they ‘take up’ that vision (Roy 2011b: 312). That spectrum is apparent in Trinidad and Zanzibar. My approach is again undergirded by Glissant’s postcolonial vision. Glissant, like Fanon, was a student of the poet, Aime Cesaire, and he was himself a poet, making his work perhaps more difficult to access for postcolonial urban studies in a social-​science vein. He went so far as to claim ‘a right to opacity’ and ‘thinking that prefers indecision’ (Rosemberg 2016: 322). Yet he had strong emphases on space, place, and landscape in his works, and his means of constructing comparisons aimed to decolonize the approach (DeLoughrey 2004, 2019; McKittrick 2006). For Glissant, comparativism would make use of thick descriptions of particularities in the global South by testing their relation to one another. In Glissant’s (1989: 98) vision, comparison celebrates ‘diversity… without universalist transcendence’, where postcolonial societies exist ‘no longer as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention of creating a new relationship’. Glissant (1990) resists the colonisers’ determination to subsume the ‘roots’ of other peoples beyond the global North or the West under the ‘mono-​root’ of Western thinking. Of course, resisting a ‘mono-​root’ must include recognition that Africa and the Caribbean experienced deep, diverse, and complex colonialisms. Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Danish, and US colonial rule flowed through the Caribbean Sea from the late 15th century until the present, and every island, along with each portion of the ‘rim’ of the mainland Americas bordering the sea, offers distinct narratives of

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colonial history and urban impacts (Mintz and Price 1985; West and Augelli 1966). British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Spanish, German, Italian, and Dutch colonial rule produced similar distinctions across Africa. Glissant is a useful guide here as well, since many of his essays discussed the struggle for overcoming diverse colonial legacies, the work of forging Caribbean and Black/​pan-​African unity, and the challenge of situating the Caribbean within the Americas. Glissant also provides a means for analysing both subaltern resistance to and embrace of colonial urbanity. A  central theme upon which he fixated in his work was Martinique’s 1946 ‘departmentalization’, through which the island became a Department of France, rather than a colony or independent state. While ‘other colonies’ set ‘out on the tough journey towards national identity and independence’, Martinique missed this opportunity and many of its people embraced the ‘inevitability’ of a ‘passive consumerism’ in the ‘mixing of… a “French background” and “local particularities” ’ (Glissant 1989: 88). The sensitivity to landscape and to the complex and nuanced range of local responses to both colonialism and postcolonialism makes Glissant’s work a valuable guide. Glissant (2010:  145–​6) also points to how ordinary African and Caribbean peoples remade colonized landscapes through everyday life –​as in this vital passage about Ibadan, Nigeria from Poetic intention: It was in Ibadan, Nigeria, that I discovered and experienced what is referred to as the force of a people. That city… extends over an infinity of little houses or cabins whose agglomeration finds its meaning in the full of the night. Then the light of street stalls, the music, the tumult, and the very odors populate and install it in a familiar electricity. City of alleys and shanties, of dim lights and smoke… A city without monuments but where perfection crackles in the presence of the world. In a manner instantly recognizable from Port of Spain to Zanzibar –​a ‘familiar electricity’ –​one sees how the ‘force of the people’ works to overcome and remake the colonial order, or to embrace it and make it belong to the tumult. This ‘force of the people’ is an electric and elastic element in the decolonization of urban landscapes. In Trinidad and Zanzibar, because both the botanical and human–​cultural landscapes were and are produced hybrids, the character of connection between nature and culture was and is manufactured in odd patterns. For Trinidad and Zanzibar, ‘landscape is its own monument: its meaning

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can only be traced on the underside’ (Glissant 1992: 11). Glissant thus ‘encourage[d]‌Caribbean writers to re-​establish the dialectic between landscape and history, and between culture and the natural world’ (DeLoughrey 2004:  299). Both Trinidadian and Zanzibari writers and ordinary urban residents struggle to re-​establish that dialectic, and parks, gardens, and urban nature offer prime real estate for that struggle.

Comparing Trinidad and Zanzibar The comparability of Trinidad & Tobago with Zanzibar & Pemba is obvious. Both countries consist of two islands, one larger, one smaller, one more densely populated, urban, and industrial, the other less densely populated, more rural, and agricultural. Both countries have complex ethnic and religious politics that combine Asian and African heritages, albeit with different proportional compositions for race, ethnicity, and religion. Both share a British colonial past, where Britain’s ascendance followed Iberian colonial rule (Spain in Trinidad, Portugal in Zanzibar) and periods of French and German influence. The contemporary population sizes are nearly identical. Both northern, rural islands (Pemba and Tobago) struggle with connectivity to the larger islands. Glissant (2010: 205) said of Trinidad that it ‘seems to anchor the continent’, and to leave Caribbean peoples dreaming ‘of the South that it is in us’. The oft-​repeated 19th-​century claim that ‘when they play the pipes in Zanzibar, they dance at the [African Great] lakes’ reverberated into the 20th and 21st century. The urban areas are fascinating to compare. The two main islands, Unguja (also called Zanzibar) and Trinidad, share a similar urban population, proportionally. Even though it is distributed differently through the respective urban hierarchies, in both settings in practice it is realistic to see all urban settlements of the main islands as part of one urban area. Port of Spain as a city on its own declined dramatically in population, from over 100,000 in 1942 to 37,074 in the 2011 census, accompanied by dramatic growth in the smaller municipalities around it –​partly the result of redrawing municipal boundaries (Pantin 2016: 62; Stuempfle 2018: 249). The neighboring municipalities of San Juan-​Laventille (157,258), Tunapuna-​Piarco (215,119), and Diego Martin (102,375) –​all thoroughly urbanized –​were far larger in population in 2011 than the capital city. By also including the adjacent Chaguanas (83,516), Couva (178,410), and Arima (33,606) municipalities as part of one contiguous metropolitan area around Port of Spain, one might easily say that the urbanism most outsiders call ‘Port of Spain’ holds more than 800,000 people. This greater Port of

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Spain contains more than half of Trinidad and Tobago’s population of 1.37 million. Princes Town, San Fernando, Penal, Point Fortin, and Sangre Grande urban municipalities, though farther out from Port of Spain, are nonetheless linked to Port of Spain by the daily movements of ordinary people: most people on Trinidad island reside in one urban zone, with two intersecting axes. This is comparable to Zanzibar. The city’s historic core, Stone Town, which the British colonial regime considered the Town of Zanzibar until the late 1940s, has also declined in population over the last century, with the growth of its suburbs. Scarcely 12,000 people lived in Stone Town in the 2012 census –​less than half of the colonial-​era population, less than 6 percent of the Urban District/​Zanzibar Municipality population (223,033) and about 2 percent of the metro area. As discussed in Chapter 2, suburban West District in 2012 had 370,645 people, leading Zanzibar’s government to sub-​divide it into two districts (West A and B) in 2015. Some 501,459 of the 593,678 people in the now three municipalities that comprise Zanzibar Urban-​West Region were classified as ‘urban’ residents in the 2012 census, which counted 1.3 million people in all of Zanzibar. Urban growth has also leapt the boundary of Urban West-​Region. By 2011, eight Central District enumeration areas contained more than 25,000 residents combined whose lives were completely integrated with the larger urbanism. Road construction across the island since 2000 to accommodate the growth of tourism has integrated formerly far-​flung towns into the urban world of Zanzibar; it is easy to think of the whole island as part of the metro (Myers 2016). In both urban agglomerations, Port of Spain and Zanzibar, the overwhelming majority of the metropolitan population resides in what were, just 30 years ago, the suburbs; nearly everywhere else in the two respective islands, Trinidad and Unguja, rural–​urban differentiation is increasingly elided by transport, trade, migration, commuting, and communications. Political and botanical landscapes are among the most intriguing avenues of comparability between these two urban places. The colonial era had much in common besides personnel like RO Williams. While Zanzibar was a British protectorate (‘protecting’ the Omani Sultanate of Zanzibar), it was the much smaller fourth partner under the East African High Commission. From the 1920s on, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika were far greater British priorities. Similarly, within the British West Indies, Trinidad trailed Jamaica in the degree of British concern under colonialism, and Port of Spain trailed Kingston in significance (Stuempfle 2018:  356–​8). Trinidadian resistance to and ambivalence over integration into a larger ‘British West Indian’

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Caribbean polity ran high throughout the mid-​20th century (Stuempfle 2018: 274–​5). Both colonies hosted US military stations –​and, after independence, both former colonies experienced socialist revolutions that included political upheaval around these bases. Although the People’s Republic of Zanzibar only lasted from 11 January 1964 revolution until its 26 April 1964 union with Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania, Zanzibar has retained a strong revolutionary socialist gloss to its political culture somewhat akin to the intellectual hangover of leftist authoritarian politics found in Trinidad. Trinidad’s first prime minister after independence, Eric Williams (1962–​81), had a good relationship with the socialist first president of the United Republic of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere (1964–​85), whom he visited in Dar es Salaam in early 1964, weeks prior to the 26 April union with Zanzibar. Although Eric Williams did not visit Zanzibar on his ten-​ country Africa tour, he was taken with the cultural mixture of Asia and Africa he perceived along the Swahili coast, which reminded him of Trinidad (Palmer 2006: 251). Comparable political–​historical landscapes are inseparable from the natural ones. The two ‘useful and ornamental’ books reveal considerable overlap in species composition. RO Williams listed places of origin in the world for 657 plant species in Trinidad and 518 in Zanzibar, and 334 of these are identical. Since some of Williams’s entries make no mention of places of origin, the overlaps may be even greater. Twentieth-​century British colonialism is only directly responsible for a few of these 334 plants being transferred from one setting directly to the other. But European imperialism generally accounts for most of the plants exchanged, especially for those of significant commercial or prominent ornamental uses. For the ‘useful’ side, RO Williams’s concentration on cocoa, limes, other citrus, and tree crops in his Caribbean career became central to his life in Zanzibar; on the ornamental side, the most obvious transfer from Port of Spain to Zanzibar town appears in the saman trees (Pithecellobium saman) that Zanzibaris ironically call Mitiulaya (‘European trees’), which still line prominent avenues in both urban areas –​despite Williams’s personal dislike of them as avenue trees (Zanzibar National Archives file AK 7/​15, 26 April 1948). Colonialism was embedded in the botanical landscape of both urban areas, and there is much to be analyzed in how the post-​colonial urbanisms addressed this legacy. Glissant (1997: 151) anticipated how difficult the recovery of an ‘aesthetics of the earth’ would be after colonialism, wondering how this re-​membering of liberated landscapes would be accomplished ‘in the half-​starved dust of Africa… the mud of flooded Asia… in city sewers’ (see DeLoughrey and Handley

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2011: 28). Trinidad and Zanzibar evidence the postcolonial difficulties that Glissant expected.

The useful and ornamental plants Early in my dissertation fieldwork in Zanzibar in 1991, I was playing football (soccer) on a makeshift pitch on the edge of the informal settlement of Jang’ombe. The pitch had some grass and was reasonably flat, but it had substantial trees around it. Although there was one massive kapok tree on the sideline (Figure  3.1), other trees caught my attention more for the obstacles that they became for my errant passes. It was only later, studying city maps, that I realized I had been playing in what had been, from its foundation in 1870 by John Kirk, Zanzibar’s Migombani Botanical Garden. In the 19th century, Kirk was one of many taxonomists and botanists operating across the British Empire to study, catalog, cultivate, and Figure 3.1 Kapok tree, football pitch, Migombani Botanical Garden, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

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propagate tropical plants that, in one way or another, might be of value. Similar botanical colonizers operated in other European empires around the global South, including ‘corporate–​colonial agricultural explorers’ (Rosengarten 1991). In Kirk’s case, botany was more of a hobby: he was a surgeon and explorer with David Livingstone, Vice-​Consul, Assistant Political Agent, and then Consul-​General for Britain in the Zanzibar Sultanate from 1866 to 1887 (Huzzey 2012). Trinidad was a major node in the ragtag imperial botanical army, but Kirk ensured that Zanzibar was, for a time, included in the Empire’s map of significant biological research centers. From its establishment as a British protectorate in 1890, Zanzibar floated with Trinidad in the Empire’s information currents regarding town planning, parks, and gardens. By the 1930s, those currents increasingly brought the two colonies into the same ‘circular’ flows. As tropical island colonies, Trinidad and Zanzibar long hosted European naturalists’ research and exploration projects (McCracken 1997). Island colonies like Fiji, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Singapore, or Hong Kong ‘offered ideal laboratories to observe changing climatic and ecological conditions’ (Bennett 2015: 35–​6; DeLoughrey 2004). Trinidad’s botanic garden was begun in 1820. Its plants had been catalogued and analyzed for more than a century when Williams compiled the Useful and ornamental plants volume (Salisbury 1987). While the volume of publications for Zanzibar pales in comparison, it was also the site of multiple studies of its flora. Most of the naturalists’ work was funded by and built around imperialist objectives, and most authors were colonial officers. The first word in the title of Williams’s two guides is useful, after all: trees, shrubs, and grasses were useful to colonial regimes when they could produce exploitable resources. As Rita Pemberton (1999:  1) wrote in her study of Trinidad’s Royal Botanic Gardens, ‘colonies were expected to produce the raw materials that the imperial power needed’, and they sought to do so by ‘(1) a constant search for new crops at home and abroad; (2) a sharing of information and exchanges of plants and seeds by botanists across empires, and (3) trials of new plants in the colonies.’ Botanists and naturalists were central to these exploitative tactics toward natural resources. Environmental historians, historical geographers, and scholars of environmental literature have researched the British empire’s links between botany and capitalism extensively. Little of this work has examined the urban parks and gardens of colonial regimes (Home 1997). The political critique of imperial botanists’ work in these studies is formidable, but has its limits (Sunseri 2009). ‘State policy,

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management practices, professional cultures and scientific theories varied greatly’ among the colonial powers, across their colonies, and even within individual colonies (Bennett 2015: 45). Colonial regimes were seldom successful in imposing their will on environments –​there was always resistance, and the weakness and ineffectiveness of many colonial states further diminished successes for exploitative environmental systems. There were also colonized people who did not resist –​indeed, who embraced –​colonialist ideas of landscape, despite the system’s exploitative nature. The creation of colonial-​era urban parks and gardens in British colonial Africa or the British colonial Caribbean was explicitly about control. Paternalism and racism undergirded the work of even those who professed the best intentions for uplifting indigenous and colonized peoples in their efforts to shape urban nature. Although one finds a variety of human beings among colonizers, and colonized peoples had a wide range of reactions to the colonizers, the dominant colonialist mindset matched well with RO Williams.

RO Williams in service to the British Empire Williams was born in West Lulworth, Dorset, England in 1891. He came to Trinidad in 1916, serving there until 1935, mostly in the Botanic Garden. He served a four-​year tour in Palestine before returning to Trinidad in 1939 as Director of Agriculture. After the Second World War, he became Zanzibar’s Director of Agriculture, and he retired from the colonial service there in 1948 to become General Manager of the Clove Growers Association (CGA). He left the CGA in 1957 and retired to apartheid South Africa; he died in Cape Town in 1967, in a home looking onto Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden (Williams 1990). RO Williams was an odd character, but he typified much about the colonial service in smaller British colonies. Like many colonial officers in these territories, frankly, he really did not know what he was doing. With no formal education, advanced training, or substantive family connections, this son of an illiterate lobsterman found himself at Kew Gardens in 1913 as an apprentice; he was spared service in the First World War and left Kew in 1916 as a sub-​foreman, to serve as Curator of Port of Spain’s Royal Botanic Garden (Williams 1990: 14). Despite a subsequent career as a colonial officer in botany and agriculture, Williams’s ‘knowledge of science was not great’, he ‘did not have a broad understanding of the living world and was quite satisfied being a naturalist and observer in a narrow field’ (Williams 1990: 17). His

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son’s blunt biography claimed that RO was ‘not a deep thinker’ and his intellect was ‘somewhat shallow’ (Williams 1990:  19). The son claimed that ‘politics hardly entered into his [father’s] life’, yet that RO was ‘definitely not pro-​Labour and always anticommunist… an utterly loyal monarchist and intensely patriotic’ (Williams 1990: 17). He was a ‘prudish Victorian’ with racist views against mixed marriage (Williams 1990: 18). Williams brought this manner of thinking into his work. He had an abiding interest in school gardens, publishing the first edition of his guide to School gardens in the tropics in Trinidad in 1925, based on lectures he had given to primary school teachers. The second edition came in 1933, and the third in 1949, with material from Zanzibar. Most of that book is concerned with practicalities of design and management for school gardens, and the food crops and ornamental plants most suitable to them in the tropics. But his thinking on the purposes of school gardens also tells much about how he felt plants could be ‘useful’ beyond their economic potential as natural resources. ‘A properly organized garden under the control of a teacher’, he wrote, ‘offers boundless opportunity for developing (a)  the minds of children by observation and experiment; (2) their bodies by useful practical work and healthy outdoor exercises; (3) their wills to work with others, and to be unselfish, painstaking and tidy in thought and deed’ (Williams 1949a: 11). Gardens would teach children ‘methods for improving crop production’, but also help them ‘in later life when they have homes of their own’ to keep things in order (Williams 1949a: 11). They should ‘be encouraged to look forward to their work’ in the garden, which should be ‘an outstanding example in its neighborhood’ (Williams 1949a: 12). There is much here to suggest that to Williams the role of school gardens was to train colonized people to be good domestic servants, gardeners, laborers, and imperial subjects. The useful and ornamental plants of Trinidad & Tobago was a ‘major scientific work… [and] RO’s most lasting contribution to the islands’ (Williams 1990: 37), more widely known than its Zanzibari cousin. Its ‘object was to give general information about the plants, whether native or introduced, of interest in Trinidad and Tobago, for their useful or ornamental qualities’. He added various ‘cultural notes’ to other editions (for example Williams and Williams 1951: iii). Plants were categorized by their uses or qualities of beauty (Williams and Williams 1951: 22–​56). Amid the dry scientific cataloguing, Williams’s entries occasionally reveal more, with stories of the ‘discovery’ or introduction process for plants (for example Williams and Williams 1951: 74, on breadfruit).

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Like many in Zanzibar’s colonial service in the postwar era, RO found the place massively over-​supplied with ‘protocol’ and a pervasive ‘atmosphere of formality’ (Williams 1990: 69). He did not work energetically in either of his positions. In the first, Director of Agriculture, he tried to enliven a cocoa plantation project and run the Botanical Garden as a business more than a scientific center. He moved into a government house in a new residential area next to Migombani in the early 1950s as he managed the CGA –​but marketing cloves and clove products for a place that then produced 80 percent of the world supply was hardly challenging. The CGA had intimate relations with the Department of Agriculture and consistently operated ‘in accord with British government policy’ (Bowles 1991: 96). If the CGA had been a truly ‘private company’ its practices ‘would eventually have led to bankruptcy’, but ‘in Zanzibar, this was not allowed to happen’ because of the colonial economy’s heavy reliance on cloves (Bowles 1991: 97). While the Useful and ornamental books document the creolization of these two landscapes, my main interest lies in urban plants and parks, and therein colonialism’s impacts are unmistakable in leaving the towns with very comparable botany. To analyze that aspect, the next segment examines the creation of specific park spaces more thoroughly.

Spaces of colonial nature in Port of Spain and Zanzibar The two most significant parks of Port of Spain, Royal Botanic Garden, and Queen’s Park Savannah, occupy adjacent parcels north of the city center. From its opening in 1820 through Williams’s arrival nearly 100 years later, the Botanic Garden served colonial research interests, but in equal measure its grounds served the symbolic and aesthetic interests of colonial urban society (Mohammed 2008). Government House, the colonial governor’s residence, looked out over the gardens. The planetary scope of its tree collection sent the clear message of Britain’s imperial reach; by 1895, trees, bushes, and flowers from all around the Empire as well as South and Central America had been planted, and a guide for tourists glorified ‘the beauty of the scene’ in the Garden and the view from it of the Queen’s Park Savannah and hills of Laventille and St Ann, with their ‘luxurious tropical verdure’ (Hart 1895: 26). Lady Broome, the wife of Governor F. Napier Broome, put that beauty and luxury in context in 1899: Pages might be written on the scientific value of the beautiful gardens which surround this tropical palace

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[Government House]… The serious business of the gardens is really to make experiments in the growth and cultivation of the various economic products of the island… It is a mistake to regard them from the ornamental point of view, though their beauty is very striking. (cited in Stuempfle 2018: 68) As Stuempfle (2018: 69) writes, ‘Government House clearly asserted authority and grandeur within the Botanic Gardens’, with its observational position overlooking the Savannah and the city. The Savannah District was the heart of colonial Trinidad. The Savannah itself hosted horse-​racing, cricket, football, rugby, hockey, and golf matches from the 1820s on, along with military reviews and parades; it was the landscape that reproduced the colonial power structure. By the time Williams arrived in 1916, the Savannah was surrounded –​besides the Botanic Garden and Government House –​by the most elite residences of Port of Spain and the colony’s central cultural institutions. This was ‘a low-​density residential and recreational area in which there was a premium on order, control, peacefulness and cultivated nature… an alternative to the commotion of downtown’ and a ‘high status’ area for ‘the city’s most prominent inhabitants’ (Stuempfle 2018: 70) (Figure 3.2; Figure 3.3). For his first few years in Trinidad, Williams lived within the Royal Botanic Garden, in what was formerly the curator’s bungalow. It was positioned at the upper corner of the garden, looking down the Emperor Valley toward Port of Spain and the Savannah. Surrounded by impressive trees from around the world, from that vantage point ‘the botanical world of the gardener was comprehensively represented in the Port of Spain garden’ (Williams 1990: 24). Williams delighted in the responsibility the curator had for caring for ‘trees and plants in other public places’, too –​especially the Savannah, which RO’s son described as ‘insulating them from the squalid town and water-​front’; he considered the Savannah the ‘only relieving feature’ of Port of Spain (Williams 1990: 24). In 1782, the Spanish colonial regime granted the Savannah to the Peschier family, French settlers via Grenada, in two parcels –​179 acres to Henry Peschier and 20 acres to his wife, Celeste. Henry Peschier called his portion Paradise, cleared it of forest and planted sugar cane, building a sugar-​processing factory as well as houses for his laborers and family. Things quickly went badly for the Peschiers in ‘Paradise’: two daughters died of yellow fever in 1786, and Henry died in 1791 at age 50, leaving Celeste with seven children to raise on her own. Celeste

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Figure 3.2 Kapok Valley, Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain

Source: Author.

died in 1817, and the heirs sold both parcels to the (by then British colonial) municipality, except for 6,000 square feet for their family’s cemetery (Costelloe 2017; Stuempfle 2018; Williams 1990). RO Williams, Jr (1990: 24) claimed that ‘fortunately the regulations laid down and promises made to the Peschier family had been strong enough to keep [the Savannah] free from urban development’ and that the ‘fashionable residential areas developed around it’ (Williams

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Figure 3.3 Sunset, Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain

Source: Author.

1990:  24). Yet the Savannah is alive in local cultural and spiritual imaginations as the annual carnival venue, the central performative ritual for Trinidadian cultural identity. In Williams’s time, ‘the famous pre-​Lent carnival procession took place on the encircling road’ (Williams 1990: 24), an innocuous rewriting of a tumultuous narrative. Trinidad’s carnival celebrations had had a violent political history when Williams arrived. The colonial era was marked by the steady takeover of carnival by the creative culture of the African-​origin working-​class masses in Belmont, East Dry River, Laventille, and East Port of Spain. Jab jab, jab molassie, cowband, bat and devil mas performances –​the carnival derided by elite Trinidadians and colonial (and early post-​colonial) governments, originating in the ‘dirty, ugly, noisy, threatening and potentially violent’ side of town –​became central to expressions of ‘protest and rebellion against the harsh and unfair conditions which marked [the] daily existence’ of the masses (Matthews 2016: 187–​8). During the interwar years, the colonial regime attempted to manage or eliminate the working-​class carnival by moving it to the controlled space of the Savannah. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, competing variations of carnival occurred in the downtown and the Savannah, but slowly and steadily as the 20th century progressed the popular,

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working-​class, and African elements of carnival became transcendent on the Savannah. The colonial parks of Zanzibar, Migombani Botanical Garden, and Mnazimmoja Park, tell a rather different colonial story. When Migombani was created in the 1870s, the surroundings were rural, lying beyond Ng’ambo, the ‘Other Side’ of Zanzibar Town that was only beginning to expand. Like the rest of Ng’ambo, Migombani’s land in the 1870s consisted of the viunga (literally, the attached things) of town elites, overwhelmingly Omanis. From the 1870s through the 1940s, as Ng’ambo lands became urbanized, land control shifted toward South Asian money-​lenders and businesspeople, or was dedicated as waqf (Islamic inheritance property) upon the death of the Omani owners. Migombani had belonged to a prominent al-​Harthi clan family, Omani rivals to the royal al-​Busaidi family. Even into the 1930s, when the part of Migombani not included in the Botanical Garden had been dedicated as waqf of Aziza binti Salim al-​Harthi, this plantation had 87 clove trees and 313 coconut palms on 17 acres (UK Public Record Office Colonial Office file CO 618/​59/​1, 9 February 1934). The al-​Harthis had ceded the rest of Migombani to Kirk for the Botanical Garden as British influence expanded. By the time Zanzibar became a British protectorate (1890), the Botanical Garden was firmly established, but it steadily declined in scientific significance with the expansion of the colonial agricultural research station farther out of town. By Williams’s arrival, Migombani was surrounded on its northern edge by Ng’ambo’s first planned suburbs, the Holmwood estates. To the west lay the Ziwani police barracks and the as yet undeveloped Kilimani hill. Farms, dairies, and pastures took up the eastern edge, and the sea comprised the southern edge. Thus, in contrast to Trinidad’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Migombani was far from central geographically or politically in the city. It operated largely as a commercial supplier of ornamental plants for expatriate elites and the burgeoning tourism industry in the 1940s. In a 1992 interview, the Director of Zanzibar Municipality’s Parks and Gardens Department, Mohamed Mzee (1992), spoke wistfully of Williams’s tenure overseeing Migombani (he brought out his well-​used copy of The useful and ornamental plants to show me evidence of Williams’s lasting significance). He lamented its 1951 transfer to the Zanzibar Town Council, which never developed the capacity to maintain the Botanical Garden (Zanzibar National Archives file AK 7/​15, 26 April 1948 and 25 October 1948). Mnazimmoja was a more central park for colonial Zanzibar, comparable to Queen’s Park Savannah. Mnazimmoja consists of two large

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segments. What became by the early 20th century the main section was in 1890 the backwaters, literally, of the Pwani Ndogo, the tidal basin and creek separating the Stone Town peninsula –​called Zanzibar Town until the 1960s –​from Ng’ambo, colonialism’s ‘native location’. Further south, a thin sand bar built up over time into a semi-​forested strip of land separating Pwani Ndogo from the Indian Ocean and connecting Stone Town with the island of Unguja. This strip was the first part of Mnazimmoja Park to be developed. James Christie (1876: 275) called this the town’s Bois de Boulogne (Paris’s massive public woodland park). In 1899, the colonial regime began to fill in the southern lagoon of Pwani Ndogo that by the 1870s was used, at low tide, as a picnic area for Town elites and the festival area for Ramadhan’s end (Bissell 2011:  53–​54). In the 1900s, the British developed the portion of the strip not claimed for a Khoja Ismailia cemetery into a golf course, which wrapped around the southeastern corner of Pwani Ndogo. The reclaimed land was opened to the public as Mnazimmoja Recreation Ground in 1915, free for ‘the use and enjoyment of the public forever’ (Zanzibar National Archives file AB 40/​42; Meffert 1991). In combination, these two portions of Mnazimmoja held golf, tennis, squash, cricket, and football matches, along with the Eid al-​ Fitr and Eid al-​Adha celebrations –​on the city’s largest public space throughout the colonial era. Until 1897, many of Ng’ambo’s first residents were enslaved Africans, freed slaves, servants and peasants, mainlanders, or formerly rural peoples from Zanzibar’s Swahili-​speaking indigenous communities (Fair 2001; Myers 1994). Most Stone Town residents in the early protectorate were Arab, South Asian, or European. The European quarter –​designated and developed by the British between 1890 and 1954 –​occupied the southern triangle of Stone Town, in the Vuga neighborhood, adjacent to Mnazimmoja. As the colonial regime made use of and attempted to reproduce and codify into laws the separation of Stone Town and Ng’ambo, they filled in the Pwani Ndogo to make the boundary less liquid (Bissell 2011: 178). A 1913 colonial sanitation report made the park’s political aims explicit: Mnazimmoja ‘should remain an open space and a neutral zone between the European and the native quarter of the town’ (Zanzibar National Archives file AB 2/​ 264: 9). Like the Queen’s Park Savannah, Mnazimmoja and the landscape around it became associated with the colonial era’s elite. By the 1940s, Vuga contained the British Residency, the High Court, the town hospital, the showcase Peace Memorial Museum, and apartments that housed many colonial officials. From 1908, casuarina trees marked both sides of the road separating the golf course from the recreation ground.

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On the semi-​circular border of the park in Ng’ambo’s Kikwajuni neighborhood, a string of middle-​class Swahili, Comorian, and Indian residences were constructed beyond the colonial allée of saman trees. The African-​Swahili Kikwajuni community’s relationship to the golf club became apparent with the formation of its first football club, the Caddies, in the 1920s. A second neighborhood club, the New Kings, came into being later in the 1920s (Fair 2001: 233). Both clubs practiced on segments of the grounds not turned over to the golf course or cricket pitch, and football’s popularity led the colonial regime to add ‘three additional football pitches… adjacent to the makeshift ground at Mnazi Mmoja’ (Fair 2001: 234). Neighborhood women utilized the grounds for practice sessions of popular dance groups. And both men and women used Mnazimmoja for Eid holidays (Bowles 1991). As with the Queen’s Park Savannah, then, Mnazimmoja served as a zone for reproducing the colonial order, even as it became a site for countering that order. Trees and parks along with the urban nature–​landscape more broadly were essential agents in colonial plans for both colonies. But what became of those colonial intentions is quite varied. In part this had to do with the lackadaisical implementation of colonial plans (Bissell 2011). But it also had to do with the varied responses to colonial projects in different colonies. This is well illustrated in the post-​colonial stories of urban parks, gardens, and landscapes.

Alternative landscapes of postcolonial urbanism The demise of colonialism left cities with plants and parks that expressed colonial visions, and post-​colonial states often sought to continue speaking with shaped natural space and living things –​sometimes in a colonialist manner: in Trinidad, it is still the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Queen’s Park Savannah. But the people of Trinidad and Zanzibar found different ways of redeploying plants and parks for different purposes. Both as places of resistance or accommodation, parks and gardens show ‘the ways in which the landscape mitigates the complex process of human transplantation and sedimentation’ in the post-​colonial era (DeLoughrey 2004: 299). In the contemporary Royal Botanic Gardens, a sizeable amount of the space is grassy picnic park land. The city recently built a strip of gazebos to encourage more families to use the park for picnics. Many of the trees are off the paths. The Emperor Valley Zoo has taken another segment of the Botanic Garden, as have the national presidential headquarters above it. Despite the park being dramatically changed from

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Williams’s time as its curator, by comparison to Migombani in Zanzibar this remains a model park for an orderly state, or one that wishes to project such an image. In the Queen’s Park Savannah, the colonial world order seems to remain, beyond just the name –​except during carnival, when it is occupied by spirits of alternative cultural visions. In the neighborhoods that surround the Savannah, alternative landscapes and socio-​natures abound. Greater Port of Spain displays numerous examples of local people rethinking and reshaping the landscape. One prime example exists in the heavily African-​influenced east end of Port of Spain: a ‘rethinking’ of urbanism that represents the long endurance of alternative ways of making urban landscapes in the first place. East Dry River, Laventille, Sea Lots, Belmont, and San Juan were rife with ‘African cultural retentions’ from the early 19th century on (Gift and Kiteme 2013:  95). Many urban dwellers of African origin utilized ‘sou-​sou’ micro-​credit systems in small groups, a retention from Yoruba esusu financial cooperation institutions (Cummings 2004:  63). Part of this narrative is tied to the history of Africans in Trinidad. Almost 40 percent of Trinidad’s African community came from the Bight of Benin and held many cultural elements in common; unlike most Caribbean islands, ‘the majority of enslaved blacks in Trinidad’ at the time of emancipation ‘were born in Africa’ (Gift and Kiteme 2013:  96) and still spoke African languages at emancipation. Yoruba, Igbo, Rada (Beninois), and Mandinke cultural practices endure into the present, notably in music, dance, and spiritual and religious practices (Besson 2011 and 2012; Carr 1989; Stuempfle 2018). So many Yoruba speakers resided in Laventille and East Dry River that the hilly area was collectively known as Yoruba village (Figure 3.4). Belmont, which was known as ‘Freetown’ in the 19th century, had Igbo, Kongo, Mandinke, and Rada communities alongside Black Barbadian migrants (Cummings 2004; Stuempfle 2018: 74). These are the poorest parts of Port of Spain, associated with high crime since the 1870s. Yet there is still a substantial natural environment in these hills, and the West African spiritual and healing practices as well as the musical instruments used in many songs originating in the city’s northeast depend upon specific woods and oils found in the hills –​or plants grown in the barrack-​ yards (Cummings 2004: 61). Ties to Africa today extend from the Afrikan Oils shop down the street from the Queen’s Park Savannah to the Success Laventille Networking Committee with its Ujamaa Newsletter that promotes ‘self-​knowledge, traditional African practices, cultural self-​assurance, and a view of themselves as heroic survivors rather than as victims’ (Gift and Kiteme 2013: 101).

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Figure 3.4 Laventille Hills, Port of Spain

Source: Author.

The colonial regime had banned African drums in the 1920s, r­ educing the direct tie to the appropriation of wood from local trees –​ but this gave rise to the greatest musical gift Trinidad has given the world, the steel pan, invented in the yards of East Port of Spain using old oil barrels (Cozier 2012). Calypso and steel pan music and West African-​inspired masquerade became the heart of Trinidad’s carnival celebrations on the Queen’s Park Savannah, alongside stickfighting rituals (Brereton 2009; Cummings 2004). From the 19th century to the present, the eastside neighborhoods have used these cultural elements –​and, in a tangible sense, the cultural landscape –​‘to convey a political vision, one of resistance to oppression and a refusal to negate the cultural continuities that they were able to create for themselves’ (Gift and Kiteme 2013: 106). ‘Reciprocal relationships’ were essential to Afro-​Trinidadian communities in Port of Spain, their lively usage of plants and parks in stark contrast to the ‘subdued’ business district of today as the downtown elite cleared out the ‘village’ dynamics of the city (Cummings 2004: 177). The hills north of the Botanic Gardens belong to the middle-​and upper-​class suburb of St Ann’s, but are also home to the community afforestation and environmental education organization, Fondes

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Amandes. Led and run largely by women activists, Fondes Amandes seeks to stabilize the hillsides, but also to raise consciousness and the quality of life for poor women in and around the city (Agard 2017; Babb 2017). Theater space and outdoor classrooms are venues for the group’s work, combining pride in Trinidadian connections to nature with a liberatory agenda. Farther from central Port of Spain, there are also alternative landscapes that emerge from a countercultural, decolonized Trinidad, like Wa Samaki (meaning ‘of fish’ in Kiswahili), a permaculture cooperative in Couva, in central Trinidad south of Port of Spain. In Zanzibar, the avenue trees, parks, and gardens of the colonial era have taken on new meanings, both in the revolutionary single-​ party era (1964–​92) and the years since then. The state changed its uses of trees, parks, and gardens; so, too, did ordinary residents. The post-​revolutionary order has brought physical redevelopment and redeployment of the Forodhani Gardens in front of the former Omani Sultan’s Palace and the administrative headquarters of the Protectorate at the Beit al Ajaib (House of Wonders) in the interest of tourism. Yet Forodhani retains, underneath, strong local uses and meanings beyond tourism; it is alive with ordinary people every night, gathering to socialize with friends and family. By contrast, Victoria Garden in the old British enclave of Vuga, where the colonial Legislative Council once met, never returned to the position of political centrality colonialism attempted to give to it: the old LegCo building is the municipal parks and gardens department’s storage facility. Mnazimmoja Recreation Ground lost its golf course with the revolution, but then more recently lost its significance as a revolutionary era center for other sports activities (there are plenty of football pitches, but they are in poor shape) (Figure 3.5). It has retained its utility for Eid celebrations (Figure 3.6), and its far southwest corner, Suleiman Maisara, is a key site for celebrations of the revolution’s anniversaries. The park’s grass is disappearing from overuse and informal parking. A 2017 drainage project dug up the park down its center, and it had not yet really recovered by early 2019 –​nor was drainage of the park’s swampy core all that successful; climate change predictive models suggest that the Pwani Ndogo (that is, the sea) is likely to reclaim Mnazimmoja by 2100 (Jumbe 2019). The mitiulaya (saman) trees of the 1930s remain on the park’s northern side, in all their grandeur, but many of the mivinje (casuarinas) bordering the south edge have been cut. The Peace Memorial, Golf Club, and other colonial structures have faded into disrepair. Yet Mnazimmoja looks like it earns intensive maintenance by comparison with Migombani. By January 2017, one

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Figure 3.5 Saman trees along Mnazimmoja Park, Kikwajuni, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

environmental officer put it this way: ‘Migombani has died.’ Even there, however, a grassroots community group emerged from the haphazard settlement north of the park to proclaim that rumors of Migombani’s death were premature, seeking external funding to secure its borders and gain income from admission, to feed their families and to plant trees to revive the garden (Figure 3.7). Perhaps the most fascinating narrative among parks and gardens of the colonial city belongs to Jamhuri Gardens, just adjacent to Mnazimmoja. This space was originally a physical part of the Pwani Ndogo, north of and contiguous with Mnazimmoja. While the Pwani Ndogo’s southern end was filled to create Mnazimmoja, the middle stretch surrounding

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Figure 3.6 Mnazimmoja Park, Eid celebrations, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

Figure 3.7 Migombani Botanical Garden, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

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Kisiwandui (Smallpox Island) was filled only in 1931, to create what is now called Mkapa Road or Creek Road, the physical dividing line between Stone Town and Ng’ambo. However, a drainage canal was created, along with a circular pool at the south end just past what had been the small island (that is Kisiwandui) in the tidal inlet. This pool, meant as an element of beautification of the landscape, slowly faded, and then was gradually filled in by the revolutionary regime. This zone of Kisiwandui, called Mpakani [on the border, where Ng’ambo meets Stone Town], remains symbolically important to the revolution’s supporters as the home of the revolutionary party’s headquarters since 1957 (Juma 2013). In the early 1990s, the revolutionaries created an ornamental garden in the circular pool’s sunken remains. This park has been well maintained, and the government added a children’s playground to the circle in the 2010s. What is more remarkable, though, is how readily ordinary residents have taken to using this park. It is home to informal Islamic and civic education groupings and day-​to-​ day political–​cultural discussions. The Zanzibar government’s 2015 Ng’ambo Local Area Plan (discussed further in Chapter 5) proposed a new ‘Central Park’ that would link Mnazimmoja to the unprotected southern side of the remains of Migombani, and a ‘green corridor’ from Jamhuri Gardens eastward through the center of Ng’ambo. These ideas might be implemented, but the reality is that ordinary people are already remaking and reframing these parks and corridors. The detective character, Bwana MSA, of Zanzibar’s crime novelist M. S. Abdulla (1968), had a thick book he regularly consulted as his guide in solving cases, Kinyume cha mambo: ‘The opposite of matters.’ The sorts of contradictions that Bwana MSA frequently labored to uncover evinced a core kernel within Zanzibari culture: its joyously defiant, ornery embrace of the opposite of matters, of contradiction. Bwana MSA bristled at the notion that he was spying, insisting on seeing his work of uncovering contradiction as research: ‘to research is to look with concentration… attention and listening to get to the totality of matters, so that you are able to say that this was like that for such and such a reason. And spying is to peddle, monger and smear a thing in order to pick at it’ (Abdulla 1976: 7; translation mine). This is a city full of contradictions and evidence of elites ‘picking at it’: signs telling one what not to do there, where one has done exactly that (Figure 3.8). It is a revolutionary democracy that is neither revolutionary nor democratic. Its pious Muslim identity is inseparable from its historic and still pervasive openness to otherness and difference. This opposite-​of-​things cultural energy defines a strong core of Zanzibar’s socio-​nature.

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Figure 3.8 Waste piles up under a sign that reads, ‘You Must Not Throw Waste Here’, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

At first pass, this seems to contrast with Trinidadian culture –​but even there, where the air is thick with a post-​colonial propriety that is not really ‘post’, a vein of gleeful irreverence finds its way into the cultural bedrock. The most profound example of this is discussed extensively in the next chapter, but can be introduced here. This is in carnival, encapsulated in the work of the Lordstreet Theatre Company and Jouvay Institute in Port of Spain. Founded by playwrights Tony Hall and Errol Fabien, this alternative arts organization is dedicated to fostering ‘play’, so that the transgressive spirit of the alternative J’ouvert (daybreak) Carnival in Trinidadian culture and what Hall termed the ‘emancipation performance traditions’ of Afro-​Caribbean culture continue ‘traveling from century to century’. As Conway and Potter

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(2012: 709) put it, there is ‘a socio-​cultural vibrancy that always appears to survive and prosper’ in Trinidad, even in a royal botanic garden, and a queen’s park Savannah.

Conclusion In Trinidad, the story of the city has commonalties with Zanzibar, with some divergences. Ultimately, the heterogeneous conjunctive symbiosis of cities living in the aftermath of British colonialism specifically appears in repeated urban forms and spaces for nature that the colonial regimes sought, both in terms of botanical gardens and central parks. Similar parallels played out across Britain’s other sub-​Saharan African and Caribbean holdings, with similar realms for divergence. From Rangoon to Singapore, from Kolkata to Hong Kong, from Shamian Island in Guangzhou to the British settlement in Shanghai, British colonial socio-​natures in Asia in the everyday urbanism entailed similar layouts, similar plants, and similar mindsets to those of Africa or the Caribbean. There are particularities, but repeated instances of creolizing landscapes that, taken together, form an archipelago. Prita Meier (2016) sees the cities of the Swahili coast including Zanzibar as having the contradiction of their essence emerging from a constantly changing array of globalized ‘elsewheres’ even while their architecture rests on a projection of unchanging stone permanence. This gives rise to a churning ongoing effort to reconcile ‘the need for mobility and mixing on one hand and fixity and rootedness of the other hand’ (Meier 2016: 3). In some senses, this is a contradiction one can see in the Caribbean, and in other postcolonial settings. There is in both the small cities of this chapter a feeling of –​an insistence on –​ endurance and permanence, on place, and at the same time a sense that what makes these places and cities exist is their set of flows and links with elsewhere. The cities can be found on their transversal lines, in their submarine and subterranean rooted interconnection. Undoubtedly, colonialism’s impacts on the flora of cities across the global South included the production of some of this interconnection, as RO Williams’s career suggests. Postcolonial literature and the arts have been crucial to colonized peoples’ attempts to produce a response or reconstruction. For one example, St Lucia’s renowned poet, playwright and artist Derek Walcott, a mentor to Trinidad’s Tony Hall, challenged the Caribbean’s ‘colonized vegetation’ in his address when he earned the Nobel Prize for Literature, and sought to reframe the landscape ‘branch by branch, leaf by leaf ’ (as cited in Savory 2011). The Glissantian ‘poetics of relation’ in this reframing cannot be said to be

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fixed-​in-​place, consistent, pervasive, universal, or successful across even one post-​colonial society. The Trinidad and Zanzibar cases highlight the variability of, but also the potential for, postcolonial cultures in decolonizing the urban landscape. Chapter 4 explores translocal senses of place across several case study cities of this book that develop in cultural productions in the realms of the ‘poetics of relation’.

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Submarine Urbanism: Cities People Make in ‘the Here and the Elsewhere’ Introduction Urban studies has developed a vast interest in transnational urbanism in part for analyzing the confusing, contested, and sometimes hard-​ to-​see flows of human beings in the contemporary era. As with many developments within global urban studies, both the theoretical and empirical dimensions of this work are dominated by global North scholarly interests and trends. Literature on global, globalizing, or world cities has long focused on the transformative impacts of migration. On one hand, researchers highlight the importance of transnational elites, and, on the other, floating populations of marginalized global South residents in globalizing cities (Benton-​Short, Price and Friedman 2005). An increasing area of interest resides with those in between. Most literature on transnational migration and urbanism has centered on global South migrants’ impacts in global North cities. This has produced valuable outcomes, like Smith’s (2005: 237) argument that new transnational migrants ‘forge… translocal connections and create the translocalities that increasingly sustain new modes of being-​in-​the-​ world’. Translocal is a useful term for both horizontal and vertical ‘relations across different locations’ in the contemporary era of globalization and planetary urbanization, because it ‘incorporates the tension and interplay between mobility and situatedness, movement and stability’ (Verne 2012: 17–​18). This chapter focuses on migrants’ translocalities, but by looking at what happens in global South urban contexts from which translocal migrants originate and to which they often return or circulate. It builds from scholarly analysis, but also

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from cultural works, since literature (the heart of postcolonial studies) and other arts provide vivid illustrations of Southern perspectives on these translocalities, on the ‘underside of our history’ essential to the continued ‘durability of our world’ (Mbembe 2017: 181). What emerges across these diverse settings is something Glissant termed ‘the force of a people’, where each place becomes a ‘meeting space where all worlds intermingle, an anchorage point connected to all the elsewheres’ (Rosemberg 2016:  324). Glissant called this intermingling of places ‘creolization’: this is ‘a relation of resistance and of affirmation of difference, born in the Caribbean’, where ‘creolization is marked by the inherent violence of the slave trade’ (Rosemberg 2016:  325). Slavery and indentured servitude mark much of the narrative of creolization in this chapter, alongside colonialism. However, my emphasis lies in how these cities’ writers and artists seek to move beyond or come to grips with the colonial (and post-​colonial) wounds.

Translocal urbanism and migration: Glissant’s poetic vision For many Southern and postcolonial thinkers, hardships faced by many urban residents today are part of why translocality, diasporic communities, and migration cannot be separated from deeper, darker histories and geographies –​most vividly, from colonialism, slavery, and genocide. Some may claim that Glissant champions a ‘happy’ version of globalization ‘rejoicing in the ever-​increasing interconnection and mobility of humankind’ (Wiedorn 2018: 121), but Glissant’s (1998: 17) poetry is haunted by these much darker themes about colonialism and slavery, as evidenced straightforwardly in his book or poem titles; one poetry collection, Riveted blood, even begins with a poem entitled, ‘for every tortured geography’. His powerful poem ‘Carthage’, from Black salt, takes its name from the ruins of that ancient North African city. Although Roman imperialism destroyed Carthage several thousand years ago, Glissant uses the setting to evoke more recent imperialism’s damages, along with cuts to the soul of humanity from the trans-​Atlantic slave trade. It begins with the salt that is ‘already on gravediggers’ hands’ from the ‘soldiers [who] have built cities around the globe’: The dregs of the sea, no longer aroma… spread on the conquered city. Everyone forgets the first salt he tasted: now traffics in its essence. The world, and more countless the

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pillaged Carthages today –​feeds this burning fire within him to conquer, to kill… A people comes: to be allotted its share of salt on digging wounds… Salt is forever mixed with the blood of victims and with the wounded stones that weren’t men’s work. (Glissant 1998: 71) Sea salt stains the hands of the enslaved and the cities they built, in ways that are ‘no longer aroma’ –​un-​sensed, un-​remembered, bloodied by waves of conquest. The ‘pillaged Carthages today’ are ‘countless’: cities implanted as colonial projects are now ravaged, and they ‘traffic’ in the ‘essence’ of the ‘salt’ of bitterness. In the poem ‘Goree’, from Yokes, set in that slave-​processing center offshore from Dakar, Glissant (1998: 117) calls forth the wounds of conquest and slavery on the ‘harbor island where yesterday’s dreams garrotte dreams of tomorrow to their death’. Glissant struggled with what the formerly enslaved and colonized could do to remake such an urban world full of salt and blood. As a Martinican exploring what could unite the disparate Caribbean with itself, the rest of the Americas, Europe, and Africa, he focused on peoples of Africa’s diasporas first, and their quest for home. ‘The first impulse of a transplanted population which is not sure of maintaining the old order of values in the transplanted locale’, Glissant (1989: 16) wrote, ‘is that of reversion’, by which he meant a return home resting on an ‘obsession with a single origin’ and an insistence that ‘one must not alter the absolute state of being’. This reversion was often supplanted by what Glissant termed ‘diversion’, redirecting people’s energies toward unattainable goals. The first might be returning to a mythical sense of what the perfect old African homeland (never) was, while the second would be creating a fictional idealist illusion of the present or future. In the colonial context, reversion might lead to glorification of a mythical, great pan-​African past, and diversion to an unrealistic pan-​African Black Atlantic present/​future. What he sought instead was something in between, a ‘Caribbean imagination’ that operated as a dialectic ‘between inside and outside’ that might ‘liberate us from being smothered’ (Glissant 1989: 139). This meant attempting to ‘think like an archipelago’ (Wiedorn 2018), where the world of cities is a collection of distinct islands tied to one another and ‘the most distant and heterogeneous cultural elements can be brought into relation’ (Glissant 1996: 22). This in-​between, both/​and archipelagic imagination where ‘the here and the elsewhere’ (Rosemberg 2016: 328) meet is evident in the cultures, places, literatures, arts and musical traditions of the Caribbean urbanisms of this book (Port of Spain and San Juan). This is also a

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strong theme in the transnational/​translocal postcolonial literature of many global-​South settings. But since the Caribbean is ‘perhaps the most globalized of world regions’ (Klak 1998: 6), or ‘the first site of modernity’ because of its ‘complex creolization process’ (DeLoughrey 2004: 298), the starting place here lies with interrogating the meanings and impacts of transnational migration and translocal identities for these two Caribbean urban areas. I build in each setting toward investigating in-​between imaginations –​attempting to evade both reversion and diversion –​in works from Trinidadian and Puerto Rican artists and writers. The analysis then turns to Cape Coast and Zanzibar, and writings by Ghanaian and Zanzibari authors. The discussion in each setting begins with more conventional social science understandings of migration, demographics and cultural change (less so for Chapter 3’s cities, Port of Spain and Zanzibar), before turning to literary and artistic analysis. The aim is to illustrate Southern cultural understandings of both translocality and urbanism that reside in Glissantian archipelagic relation with one another.

Port of Spain: jouvay urbanization Greater Port of Spain has been the focus for what Conway and Potter (2012) term ‘middling’ transnational return migrants, meaning those who are neither super-​rich elites nor desperately poor. Their study focused on creative artists and professionals who returned to Port of Spain as change agents. The sheer volume of skilled returnees is not vast, but their significance outstrips their number. Their return in the 21st century coincided with a mini-​boom in suburban development around Port of Spain (Conway and Potter 2012). The range of migrants whom they interviewed returned for creative or altruistic reasons, but also experienced ambivalence regarding the return. The metro area has seen a growth of gated communities and securitization, but with this ambivalence evident in the character of how people live in these neighborhoods (Mycoo 2006). Far more than most Caribbean cities and islands, Port of Spain and Trinidad experienced significant in-​migration aside from European/​ American colonization and African slavery. South Asian indentured servitude that followed in the wake of abolition transformed the demographic character of Trinidad, to a degree only found in a few other countries and cities throughout the global South. Between 1831 and 1920, more than 1.3 million people left then British India (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) as indentured servants. Some 450,000 came to Mauritius; roughly two thirds of contemporary Port Louis is

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ethnically South Asian. Guyana, KwaZulu-​Natal Province of South Africa, and Trinidad each received more than 150,000 Indian migrants, changing the urban landscapes of Georgetown (Guyana), Durban (South Africa), and Trinidad (Huzzey 2012; Northrup 1995). Although there are spaces and processes where Trinidad’s South Asian and African cultures blend and thrive, there are notable political–​cultural divides. These divides are perhaps most uncomfortable in literature, given the positions and opinions of Trinidad’s most famous writer, V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul produced an eclectic, diffident, difficult body of work across his long career, with his writings about Trinidad and Port of Spain among the most controversial works. Trinidad’s first prime minister, Eric Williams, commissioned Naipaul to write an analysis of the Caribbean, only to find ‘to his dismay, that Naipaul [1962] had produced, instead, a rather harsh and even contemptuous survey of the islands’, The middle passage (Varela-​Zapata 2014:  163). In it, Naipaul (1962: 58) called Port of Spain ‘the noisiest city in the world’. He disparaged carnival, saying it ‘has always depressed me… I have never cared for dressing up or “jumping up” in the streets’ (Naipaul 1962: 255). Naipaul ‘demonstrate[d]‌a blindness to the value and power of popular cultural forms’ in his own country (Nixon 1992: 156). Naipaul’s distaste for his home town lies in stark contrast with the embrace of its creolization and translocality by many other Trinidadian writers and artists, including those of South Asian origin. One prominent vernacular architecture example lies in Carapichaima, south of Port of Spain: the Temple in the Sea created by Trinidadian Indian laborer Sewdass Sadhu. Sadhu’s original Hindu temple was ordered demolished by the colonial government five years after he had created it, because it had been unlawfully built on government land. Sadhu responded by reproducing the Temple bit by bit more than 100 meters out into the Gulf of Paria, since this was ‘no man’s land’. From 1947 until his death in 1970, he built the Temple by hand, stone by stone, at low tide. It was only with support from government in the 1990s that the Temple was completed and a pier constructed out to it to connect to land at high tide. For Trinidadians, Sadhu’s sacrifice to create the Temple came to symbolize the fight against colonialism and the struggle for a pluralist, tolerant post-​colonial country (Maharaj 1996). The Temple literally and symbolically manifests the Caribbean discourse of submarine relations at a planetary scale, firmly fixed in the tidal flats of the diverse central Trinidadian outskirts of greater Port of Spain (Figure 4.1). The embrace of creolization and translocality found in the story of the Temple in the Sea connects well with a Glissantian ‘rhizomatic

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Figure 4.1 Temple in the Sea, Trinidad

Source: Author.

structure for the Caribbean’ (D’haen 2014: 26). Although numerous authors manifest this Glissantian spirit in Trinidadian literature, the chapter focuses on playwright Tony Hall. Hall co-​founded (with Errol Fabien) the Lordstreet Theatre Company in Port of Spain. But Hall’s life and work encompass the sort of in-​between translocality of the poetic, relational, and rhizomatic Caribbean imagination that Glissant sought to foster. Hall spent his early career in western Canada after

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earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Alberta, served for over a decade as an artist-​in-​residence at Trinity College in Hartford, and now resides mostly on Tobago. With Lordstreet as with virtually every aspect of life, Hall strives for what he refers to as the ‘Jouvay process’, as in his online Jouvay Institute –​which has this quotation from Fanon as its banner: ‘there is a point at which methods devour themselves’. The methods of his process begin and end with an insistence on ‘play’. He describes the jouvay process as a ‘post-​post-​New World perspective on drama practice or “action” in relation to living and being’ (Hahn 2014). Jouvay is the Trinidad-​ization of j’ouvert (daybreak), the pre-​ dawn-​into-​dawn street-​party of the annual carnival celebration. J’ouvert street parties in the Caribbean grew into substantial, transgressive central features of carnival in the wake of emancipation. Hall (in Hahn 2014) intends the process as ‘an instinctive meditation, a continuous “awakening”… to the “contradictory” and “paradoxical” energy of the “emancipation performance traditions” traveling from century to century’ in the Caribbean. Hall’s (2004) play Red house (fire! fire!) marked a powerful engagement with the making of Port of Spain. The play is transversal temporally, rather than geographically: it is a play within a play, where actors in a 1999 street play for ‘tourists’ in Port of Spain portray the events around the 1903 Water Riot and burning of the Red House (the colonial Legislative Council building) in the same spot in the city. But as they attempt to perform their play for a paying audience, the play –​in 1999 –​becomes the subject of police and paramilitary concern, and the 1903 riot reproduces itself nearly 100 years later. In the process, Hall shows that ‘the issues of equality, justice, racial integrity, and self-​determination that fueled the riots in 1903 burn as brightly now as then’ (Riggio 2004: 5). The juxtaposition of eras is jarring as the play jumps back and forth across time. But Hall makes plain along the way that the post-​colonial era is not very ‘post’ in Port of Spain. At one point, an ex-​policeman character in the 1999 narrative, Fletcher, makes a promotional TV spot for a new downtown development. The speech would be ridiculous were it not close to the truth, as Fletcher extols the virtues of ‘Operation Pyramids’, a scheme of ‘Colonial Logic Investments Limited’ to bring ‘even more pride and dignity to everyone who lives on these islands… Whose ancestors were dragged up on these beautiful shores.’ The operation’s ‘pyramids’ will be made of ‘transparent tuff-​bond plastic Lego blocks’ and ‘will house our head offices and administrative complexes as well as tombs, vaults and other utility chambers’ (Hall 2004:  43). People will enter the ‘pyramids’ at the

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top in ‘personal aerocrafts’ and the buildings will ‘never touch the ground’. Fletcher closes his short advert with this: ‘We, of Colonial Logic, wish you the best and look forward to continue serving you in the future’ (Hall 2004: 43). ‘Colonial Logic Investments’ is a play on the actual company, CL (for Colonial Life Insurance) Financial, which underwrote the transformation of Port of Spain’s urban core amid the natural gas boom of the 1980s and 1990s, and the ‘pyramids’ –​while rooted to the ground and not built from Lego blocks –​are the garish and outsized governmental headquarters of contemporary Trinidad and Tobago (Figure 4.2). The most deliberately translocal character in the 1999 play, King Stewart (who plays the rabble-​rousing leader of the Ratepayers Association charged with burning down the Red House in the 1903 play), claims his ‘destiny’ ties him to Africa, if only ‘to be the soul, salt… sweat of a new world’ (Hall 2004: 57). Stewart emerged from the ‘chains of Babylon’ but ‘nestled in [his] mother’s yard in Belmont [part of Port of Spain’s African village], in Dahomey [Benin]’ (Hall 2004: 118). But Stewart also reminds the audience and his fellow actors of his ‘Cree brethren… on the Canadian Prairies’, since he works to emulate ‘The Contrary’ character of Cree folklore, walking onstage backwards, and doing the opposite of things (Hall 2004: 55).

Figure 4.2 Port of Spain skyline, Trinidad

Source: Author.

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As the play proceeds, Hall deliberately muddles the storylines, as characters move back and forth across the two time periods. The narrator character, Tourist Annie, attempts to direct the play(s), to police eras into place, but eventually, she gives up: ‘You see that?’, she asks the audience near the end. ‘This place will always defy Colonial Logic. They going to have a hard time’ (Hall 2004: 123). Port of Spain’s Alice Yard is a collaboration of artist Christopher Cozier (2012), writer Nicholas Laughlin, and architect Sean Leonard (2012), which literally provides a place for defying and giving a ‘hard time’ to colonial logic. It occupies the backyard space of 80 Roberts Street in Woodbrook, Leonard’s great-​g randmother’s place. Since 2008 it has been a ‘space for creative experiment, collaboration and improvisation’. Alice Yard hosts artistic residencies, performances, art exhibitions, carnival bands, students, and an ever-​changing, flexible network of Trinidadian, Caribbean, and international creative people. More than 70 writers, musicians, performers, and artists from some 20 countries have links with the Yard. Cozier, Laughlin, and Leonard embody the cosmopolitan and creative spirit of the  Glissantian submarine connectivity of postcolonial Southern cultural work in the 21st century, a spirit that resonates in San Juan too.

San Juan: ‘yo-​yo boing’ San Juan is the largest city in the San Juan–​Carolina–​Caguas US Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). This MSA houses more than two thirds of Puerto Rico’s population, with about 2.1 million people. Its population declined by more than 500,000 between 2000 and 2016, and even more people left after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Puerto Rico’s ambiguous status –​and Puerto Ricans’ tenuous hold of citizenship –​within the US leave an exhausting legacy of transnational and translocal dreams. The Puerto Rican population on the US mainland grew dramatically after 1960. But toward the end of the 1970s ‘a dismal and discouraging picture… for many families’ in Hartford and the Northeast led many Puerto Ricans to ‘decide to return to the island where the environment [wa]s not so hostile’ (Trafford and Ellington 1977: 67). Puerto Ricans often refer to the island by the indigenous Taino name for it, Borinquen, and to one another as Boricuas, or ‘brave lords’ (Santiago 1995: xviii). While the overall trend in recent decades has been toward leaving Puerto Rico, for most Boricuas there is little sense of permanence to the move; an enduring in-​betweenness predominates. Many Puerto Ricans are stuck between a both/​and

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(both Puerto Rican and American) and a neither/​nor (fully belonging neither to Borinquen, nor to the US). San Juan is a slightly different case for discussion of the impacts of transnational or translocal migration on global South cities, since it is officially a US city (Figure 4.3). It is also an oddity of a shrinking city in the global South, and its ‘quality of life… deteriorated’ considerably in the last two decades, well before Maria’s devastation (Munoz-​Erickson 2014: 3). However, there are parallels with many patterns elsewhere among global South cities, as in its expansion of gated communities, with investments from Puerto Ricans returning from the mainland US and with elite outsider investments. This has gone together with the privatization of public space, segregation and socio-​spatial polarization often associated with globalization in the global South (Dinzey-​Flores 2008). After Hurricane Maria, the US federal government declared more than 90 percent of the island an ‘opportunity zone’ for capitalist investments from the mainland. This territorial overreach is one aspect of difference from the mainland US; another lies in the process itself for the securitization of neighborhood space: many new ‘gated’ communities are public housing complexes where gates were built by the police as security measures (Garcia-​Ellin Figure 4.3 Old San Juan, Puerto Rico

Source: Author.

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2009). Garcia-​Ellin (2009) argued that there was no actual crime wave to warrant this securitization. Lebron (2019: 10) documented that ‘the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico has been less about halting high levels of crime (whether real or imagined) than it has been about shoring up political, economic and social relations of power during moments of intense flux and crisis’ –​relations of power dominated by the US mainland. Securitization is a physical reminder of the external impositions that characterize political–​social realities for 21st-​century Puerto Rico, from small scale to grand scale. At the small scale, islanders had no say in the US federal government’s 2018 imposition of a ban on the island’s cock-​fighting industry despite its hundreds of years of history and the 27,000 jobs it provided; at the grand scale, that situation exists because Puerto Ricans have no voting representation in the US Congress or the Electoral College that selects the US president. This provokes a sense of powerlessness in the face of the continued colonization-​that-​is-​not-​colonization. Translocal experiences and identities are pervasive themes in Puerto Rican literature and art. Literature appears in Spanish or English –​or both at once, as in poet Giannina Braschi’s comic novel, Yo-​yo boing. Braschi shifts seamlessly between the two languages (or, she would argue, three languages, including Spanglish), even within one sentence, and between poetry, prose, and screenwriting. One funny bit of dialogue plays off this code-​and genre-​switching: -​Are you still writing poetry? -​I’m writing poetry disguised as a novel  –​ you offered apologetically. -​There are no disguises here  –​ I  said  –​ She’s writing a screenplay… Frenillo. Ponle freno a tus estribos. [Brace. Ride under control in your stirrups.] Hold your horses –​frena los caballos. (Braschi 1998: 100–​1; italics in original) From the title onward, Yo-​yo boing is concerned with bouncing from one language to another, one identity to another –​Yo-​Yo Boing was also the stage name of a famous Puerto Rican comic film actor, Luis Antonio Rivera, and this novel is threaded with film studies. But Braschi’s book, like a lot of Boricua writing regarding translocality and transnationality, concentrates on the US mainland dynamics, particularly in New York (Santiago 1995; Johnson 2014). One non-​ Boricua character, exasperated at the trials of an academic career in

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the US teaching the ‘cold, callous children of Republicans’, claims to share with her Nuyorican friend the status of being ‘misplaced in this bloody country’ (Braschi 1998: 128). But the Puerto Rican main character responds with her identification with New York, ‘the last great European city. And the first great American city. And the capital of Puerto Rico. On the verge of collapsing’ (Braschi 1998: 145–​6). This is certainly a spatial manifestation of the creolization that fascinated Glissant, but most of the novel is a wise-​cracking commentary on filmmaking, literature, and poetry, rather than a cultural critique that can be explicitly emplaced as urban Caribbean, beyond her character’s claim of New York as Puerto Rico’s capital. Her biting 2011 follow-​up, The United States of banana, is likewise a New York book, eviscerating her alienated, displaced and disenfranchised status in New York, as an example for Puerto Ricans in the post-​9/​11 mainland US (Braschi 2011). There are many Puerto Rican novelists and writers who offer powerful critiques of urban space on the island, of housing and urban land rights, and of climate justice as it relates to post-​Hurricane Maria in the urban landscape (Edwards 2019). This artistic array of critique is potentially even stronger in photography, music, art, and architecture in the urbanism. Photographer Jack Delano’s (1990) collection, Puerto Rico mio, represents an unusual example of translocal representation of in-​ betweenness in the sense of place. Delano emigrated with his parents from Ukraine to the US as a child; he first came to Puerto Rico with the US Farm Security Administration as a young photographer charged with documenting the everyday life of islanders (Delano 1997). The FSA presence was in keeping with the Roosevelt administration’s geopolitical/​colonial tactics in including Puerto Rico in its New Deal programs, to quell the ‘active discontent’ of Puerto Ricans and, especially, recent migrants to San Juan (Tyrell 2008: 76). Delano returned in 1946 to further understand ‘the developing cultural life of the island’ (Fern 1990: 13), and lived in San Juan for the rest of his life. He long served as the director of an educational broadcasting television station and worked in the Division of Community Education for the island’s government. A 1978 National Endowment for the Humanities grant enabled him to produce Puerto Rico mio, which presents the striking photographic contrasts of Puerto Rico in the 1940s and the 1980s. He ‘revisited his own work, and reinterpreted it in the light of his later photography… Sequence and juxtaposition are just as important as the images themselves’ in the book (Fern 1990: 15). The photographs demonstrate how ‘Puerto Rico and its people ha[d]‌become different’ over a 40-​year period, but also show ‘what things ha[d] stayed the same’

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(Mintz 1990: 5). The chief transformations –​politically, toward some semblance of self-​rule; economically, toward urbanization and industrialization; and culturally, toward massive migration to and circulation with the mainland –​are palpable in the photographs. The later era shows Puerto Ricans who are ‘now urbanized, now better-​fed and now better-​dressed’, but also pointing toward ‘what has been lost’ –​in one Puerto Rican analyst’s terms, one sees that ‘we have forgotten our humanity’ and ‘our sense of neighborliness’ (Carrion 1990: 9). Most photographs from the earlier period are in rural settings –​he was working for the Farm Security Administration in the 1941 trip, after all. Delano (1990, 1997) was struck by the poverty, injustice, and inequality Puerto Rico’s majority faced in the 1940s, but almost as much in the 1980s and 1990s. On his initial visit, he found that ‘living conditions were horrendous’ in the city but remarked on the ‘indominable spirit’ that people showed ‘in the face of appalling adversity’ (Delano 1990: 24). His important roles in filmmaking and television, alongside photography, art, and music meant that Delano had a hand in reshaping the dominant imagery of Puerto Rico for islanders, and to some extent for the mainland. In the early 1960s, the US Congress’s House Un-​American Activities Committee came to Puerto Rico to investigate the alleged communist sympathies of Governor Luis Munoz Marin, Delano, and the television station he managed, WIPR, and the local legislature followed suit; the resultant political tensions precipitated Delano’s retirement from the station in 1969 (Delano 1997: 169). Puerto Rico mio is a book representation of Delano’s ‘Contrasts’ exhibition, first displayed at the University of Puerto Rico in 1982. ‘Old problems’ remained and ‘new problems’, among them issues tied to urbanization, arose amid ‘rapid industrialization’ (Delano 1990: 31). Delano’s work had the goal of making ‘ordinary people important’ (Delano 1990: 33). But he also made the ordinary landscapes, rural and urban, important as well. Whether an aerial view of San Juan (38), a parking lot at a shopping mall there (111), squatters in a ‘land rescue’ settlement (one of hundreds that the government labeled ‘land invasions’) destroyed by the police in suburban Carolina (142–​3), ordinary people with absurd tourists in the city (149), a massive condominium (153), young kids in a San Juan elementary school computer lab (163), or the stunning photographs of factory workers from suburban Rio Piedras, it is the 1980s urban photographs that reverberate most, nearly 40 years later. One cannot help but be struck by the sense of hope left there in those years, seeming to fade from Borinquen in the 21st century. Oscar Hernandez (2013), and photographer Theo

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Hopkinson, recently took Delano’s ‘Contrasts’ idea one step further in San Juan: then and now/​entonces y ahora, juxtaposing city images from the 1940s (some of them Delano’s photographs) and the 2010s. This recent project only further illustrated the dual findings of Puerto Rico mio (transformation and endurance), with the added emptiness of a declining city. Yet this is hardly a dying time for San Juan’s artistic spirit or the enrichment that comes from ‘submarine’ relations with the mainland. Music –​rap and hip-​hop –​have been crucial means for expressing resistance to colonial oppression. Lebron (2019) shows the criminality, drug abuse, sexism, homophobia, and violence of urban Puerto Rico’s underground music scene and its ties to public housing from the 1980s through the 2010s. But she also argues that ‘rap music and the culture that developed around it’ in public housing complexes ‘highlight the difficult realities of circular migration and the implementation of a neoliberal economic agenda’ (Lebron 2019: 84). San Juan area residents have long worked to counter the coloniality of the city’s built environment, as in the architectural efforts of those granted housing in Rio Piedras’s ‘Eleanor Roosevelt’ neighborhood, a New Deal public housing program in the 1940s, to remake the development as their own, as part of an ‘intangible quality’ of place-​making (Tyrell 2008: 84). Likewise, the land ‘rescuers’ of 1967–​82 represented ‘the first urban social movement in Puerto Rico’ (Cotto Morales 2019). Many community activists, from well before Hurricane Maria until today, have worked through the here and the elsewhere for San Juan’s development and for fostering its arts communities. One prime example comes from Machuchal neighborhood’s Casa Taft 169 and its partnership with the activist urban design firm La Maraña. Casa Taft 169 began in 2013 when community activists occupied a building that had been abandoned for more than 40 years (Unanue 2017). Their first step involved developing a community garden for Machuchal neighbors to come, eat, grow Puerto Rican herbs, and build collaborations; eventually they broke down the cement blocks that the municipality had placed in Casa Taft 169’s doorways as a ‘public nuisance’ building, to make a ‘self-​run civic center’ (Unanue 2017). The activists recognized quickly that abandoned public nuisance buildings were an ‘epidemic problem’ in San Juan with the declining population and with elderly residents dying without proper property inheritance follow-​through (Unanue 2017). Marina Moscoso Arabia (2017), the driving force behind Casa Taft 169, believes that the project and Machuchal can be models for renovating and revitalizing San Juan and Puerto Rico, to ‘design amongst themselves’ for ‘local socioeconomic development’.

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They work to involve the neighbors in ‘everything we try to do… The premise is that everyone can… contribute something during every stage of development’ (Moscoso Arabia 2017). In 2016, Casa Taft 169 and La Maraña joined together in a successful grant from the American organization ArtPlace for US $450,000, ‘dovetailing participatory design with the unquestionable power of art’ to create a local area master plan with Machuchal’s residents. Machuchal had long been a creative center in San Juan, as the neighborhood that inspired Ismael Rivera’s musical ‘hymns of black reaffirmation’, served as home base for the late writer, lawyer, and activist Nilita Vientos Gaston, and welcomed ‘thousands of Dominican immigrants’ (La Maraña 2016). Their participatory project built on the premise that the neighborhood’s ‘magnetic diversity’ and ‘artistic capital’ had to work together (La Maraña 2016). Their ‘grassroots approach to urban planning and development’ to start ‘playing, shaping and innovating’ from that base of what ‘already is’ has been groundbreaking for San Juan and Puerto Rico. ‘To make art means to have the capacity to transform what surrounds you… we want to spark this neighborhood’s creativity’, Unanue (2017) claimed, and ‘we want each “machuchalero” to set their dreams free’. To be sure, San Juan remains a city with high rates of poverty and inequality, and it is far from recovery from Hurricane Maria. Moscoso (2019), noting that 24 percent of the urban area’s residences are vacant even while there has been a growing homeless population for more than 20  years, wondered aloud, ‘what are we recovering from?’ Still, efforts of organizations like Casa Taft 169 and individuals like Moscoso and Unanue manifest an activist urban landscape that is and has been incredible for decades, including a small list suggested by Puerto Rican scholar Guillermo Irizarry (2019): Casa Pueblo, Taller Salud, Ayuda Legal Huracán María, Idebajo, Comedores Sociales, Agit Arte, el Hormiguero, el Semillero, or Poetry Is Busy. Together, these art-​activists produce a vibrant political–​cultural life in San Juan operating on the transversal between ‘the here and the elsewhere’. *** Most studies of globalization’s cultural and demographic impacts in urban Africa concentrate on capitals and primate cities; the next segments focus on two smaller cities, Cape Coast and Zanzibar, with deep global histories. In both cases, 21st-​century impacts of globalization, return/​circular migration, and translocality are linked to history, as heritage/​slavery tourism transforms the cityscapes (Agyei-​ Mensah 2006; Agyei-​Mensah and Ardayfio-​Schandorf 2007; Asiedu

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2005; Keshodkar 2013). Cape Coast and Zanzibar are cities born out of interplays between global forces and local agency. Both embraced festivalization and tourism as major features of their 21st-​century global roles. Cape Coast hosts the Pan-​Africa Festival (PANAFEST) every other year, while Zanzibar annually holds the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) and Sauti ya busara (Voice of wisdom) music ­festival (Fair 2018). Successive segments examine submarine relations, in Glissant’s sense, for these cities-​in-​the-​world.

Cape Coast: door of return Cape Coast was a Fetu fishing settlement prior to the Portuguese arrival in 1471. It became a Portuguese slave port by 1555 (a few miles from their main castle, Elmina), expanding with Dutch (1637–​52), Swedish (1652–​57), and Danish rule (1657–​64). The British assumed control in 1664. Under them, it became first the central site for British slaving and (1832–​77) Gold Coast colony’s capital (Agyei-​Mensah 2006; Gocking 1999). During the late 19th century, Cape Coast was still the colony’s main port for rubber and gold exports (Agyei-​Mensah and Ardayfio-​ Schandorf 2007). It declined significantly in the 20th century, with the rise of Accra, the railway terminus at Sekondi, and the deep-​water port at Takoradi. The post-​colonial regime established another new port in 1962 at Tema to serve Accra, and Cape Coast’s international port status ended (Agyei-​Mensah 2006). From independence in 1957, Cape Coast was in decline. Its capital role had been usurped by Accra, and no substantial industrial sector ever replaced slavery or ‘legitimate’ exports. Ghana’s 21st-​century petroleum industry lies westward around Takoradi, its cocoa industry around Kumasi, and nearly everything else that matters to Ghana’s economy around Accra. Cape Coast limps along as Central region’s administrative capital and a university town. Under colonial rule, the town never had more than 30,000 people; even with independence, urban expansion largely passed Cape Coast by. In 1984, Cape Coast still had fewer than 60,000 people, only the ninth largest urban area of Ghana (Nabila 1988). By the 2010 census, Cape Coast had grown to nearly 170,000 people, and its 2019 population was estimated to be about 217,000. After a century of stagnation, Cape Coast nearly tripled in size in 35 years. Much of that resulted from boundary extensions around neighboring settlements, but it is still the case that the tourist economy created some growth. Ghana made concerted efforts to market heritage tourism for African-​Americans and the Diaspora, focused on Cape Coast.

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Emancipation Day was made into a major event in Cape Coast, from its 1998 creation (Agyei-​Mensah 2006). By 2016, more than 70,000 tourists, many of African heritage, visited the castle (Boateng, Okoe and Hinson 2018: 104) (Figure 4.4). Cape Coast is a small town, yet it has been ‘worlding’ for more than 500  years. Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and British slavers fathered children whose lives were shaped by the emerging global Figure 4.4 Cape Coast Castle and beach, Cape Coast, Ghana

Source: Author.

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European imperial order and eventually the British Empire’s planetary culture, even as they were often trapped between worlds –​and their Ghanaian mothers frequently were sold away from Cape Coast as slaves. These various European cultures (and others beside them) left influences in the region’s art, architecture, music, and religion. Nearby Elmina castle is the birthplace of Ghanaian Christianity, expanded by missionary activities from the other European powers. Within Ghanaian society, Cape Coast people were strongly receptive toward Christianity and Western education and culture, and highly influential within anti-​colonial politics (Agyei-​Mensah and Ardayfio-​Schandorf 2007). Contemporary Cape Coast Christianity is, while very much a Ghanaian phenomenon, also deeply global, from the dozens of profiteering local-​but-​internationally-​inspired evangelical television stations to Ghanaian evangelism within the contemporary US, Canada, or UK. Because of the slave trade and its significant port role through the 19th century, Cape Coast’s African population, too, is remarkably diverse, including peoples from the Sahel and from the Atlantic coast from eastern Nigeria to Guinea. Cape Coast has a growing number of African-​American and Afro-​Caribbean residents, drawn symbolically through what the castle officially designated in 1998 as its ‘Door of Return’ (the same infamous passage, entered from the seaside). Both the tourist economy and the contemporary framing of Cape Coast as a ‘university city’ add to the cultural diversity and richness, too. Ironically, today, mobility is highly circumscribed for Cape Coast’s ordinary residents (Porter et al. 2010). Cape Coast’s population growth has not been matched with real growth in economic opportunities. Most often, this leads to migration to Accra, 90 miles eastward, but Cape Coast migrants often lack skills to compete for careers there, low-​ paying or informal employment in Accra is not comparably advanced on the same jobs in Cape Coast, and the cost of living is much higher. When they can, young people from Cape Coast take their chances with near or distant relatives in neighboring countries –​even Ivory Coast or Liberia  –​but socio-​political conditions there have been much worse than in Ghana for most of the last 25 years. This leaves many Cape Coast youth stuck in Cape Coast. Its expansion caused a huge rise in housing demand unmet in formal channels and a subsequent spike in housing costs, leading to the growth of unauthorized neighborhoods: the city’s main industrial area, where most industries have closed, is steadily being transformed to residential land, and the University of Cape Coast’s massive footprint shrinks with illegal plot sales to residential developers creating large ‘villages’ inside the university’s perimeter. The mouth of the tidal inlet that drains into

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the sea beside the Cape Coast castle has given way to a busy artisanal fishing community (Figure 4.5). Ghanaian-​A merican writer Yaa Gyasi’s breakthrough novel Homegoing (2016) begins and ends at Cape Coast castle’s beachfront. In parallel chapters, she tells the story of eight generations of a fictional Asante-​Fante-​African-​American extended family –​ two half-​sisters, one enslaved at the castle and shipped to the American south, the other married off as a child to an English slaver at the castle, start the dueling story lines. The narrative travels through southern US plantations, Baltimore, Birmingham, Harlem, Huntsville, and Palo Alto on the one end, and Cape Coast, Edweso, Kumasi, Takoradi, and back to Cape Coast on the other. In essentially 14 short stories, the novel moves from the 18th century to the present at a rapid pace, pausing to focus on key moments in the historical geographies of southern Ghana and African-​America. Though highly structured, the novel is profoundly Glissantian, as the reader inhabits the transversal connecting the parallel bloodlines. Readers are literally brought to the spot of submarine ties between the bloodlines in the novel’s final paragraphs, as the contemporary descendants on either end (unaware of their distant ‘relation’) swim together in the rough Atlantic surf just off the castle’s beach. Figure 4.5 Amamoma, Cape Coast, adjacent to the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana

Source: Author.

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Marjorie, the ‘Ghanaian’ descendent (who migrated to Alabama as a child), gives her new lover, Marcus, the ‘American’ descendant, the necklace that came down to her through the centuries from the great-​ times-​six-​grandmother the lovers (do not know they) share. ‘Welcome home’, she tells him as she puts this heavy stone around his neck. The cuts to the souls of blackness from different forms of enslavement (plantation slavery, forced child marriages to English slavers, the US prison–​industrial complex, patriarchal oppression) are painfully evident on nearly every page, but so too is what Glissant would call the poetic intention, a deliberate re-​membering of the Black Atlantic. The ‘force of a people’ crosses the ocean. It meets in its waters.

Zanzibar: here and elsewhere, a gravel heart Like Cape Coast, today’s city of Zanzibar had origins as a late-​medieval fishing village. Unlike Cape Coast, Zanzibar had a relatively minor role in trans-​Atlantic slavery. Instead, the Indian Ocean trade predominated, with links to the Persian/​Arabian Gulf but more with the Zanzibar islands themselves and African ports that paid Zanzibar tribute. The main era of slave trading also came later, peaking in the 18th and 19th centuries. From 1690, Zanzibar’s Omani overlords built the town into the Swahili coast’s largest and most important port, based around ivory, cloves, and slaves; most slaves who were sold in Zanzibar’s market were re-​exported to coastal plantations or moved to plantations on Unguja or Pemba islands (Sheriff 1987). Mombasa’s development as the terminus of Britain’s Uganda railway and German investments in the ports and railways that terminated at Tanga and Dar es Salaam ended Zanzibar’s economic and political primacy by 1914. The town’s population barely expanded from then until independence –​much of the post-​Second World War growth came in the outskirts of the colonial-​era municipality, and even this growth was marginal until the January 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. After 1964, Zanzibar’s urban population exploded. With nearly 700,000 people in 2019, the urban metro population is now almost ten times what it was on the eve of the revolution 56 years ago. At the same time, Zanzibar’s diasporic population has also expanded. The 1964 revolution produced the first wave of exiles from Zanzibar around the world (Myers 2011). The movement of Omani, Indian, Pakistani, and other elite Zanzibaris out of town in the 1960s and 1970s led to abandonment of many wealthy homes in Stone Town and suburban plantations (Myers 2010). The second wave of exiles began in the late 1980s with rising discontent in Zanzibar, from a 1988 riot, the 1992

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reintroduction of multi-​party politics in Tanzania, and highly disputed elections for Zanzibar’s president in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015. As a result, Zanzibaris, like Ghanaians, can now be found nearly everywhere. These rhizomatic communities have no clear permanence or fixity to them; because by international law they are identified only as Tanzanian, they are nearly invisible as Zanzibari communities (Dosi, Rushubirwa and Myers 2007). The re-​emergence of Zanzibar as a tourist destination and expansion of the town’s economy from the 1990s on brought exiles from both waves back into Zanzibar, as investors, entrepreneurs, part-​time, full-​time or ‘most-​of-​the-​time’ residents, or retirees. Both waves of Zanzibar’s far-​flung diaspora have impacts back home, but Zanzibar is also, as it has always been, a city of impermanent migrants. Transnational or translocal migrants return or circulate with both positive, negative and in-​between experiences. Many Zanzibari ‘return’ migrants come back annually to see family, to make investments, to attend weddings or funerals. They reconnect with their childhood mates or attend the mosque where they learned the faith. But they will often say, ‘I can’t stay here.’ The visits remind them of aspects of Zanzibari society that led them to migrate –​intractable political conflict, endless rumor-​mongering, or the stifling lack of opportunities around them (including opportunities to be different, or to stay outside the mainstream of Zanzibari culture). They construct lives in both places, but these are in effect different lives. This is similar to experiences in Port of Spain’s diaspora, returning for carnival but always ‘keeping options open’ to move back to the global North (Conway and Potter 2012; Nurse 1999). The Swahili novels of Adam Shafi suggest a shifting dialectic of the in-​betweenness of belonging. The longest of Shafi’s novels, Mbali na nyumbani (Far from home), is an autobiographical older man’s confessional of his journey as a young man away from Zanzibar through northeastern Africa to Cairo in 1960, his 1961 return to Zanzibar, and subsequent departure again a few months later to study in East Germany. Shafi is seeking to explain why he left, why he returned, why he left again, and the challenges along the way, to his grown children and younger readers. The novel’s most relevant part for this book comes when Shafi returns to Zanzibar in 1961 just as pre-​independence politics are heating up. On the boat from Dar es Salaam, Shafi is of two minds. On one hand, he was ‘just another passenger arriving from Dar es Salaam’ (all translations from KiSwahili mine). On the other hand, he ‘was fighting to be complete, arriving to liberate his country from the hands of the Sultan and the colonizers’ (Shafi 2013: 420). But, like many

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contemporary translocal Zanzibaris returning to the 21st century’s simmering politics, Shafi (2013: 424) quickly found himself amid the ugliness: ‘it was like the people of Zanzibar were burning with the rash of politics… as if stung by a woolly caterpillar that burns everything it touches’. People were ‘politically divided, they weren’t talking with each other, they weren’t visiting with each other, they weren’t burying their dead together, they fought on [different] sides, everyone attached to her/​his side’ (Shafi 2013: 423). He lovingly describes the Ng’ambo of his youth, even as he shows how ill-​at-​ease the local politics left him. This sort of ambivalence and unease about the revolution from the revolutionaries’ side seldom finds expression in written form, at least in as lyrically rendered a form as it has in Shafi’s tale. This ambivalence toward the revolution can be expected in the writings of those exiled from Zanzibar after 1964. An ambivalent translocality between Europe and East Africa permeates British-​ Zanzibari author Abdulrazak Gurnah’s nine novels. In seven of them, the ambivalence lands squarely amid Zanzibar’s revolution and its long hangover. In the most notable of these, the ambivalence about revolutionary and post-​revolutionary Zanzibar is expressed through –​or together with  –​haunting, intimate relationships that are translocal and transversal. Gurnah’s (2017) most recent novel, Gravel heart, gradually reveals the traumas of a Ng’ambo family from different sides –​Zanzibar National Party (ZNP) supporters and the revolutionaries who overthrew them –​ but also fissures within these sides. The narrator and main character, Salim, gradually learns of his family’s duplicity in the revolution and post-​revolutionary politics. His mother’s father supported the party overthrown in the 1964 revolution (ZNP), and he was murdered in detention; Salim’s mother, Saida, becomes the mistress of a revolutionary leader, outside of her marriage to Salim’s seemingly aloof and troubled father, Masud; and her brother, Amir, marries that revolutionary’s sister as a stepping-​stone to his diplomatic career. Through Uncle Amir, Salim earns support to study in London while Amir is stationed there. But Salim is drifting in England. Ineffectual as a student, he manages to complete a degree and become a low-​level clerk in a borough council. Unable to form any attachments, failing at relationships, Salim returns to Zanzibar early in the 21st century, in his 30s, after his mother dies. Gurnah, in this novel as in others, is cynical about British colonialism, the Zanzibar revolutionaries, and the counter-​revolutionaries alike. Salim’s grandfather first voices Gurnah’s (2017: 17) sharp critique of colonialism: ‘No one bid the British to come here… They came

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because they are covetous and cannot help wanting to fill the world with their presence.’ Salim’s mother, Saida, articulates the ambivalence of many Zanzibaris about the revolution and its aftermath, having suffered loss and displacement and yet having benefitted materially through her relationship with ‘His Excellency the Minister’, the vice president’s eldest son (Gurnah 2017: 48). Samir’s crumpled and failed father, Masud, divorced and exiled to Kuala Lumpur with his own father, casts a shadow over the whole narrative. Only in the novel’s final third does the reader see Masud’s side of the story, when he too returns to Zanzibar from Malaysia after his ex-​wife’s death, and the rich, intimate complexity of the in-​between dialectic of ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ emerges. Masud lives in an apartment behind a shop in Mwembeladu, while Salim spent most of his childhood in an unnamed, but similar, older working-​class Swahili neighborhood in inner Ng’ambo. On Salim’s return, he lives with his half-​sister in one of the post-​revolutionary socialist-​style flats of Michenzani built in the center of old Ng’ambo, ‘modern blocks… along the widened and brightly-​lit new roads’ that replaced the ‘small houses because they were backward slums’ to the revolutionaries (Gurnah 2017:  31). As his father slowly unburdens himself of his sad life story in the book’s final chapters, the reader learns of his dead-​end career (prior to departing for Malaysia) at the Water Department in Gulioni, near the family home. Gurnah grounds Masud’s spiral retelling of the narrative from the Other Side –​this is the meaning of the place-​name, Ng’ambo –​in the intimacy of the place and its place-​names: Nowhere was very far from anywhere in [Ng’ambo], at least not at that time before it sprawled into the countryside, yet after every two streets the area had a different name and insisted on using it. It was pointless pedantry, like poetry, a delight in complexity, a relish for detail, a stubborn refusal to forget what was known. The precise naming had no practical use, since no one could get lost in that town, at least not the people who lived in it. (Gurnah 2017: 194) Masud’s perverse love/​hatred for the Other Side is wrapped up in the reality that he reveals to Salim at the novel’s end: Saida became mistress to the vice president’s son to affect Amir’s release from prison on false statutory rape charges, and Masud’s powerlessness to stop his family’s destruction proved his undoing. Gravel heart begins with Salim’s proclamation, ‘My father did not want me’ (Gurnah 2017: 3), but by the

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narrative’s end it is quite clear just how wrong Salim was. Yet he is not at peace once he recognizes his father’s deadened love, and what Glissant might have called the ‘tortured geography’ of his life remains unsettled. He knows he has nothing to return to in London, where, he tells his father, ‘the whole world ends up… The British never left anyone in peace and squeezed everything good out of everybody and took it home’ (Gurnah 2017: 251). He did not want to return there, ‘to join the other scavengers living off… rich people’s garbage’ (252), and were he to stay in Zanzibar he would be in a ‘place of content despite its deprivations, somewhere I could walk familiar streets and meet people I had known forever and breathe the air that was like old love’ (253). Yet, he does leave for London, only for his father to die in Zanzibar on that day, filling him with inconsolable regrets: ‘I should have stayed. What use was someone like me to this England? But then what use was someone like my father anywhere? Some people have a use in the world, even if it is only to swell a crowd and say yeah, and some people don’t’ (261). This brutal, blunt ending articulates the sense of the impossibility that so often bedevils the ‘Caribbean imagination’ of submarine connections, of a liberating creolization, around the global South. ‘Some people don’t’ have any use in this post-​colonial world, creolized such that they no longer fit anywhere.

Conclusion The character of each urban setting of this chapter diverges from the next, on religious, linguistic, ethnic, and political lines. Each city tells a very different story about urbanism in the 21st century, from the decline-​and-​sprawl at the same time in Port of Spain or San Juan to the festivalization of Cape Coast or Zanzibar. Although each urbanism can be described as post-​colonial and sometimes postcolonial (that is, existing in the aftermath of colonial rule but also contesting or attempting to reframe that aftermath) with strongly translocal identities and cultures, both the nature of the postcoloniality and the translocality differ. The colonial powers were different or operated in very different ways, and the influences of colonialism into the present vary, from the strong sense of independence in Cape Coast to the endurance of the American colonial moment in San Juan. One can see variations in how people have responded to ‘colonial logic’. All four cities have far-​flung diasporas that, when combined, would be larger than the city itself in population, but their relationalities back to ‘home’ take off in distinct directions. Some voices are trying to move past coloniality, while others embrace it and still others remain stuck in between. For

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every leader of an Alice Yard or Casa Taft 169, there are those, like the main character in Gravel heart who are resigned to the view that ‘some people have a use in the world… and others don’t’. This chapter tried to illustrate some of this variation through literature and the arts, in part because literature is the central field of postcolonial studies, and in part to get at what Unanue (2016) argued: ‘to make art means to have the capacity to transform what surrounds you’. Yet there are great variations to that transformative capacity, and to the directions of transformation. The chapter set out, following Glissant, to find translocal outcomes balancing mobility and situatedness to arrive at a ‘Caribbean imagination’ in between ‘reversion’ and ‘diversion’. These cases show some of these. There is, perhaps, a continuum on which contrast, contradiction, ambivalence, code-​switching, yo-​yoing, rhizomatic identities, contrarian tendencies, transgression, and play reside in each setting. Cultural work –​art, photography, music, or literature –​puts the ‘force of a people’ into motion toward where places connect with their elsewhere in a productive creolization. But these are also still four examples of the ‘countless pillaged Carthages’ of the Southern urban world. Rhizomes can pop up in surprising places, amid the ‘wounded stones’ of the ‘conquered city’. They can also whither in the black salt. This chapter has traveled far from the usual literatures of global urban studies in the social sciences, which typically seek to explain relationality economically. To what extent can the narratives of submarine urbanism in the 21st century be attributed to neoliberal urbanism instead of a poetics of relation? There are certainly ways in which such attribution can be established. All four examples here at some level involve the contemporary development of tourist economies meant to capitalize on the pillaged Carthages in their midst, dependent on diasporas who return, and do not return. But the more literary approach of this chapter has highlighted the nuances and differentiations in translocal identities through an exploration of postcolonial Southern literature and the arts in a manner that contrasts with the general silence on these nuances in Northern social science literatures. Chapter 5 moves back toward more familiar terrain for understanding relationality in urban studies –​infrastructure and trade –​but some of the more literary sensibilities of this chapter carry forward into the next, which retains a focus on the everyday lifeworlds and experiences of urban dwellers in the postcolonial global South.

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‘The Whole World Is Made in China’: Products and Infrastructures of Dis/connection Introduction In June 2016, I  was standing with a dozen US college students and colleagues on a street corner in Xiaobei, the ‘Chocolate City’ of Guangzhou, known for its African traders (Castillo 2014). My colleague, Xiangming Chen, and I were conversing with a Nigerian businessman, who told us he had come to Guangzhou to source molds for making plastic bottles for a Lagos water-​bottling factory. We asked him what impressions he had of Guangzhou, as well as of Chinese investors and goods in Africa. He said, ‘there is good China and bad China. Many African countries get bad China and the West gets good China.’ Whether good or bad, he concluded, the reality is that ‘the whole world is made in China’. This chapter focuses on this ‘made’ world, and specifically the urban world produced by the networks and interconnections of China’s ‘go West/​go global’ strategy and ‘Belt and Road’ initiative (Chen 2018), emphasizing urban sub-​Saharan Africa. The concentration lies with infrastructure. Airports, seaports, railroads, highways, oil and gas pipelines, drainage networks, mining facilities, agri-​business farm-​ factories, new cities, neighborhoods or housing developments, manufacturing factories, stadiums, and other infrastructure projects comprise the majority of investments from China in Africa, the rest of Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America (Xue et al. 2019). Chinese infrastructure investments are increasingly significant in the global North. By 2018, Cosco Shipping Ports and China Merchants Port Holdings, two major Chinese firms, controlled one fourth to one half of shipping

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in and out of Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Piraeus –​four of Europe’s seven largest seaports (Huang 2018). As of 2019, new trains for Boston’s subway and surface rail network were produced by a Chinese firm in Springfield, Massachusetts. Chinese investments in other case study cities of the book –​Port of Spain and Hartford, especially –​are also becoming more significant. The Shanghai Construction Company built the performing arts center dominating the southern edge of Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Savannah. A Chinese state-​owned enterprise redeveloped Port of Spain’s port (Inter-​American Dialogue 2018). The New York-​and China-​based financial-​technology firm Ideanomics purchased the University of Connecticut’s former West Hartford campus in 2018 to build a US $283 million ‘Fintech Village’ there (Lurye 2018). Ideanomics, a pioneer in the use of block-​chain technology for financing services, holds many contracts to assist Chinese transportation companies raise the financing for new investments –​in China, from Hartford. What the Nigerian manufacturer told us in Xiaobei in 2016 is not pure exaggeration –​if not the whole world, a proportion of the 21st-​ century urban world is made in China, or originating from China, or controlled by China. The political economy and geopolitical literatures are mind-​blowing in their vastness on China’s rising roles in the world, even in relation to Africa or the global South alone, even in relation to infrastructure alone (for example Alden 2007; Alden and Jiang 2019; Alden and Large 2019; Benabdallah 2016; Morgan and Zheng 2019; Rich and Recker 2013; Schindler and Kanai 2019; Tan-M ​ ullins and Mohan 2013). Yet analyses that take these flows and networks as abstractions may miss human dynamics essential to making this new urban world. Southern urban theory has turned attention to people-​ as-​infrastructure. Books and articles about infrastructure in the global South for a decade or more have argued for seeing infrastructure as vital, lively, or alive, including human and non-​human agency. Infrastructure clearly means more than a first glance might suggest. The 21st century’s return to materialism through poststructuralist thought has been influential in both cultural and economic geography, in emphasizing the agency of inanimate objects. This is significant to the ‘infrastructural turn’ in urban studies and urban political ecology. While ‘things’ literally are ‘more complex than what we make of them’, I share with Meier (2016: 6) that this approach ‘elides the historicity of all our accounts of objects in the world’ because these are ‘things created and sustained through the actual work of people’. This socio-​ material understanding of infrastructure can be balanced in a manner that is not alienating in its abstract philosophical orientation, paying

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attention to both how people construct, maintain, put into use, and destroy infrastructures, but also how infrastructures react back upon human society. Infrastructure concerns the ‘development of different types of technical and organizational networks’ (Gandy 2014: 2). In urban areas, infrastructure means networks for public transportation, railroads, roads, water, sewage, or electricity, the technologies that provide the ‘fabric’ or spatial logic of urbanism. Beyond this, though, global South urban scholarship on infrastructure is confronted with the reality of many infrastructural failures and invisible infrastructures. This latter phrase connects not simply to modern global North urban ideals of infrastructure networks that are underground, but also to those organizational networks one may not see –​such as social or political infrastructure. Scholars working on Southern urbanism who engage with the ‘infrastructural turn’ bring an understanding that recognizes ‘things’ as put into motion by humans. This work has strong ties with global North theorization, with its origins in ‘assemblage’ thinking (Dovey 2017; Farias 2017; McCann and Ward 2011; McFarlane 2011). Perhaps Southern urbanists seek to underscore Dovey’s (2017: 486) caution that ‘assemblage theory… involves a huge amount of jargon and requires a good knowledge of philosophy and social theory in order to even understand’; but she contends that Southern urbanists, too, are often ‘multiplying this complexity’. There are certainly ways in which a similar or comparable rethinking of lively infrastructures has emerged in the global North, particularly in the US context with the increasing failures of urban and social infrastructures. However, Southern work has gone further in bringing infrastructure to life, while lessening the jargon. This is particularly clear in relation to processes creating the infrastructure of political and economic globalization.

Economic/​geographic understandings for intersections of globalization and urbanization On one hand, when global North observers look at processes of globalization and their impacts on urbanization and urbanism, claims are made for the flattening of the earth, where differences and distances disappear (Friedman 2005). On the other hand, many scholars argue for a networked global urban hierarchy of interconnected urban areas (Castells 1996; Sassen 1991). The Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) approach has developed a broad and rich understanding of interconnections between urban areas fostered by globalization. Their collective studies have created map upon map of the world urban

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system’s infrastructure. Taylor (2012: 62) argued that the ‘interlocking network’ of their research offered ‘a generic description of what makes cities’ (emphasis mine). While he also briefly notes the alternative networks one might map if the network of concern were of UN agencies, diplomatic missions, non-​governmental organizations, or media conglomerates, the overwhelming emphases of GaWC researchers have been with economic indicators and infrastructures (Taylor 2012: 60). Advanced producer services and headquarters for advertising, law, financing, insurance, real estate, management firms, transnational corporations, airline networks, office spaces, capital flows, trade values, media firms, internet service providers, and even pornography websites find places in the GaWC’s quantitative and cartographic visions (see Derudder et al. 2012a). Lay one upon another and the infrastructure of their global urban system appears. It is complex and fascinating, but it is only one way of looking at how the world’s cities are interconnected, or how these and any other similar networks are ‘what make cities’. Other scholars have sought to come to grips with the interconnected world of cities –​what Glissant would have called the infrastructure of ‘relation’ between them, the ties across the archipelago. Shlomo Angel (2012: 16) argued for ‘shifting our gaze away from a small number of cities in the developed world’ and eschewing ‘the artificial distinction’ between global North and South to ‘study our planet of cities as a whole’. From within his statistical, abstract and spatial-​analytical framework, he urged a ‘focus on the urgent policy questions facing cities the world over’ (Angel 2012: 289). Michael Batty (2013) constructed an argument for ‘the new science of cities’ built from mathematical modelling, using it to attempt to move beyond the divisions between global North and South –​in effect implying that the science should work anywhere. Spencer (2015: 8) argued for a ‘global urban ecosystem’ changing human and non-​human worlds. He worked around the ‘science of cities’ sort of approach of Angel, Batty and others, because he saw it as ‘overly prescriptive’ and ‘devoid of complex human agency and a discernable human logic’ (Spencer 2015: 20). These are approaches that certainly explain aspects of what ties cities together. Both Angel and Spencer bring global South cities more into the analysis than most GaWC studies. But they remain approaches built from global North conceptualizations. Batty’s scientific approach does propose a shared, seemingly non-​ideological, language –​math –​but it also falls victim to what concerned Spencer:  it misses the human elements. When we look at the world of cities from below, it forces us to look at infrastructure differently. This is both literal (in examining flows and

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links that are South–​South and/​or outside of the economistic fixations of GaWC research) and figurative (in thinking beyond scientific and ecological abstractions). Although analysis of urban infrastructures has been a mainstay of urban studies and research on urban globalization from the beginning, arguably the 21st-​century revitalization of critical approaches to infrastructure owes significant debts to Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin’s (2001) Splintering urbanism. Some of their claims do not fit well with global South contexts –​they largely saw the ‘vast lattices of technological and material connections’ with Western or global North theoretical lenses as ‘sociotechnological processes’ in ‘modern society’ and articulated a transition from public networks to privatized systems (Graham and Marvin 2001: 10). But their empirical case studies were richly global, tied to their central argument about fragmentation. Globalization’s increasingly networked urban society was simultaneously splintering; successful roll-​outs of connections accompanied disconnections. In their words, ‘a parallel set of processes are under way within which infrastructure networks are being “unbundled” in ways that help sustain the fragmentation of the social and material fabric of cities’ (Graham and Marvin 2001:  33). Significantly, they contended that ‘it is no longer tenable (if it ever was) to divorce the study of Western and developed cities from those in the rest of the world’ (Graham and Marvin 2001: 35). This enabled them to create a robust framework for global comparative assessment of the splintering infrastructures within and between cities while mindful of ‘powerful differences and specificities’ (Graham and Marvin 2001:  35). They highlighted the means through which colonialism and neo-​colonialism warped urban infrastructural development for much of the world, weaving in examples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Finally, they noted the relationality of urban place-​making as a dynamic and multifaceted process, in a manner that resonated with scholars of the urban global South. Still, Graham and Marvin’s work underplayed global South distinctions from the global North in terms of infrastructure ideals, while overplaying the ties between ‘unified, integrated infrastructure’ and a ‘cohesive social fabric’ (Fox and Goodfellow 2016: 159). Pieterse and Hyman (2014: 197) argue that the book did ‘not offer much help in navigating the policy challenges’ in Southern cities, particularly with affordability. Global South scholarship on the life of urban infrastructure has brought scholars closer to what connects cities, internally and with one another, eschewing universalizing assumptions. Many important studies have centered on India’s cities.

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Colin McFarlane (2011) brought colonialism and urban politics centrally into the analysis of infrastructure, and Swati Chattopadhyay (2012a:  xvi) did much to bring infrastructure to life by stressing that the ‘material constitution of physical infrastructure’ was also an ‘optical field’ enlivened by people’s everyday activities. The street, as a physical infrastructural thing, is transformed amid a cricket match into ‘a meeting space between friends, neighbors and spectators watching from adjoining buildings’ (McFarlane 2017: 179). Nikhil Anand’s (2017: 7) study of water infrastructure in Mumbai showed how Western ideals of infrastructure’s seamless ties to urban liberal democracy ‘have been troubled by colonial histories, fickle natures, and restive publics’ (see also Chattopadyay 2012b). Rather than being material things in the background, forgotten until they break down, Anand (2017:  13) theorized that ‘infrastructures are flaky accretions of sociomaterial processes that are brought into being through relations with human bodies, discourses and other things… Processes always in formation and… always coming apart.’ As Larkin (2013: 329) put it, this means seeing infrastructures as ‘things and also the relation between things’. And in a postcolonial city, one must recognize that infrastructures were originally produced not to extend the thing called citizenship, but ‘to discriminate between those who were deserving of membership in the colonial city and those for whom the promises of liberal citizenship were deferred or denied’ (Anand 2017: 14). In such contexts of politicized distributions of infrastructures, for many ordinary urban residents the only options reside in everyday ‘relational infrastructures’ (Simone 2015: 18). Simone (2015: 18) contends that relations are ‘the tools through which political imaginations and claims are exerted’. Confronted with disappointment and exclusion, urban residents in the global South work toward the ‘incremental accretion of capacity and possibility’ in ‘unscripted’ reformulations of infrastructure (Simone 2015: 28). Although Simone was writing about Jakarta, it is highly relevant to the rest of Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In much of sub-​S aharan Africa, though, colonialism’s urban investments in infrastructure barely compare to those in a city like Mumbai. Water, electricity, solid waste management, roads, subways, rails, public transport, health care, schools, airports, land registration, political organizations –​it really doesn’t matter which way we think of infrastructure: where it was developed at all in colonial urban Africa, it served the interests of an incredibly small population of colonial administrators, White settlers, or elites.

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Infrastructure investments in Africa’s postcolonial cities thus became ‘key sites of performative government practice as well as claim making by elite and disenfranchised citizens alike’ as contestation developed over how and where to expend infrastructures in the aftermath of colonialism (Fredericks 2018: 14). Rosalind Fredericks’s study of solid waste management in Dakar sought to ‘recuperate a vital politics of material infrastructures’ by showing ‘how material geographies of trash matter to how government and citizenship are practiced’ (Fredericks 2018:  16). People engage with fragmenting infrastructural systems as a constantly changing ‘bricolage’ in a ‘landscape of disrepair and pollution’ to ‘salvage’ alternative infrastructures that are ‘vitally alive with bodies, communities, materials, and ritual practices’ (Fredericks 2018: 18, 149) in Senegal’s lively albeit hotly contested democracy (see also Acey 2018 on Nigerian water provision; Degani 2018 on electricity infrastructure in Dar es Salaam; or Oteng-​Ababio and Grant 2018 on infrastructure development in Accra). The context of colonial disinvestment and inequality, with the ensuing ‘landscape of disrepair and pollution’ (Fredericks 2018: 18) and continuation of a regime of disinvestment in infrastructures after independence produced African forms of Graham and Marvin’s (2001) ‘splintered network infrastructures’. Even as many cities in the region are now being further integrated into global circuits of capital, already unequal access and rights to the city’s physical and political infrastructure open into vast chasms of injustice and arenas for elite accumulation (Carolini 2018; Goodfellow 2017); Murphy and Carmody 2019; Power and Kirshner 2018). Although each urbanism in the region produces its own singularities, what seems to be emerging might be conceived of collectively as ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (Lawhon et al. 2018: 729), where the urban majority still confront ‘conditions of precarity’ despite massive investments in urban infrastructure. Pieterse and Hyman (2014: 196) have documented the endurance of infrastructural deficits in Africa’s low-​income countries, where cities remain far behind the rest of the global South in density for roads, phones, internet, improved water, improved sanitation, or power-​generation capacity. China’s rise on the continent marked an essential trend in this era of corporate takeovers of infrastructures, techno-​managerial project-​based infrastructure investment, the rise of a consumer perspective on infrastructure provision, and the spatial decentralization of ‘polynucleated urban regions’ in Africa (Pieterse 2008: 24–​30). Failures, splinters, and bricolage provide an opening for appreciating the substantive, material difference that Chinese urban infrastructure investments have made for

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21st-​century Africa –​even where that material difference exacerbates colonial-​era splintered urban infrastructures (Carolini 2018).

Chinese FDI and urbanization in Africa For scholars and residents of urban Africa, China’s swift rise on the continent is the dominant theme of the 21st century (Johnson 2018; Taylor 2011). A traveler notices this immediately because she or he may be arriving at a new, Chinese-​built airport and then traveling to a hotel or other arrival destination by a Chinese-​built light rail or highway. Shopping trips or cultural events (a soccer match, a theater performance) bring further evidence, at Chinese-​built shopping malls, stadiums, or concert halls. Chinese restaurants or food stores are becoming commonplace in urban Africa. These first impressions are misleading. While outward foreign direct investment (FDI) flows from China into Africa grew from under a half-​billion US dollars in 2003 to more than US $32 billion by 2014, only 6.2 percent of China’s global FDI flows are to Africa (He and Zhu 2018: 110). An overwhelming majority of those flows are still toward a few sectors of a few countries’ economies –​oil, gas, mining, or natural resources. Almost 80 percent of China’s imports from Africa were mineral products, while heavy machinery mainly for those industries made up 29 percent of China’s exports to the continent as of 2010. As He and Zhu (2018: 109) point out, however, there is a growing ‘complexity and diversity’ to the rest of the investment, on both ends, which requires unpacking. One also cannot speak of a single ‘Chinese’ relationship with or impact on urban Africa, as these ‘vary greatly across the continent’ (Monson, Xiaoyang and Shaonan 2017:  150). Chinese investments have extended out of oil, gas, natural resources, urban real estate, and infrastructure, into rural areas and agriculture, and Chinese investors attempt to apply the lessons of Shenzhen to different sub-​Saharan settings (Bräutigam and Xiaoyang 2009, 2011). There is a complex history and geography to China–​Africa urban infrastructural dynamics and Chinese impacts on African urban development, rife with variation, complexity, and diversity. Urbanization in China itself and Chinese roles in the urbanization of the rest of the world are mightily significant. Harvey (2008: 28) contended that urbanization in China was ‘the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today’. Chen (2018: 36) notes the scale and connectivity of ‘China’s infrastructure-​led approach to globalization’: China ‘stepped up to the front’ in globalization as nationalist and protectionist agendas led many global North powers to retreat. This is clear in

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China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initiated in 2013 (Schindler and Kanai 2019). The BRI’s US $1 trillion in development plans, centered on infrastructure for trade, will eventually involve 60 countries and 65 percent of the world’s population (Chen 2018: 44). The scale of China’s significance in connecting the world through the BRI can be represented in numerous ways: China is the leading trading partner of 124 countries, compared to only 56 whose largest trading partner is the US (Chen 2018: 38). The rest of Asia is the largest priority region for China. The BRI incorporates 11 new rail lines across Eurasia into Europe, too, and trade, investment, and development in Latin America factors in –​for energy needs, infrastructure investment, manufacturing, and trade. Sub-​Saharan Africa lies in Zone 4, the ‘western end’ of the BRI’s planning map (Chen 2018). By 2014, seven African countries exported more than 25 percent of their exports to China, and 11 African countries received more than US $100  million each in FDI from China (Johnston 2018). Given the depth and importance of China to so many countries, Chinese investments in African urban infrastructure are still somewhat understudied despite scholarly interest in China’s roles in African development generally (Monson, Xiaoyang and Shaonan 2017). More than half of the US $60 billion in loans from China to African countries in 2015 targeted infrastructure, most of it either urban or inter-​urban, such as the new standard gauge rail line from Mombasa to Nairobi in Kenya (Johnston 2018). Within urban areas, too, Chinese investments are transformative. One major spatial consequence of the trend of demographic growth without corresponding economic growth that has been prominent in sub-​Saharan Africa is that the substantial physical expansion of the urban footprint, typically on the peri-​urban edges of cities, occurs with limited formal planning. This phenomenon of peri-​urban informality connects with the China–​Africa narrative in two ways. First, the increasing Chinese residency in cities in Africa is tangible in the built environment, housing markets, and urban culture, and the changes resonate outward to the peri-​urban areas. In Dakar, for instance, the main zone of Chinese settlement is a middle-​class area around the Boulevard de Centenaire built in the 1950s and ‘meant to resemble Avenue des Champs Elysées’ (Kouoh 2012:  i). While Dakar’s large Chinese highway and airport projects met long-​recognized transportation infrastructure needs, the routes directly disadvantaged the peri-​urban neighborhoods of Pikine. The speculative residential construction at the economic high end led by this Chinese investment ups the price of urban real estate further

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beyond the reach of ordinary residents, driving more people to places like Pikine, where densifying informal construction then further displaces people. Pikine’s severe floods led to a strong presence in the built environment of abandoned houses; combined with the rising costs of remaining housing, community leaders saw the rise of both severe overcrowding and out-​migration of Pikinois to rural areas (Chen and Myers 2013; Myers 2015 and 2016). Chinese investment in seemingly more affordable housing in some cities, or in infrastructure projects with local training and employment payoffs, might make substantial differences on the continent (Xue et al. 2019). But the projects are often ‘ill-​conceived’ (He and Zhu 2018: 126) and disconnected from local ideas for urban planning and development. Moreover, Africa’s infrastructure shortfalls are so substantial, still, that even these Chinese investments in filling the gaps would not suffice (Kararach 2017). Given the centuries in which infrastructure development financed and driven by outside interests has been shaped for extraction and ‘transmission to the master nations’, where roads, railroads, ports, and airports were designed without regard to internal connectivity or backward linkages, it is hardly surprising to see the suspicions that greet 21st-​century Chinese infrastructure projects around Africa that rely on Chinese financing, firms, and laborers to build infrastructure to facilitate exports to China (Ncube, Lufumpa and Kararach 2017: 648). India, Brazil, South Korea, and Turkey are emerging as alternative non-​traditional partners, but similar concerns arise for most urban Africans. In 2011, the African Development Bank (AfDB) launched a new urban development strategy on the continent that rested on three pillars: (1) infrastructure delivery and maintenance; (2) urban governance; and (3)  private sector development. While much of this effort is geared toward garnering and mobilizing domestic resources to ‘make’ urban Africa, the reality is that AfDB’s partners in financing its urban development strategy are the World Bank, United Nations-​Habitat, and development agencies from the US, the UK, Sweden, and Germany (Lufumpa, Mubila and Yepes 2017: 503–​4). Claims of China ‘making’ urban Africa’s infrastructure without the dominant Western powers ultimately seem overstated in that context. To examine this in greater empirical detail, the next segment focuses on China in Zanzibar –​where the roster of urban development partners compares with the roster across the region, with some variations (China, but also Germany, Finland, South Korea, the US, Oman, the World Bank, the United Nations, and a few domestic and international private sector actors).

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Chinese infrastructure and people-​as-​infrastructure in Zanzibar The history of Chinese trade with the East African coast is extensive. In contemporary terms, China’s role in the 1960s and 1970s in constructing the Tanzania–​Zambia Railway symbolizes the special bond between China and Tanzania. As many as 50,000 Chinese surveyors, engineers and work crews, mostly from Guangzhou, lived in Tanzania and Zambia during the most intensive years of Tazara’s creation, 1970–​ 74 (Monson 2009: 33). Yet the 21st century brought an unparalleled increase in Chinese investment and settlement in urban Tanzania. Very few Chinese settled in Tanzania, or in any sub-​Saharan African countries, until the turn of the millennium. The number of Chinese living in Africa grew from a few thousand a decade ago to between one and two million across the continent today (Chen and Myers 2013; Wong 2019). This presence is evident in urban Tanzania. On some level, the Chinese relationship with Tanzania on the mainland stalled somewhat under President John Magufuli (2015–​). Tanzania awarded tenders for a planned new high-​speed rail linking Dar es Salaam with the capital, Dodoma, and Dar es Salaam’s new international airport terminal to Turkish firms, rather than Chinese competitors. Other projects with Chinese connections that began with great fanfare –​a model satellite city in Kigamboni in Dar es Salaam and a new port at Bagamoyo –​slowed down with Magufuli’s emphasis on Dodoma in urban policy. As other expatriate communities appeared to shrink in the Magufuli era, however, the Chinese community maintained a notable presence. The map and cityscape of Dar es Salaam display this in numerous locations. Shenzhen-​based smart-​phone giant Huawei Corporation is a major presence in Dar –​its secondary African hub behind Lagos (He and Zhu 2018: 118). But it is in Zanzibar where the Chinese socio-​technical infrastructural presence has been and remains the most proportionally substantial among Tanzania’s urban areas. Zanzibar’s urban development relationships with the People’s Republic of China –​filtered through the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, not Zanzibar’s municipal government or the United Republic of Tanzania –​have been strong since the 1964 revolution (the People’s Republic of China was the first country to recognize the People’s Republic of Zanzibar, as it was named from 12 January until the 26 April 1964 union with Tanganyika). A Chinese planning team produced the city’s 1982 Master Plan, the most comprehensive plan Zanzibar has ever had. It resulted in layouts for more than 50 urban and suburban areas, a new vision and map for

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governmental operations, a new radio and telecommunications center, improved electricity, road, transport, water, and drainage networks, and renewed efforts to manage land urbanization. The plan contained extensive maps and diagrams for all proposed infrastructure –​roads, drainage, electricity, facilities, and more. The Chinese followed through implementing the plan into the 1990s. Chinese interests –​represented through a large and active consulate since the revolution  –​waned somewhat in the early 2000s, but closer to the present urban investment picked up again in intensity. Chinese contractors rebuilt the national stadium, Amani Stadium, into a sparkling showcase, and did the same for the secondary Mao Zedong Stadium. A series of other contracts followed. In 2018, a Chinese state-​owned enterprise was awarded the contract for redeveloping the city’s Kwahani neighborhood. The plan entailed demolition of the entire existing area and its replacement with an orderly set of apartments. Originally, the intent was to demolish all of the historic Ng’ambo area and replace it with apartments. The Zanzibar Social Security Fund (ZSSF) allocated a plot to a Chinese company directly in the middle of the frequently proposed city center of the 1945, 1968, 1982, and 2015 Master Plans for Zanzibar, in the Raha Leo quarter of the revolutionary-​era Michenzani apartment complex, for development of a massive new shopping mall. Other donors and investors have a major presence, too. The World Bank has provided funding for several different infrastructure initiatives in the city that might seem at first outside the sweep of Chinese influence. The first is a massive program to build and rehabilitate stormwater drainage systems throughout the city, the Zanzibar Urban Support Program (ZUSP). ZUSP came after decades of waterlogged communities living with putrid standing water as breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes and cholera. ZUSP’s first two phases costs US $38 and 55 million, and the third was projected at US $100 million. The main project entailed constructing a 20.3-​kilometer drainage network, including a 10-​kilometer long underground drainage channel to carry water from several lakes and ponds around which dozens of homes have been inundated each year in the rainy season. ZUSP also has had numerous smaller projects –​rebuilding the sea wall at Forodhani in Stone Town, providing streetlights, and creating a new landfill for the city, 20 kilometers to the east. The World Bank backed the Zanzibar Mapping Initiative, which put drones and high technology to work for ‘supporting evidence-​based and innovative solutions to better plan, mitigate, and prepare for natural disasters’, including the widespread flooding ZUSP aims to alleviate (Mbuya 2018) (Figure 5.1).

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Figure 5.1 New drainage infrastructure, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

A third (partially) World Bank-​funded scheme involves a combination of initiatives begun through partnerships of the revolutionary government’s Department of Urban and Rural Planning (DoURP) with the Netherlands government, the City of Amsterdam, and the Netherlands-​based African Architecture Matters (AAM) organization, to create a green corridor through the center of Ng’ambo, as part of producing Ng’ambo Tuitakayo (The Other Side That We Want) –​a

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new city center, through interlocking small-​scale, incremental and ideally participatory local area planning (LAP) initiatives. The green corridor project within the Ng’ambo Tuitakayo LAP was awarded to a South Korean firm. The Ng’ambo Tuitakayo initiative overall, though, witnessed a gap between the more participatory and democratic objectives of DoURP and AAM, and the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar’s consistently top-​down, authoritarian tactics. The geospatial data infrastructure for urban planning and land management in Zanzibar has been expanding and contracting for more than 30 years well beyond the recent Zanzibar Mapping Initiative, largely through links to Finland. The Finns have had major roles in producing GIS and geospatial data for Zanzibar, from the 1989–​96 aid program known as the ZILEM (Zanzibar Integrated Lands and Environmental Management) project, through the Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment (SMOLE) program (2002–​09), to contemporary cooperation at departmental levels in what is termed SMOLE II. These programs have produced the beginnings of a lands information system and the Zanzibar Spatial Data Infrastructure (ZANSDI) network, meant eventually to serve across all government ministries and the private and popular sectors in any development projects. Technical expertise and political will come and go, such that the infrastructure remains incomplete and access to it quite limited (Myers 2008 and 2011). Each scheme identified earlier as ‘new’ or residing seemingly outside of Chinese influence is thoroughly in keeping with the PRC’s 1982 Master Plan:  completely re-​engineered and comprehensive drainage, the provision of green space, and the relocation of the city center activities to the Raha Leo/​Michenzani high point of the older areas of Ng’ambo. Even the spatial data infrastructure schemes are reformulations of the land management systems conceived in the 1982 Chinese Master Plan. And the largest program, by far, is the World Bank’s ZUSP drainage scheme –​the contract for which belongs to China Railway Jianchang Engineering Company (CRJE). None of these projects entered the urban landscape without controversy. I have witnessed and participated in three decades of debate between government units ambitious for development and those eager to protect the fragile insular environment of Zanzibar, amid contentious relations between these government units and a restive and deeply politically divided public. The debates also parallel debates between those wedded to a top-​down vision of governance with strong roots in Chinese and East European communist planning, those seeking to build a neoliberal Zanzibar, and those with populist–​participatory ambitions for planning. Within the effected communities, a similar

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continuum of perspectives exists. In 2019, one of ZUSP’s technical consultants suggested that the three main problems of implementing their drainage scheme were: (1) socio-​political issues of compensation for houses demolished in the drainage network’s construction; (2) ‘cultural intransigence’, where people continued to throw trash into open drains or moved back into areas that had been drained once the project made that possible (despite it still being illegal); and (3) ‘poverty, because, let’s face it, this is a poor country’. Some 40 homes had to be demolished by early 2019, and people were paid compensation; ‘to do the project properly, we might have demolished 300, but we can’t do things the way Mussolini did’. ZUSP’s engineers and CRJE’s managers instead remapped the drainage systems to minimize demolitions by burrowing the drains under roads as much as possible –​and only one lane of road, to minimize the road reconstruction costs. Otherwise, as one engineer said in 2019, ‘the road building costs would be larger than the drainage system costs’. As a result, however, another engineer said, ‘this was supposed to be a one and a half-​year project; they now say it is to be three, but it won’t be done in four’. (All quotations are anonymous.) Even so, the ZUSP project was farther along than the green corridor, the new town center project, or the scheme to reconstruct Kwahani. The Ng’ambo (New City Centre) LAP (that is the Ng’ambo Tuitakayo plan) was one of ten LAPs the Zanzibar government developed for towns on Unguja, as part of DoURP’s National Spatial Development Strategy. Its goal was to ‘harness the positive transformative power of urbanisation in Zanzibar’ (DoURP 2016: 6). The plan focuses only on the four quadrants of Ng’ambo defined by the intersection of the ‘Michenzani’ roads –​a physical pattern that Zanzibari historian Abdul Sheriff refers to as ‘the crucifixion of Ng’ambo’ for its cross-​like shape and destructive legacy (DoURP and AAM 2019). This is the most comprehensive, careful, and engaged plan for Ng’ambo in history, with eight action plans, each of which is multifaceted. Were it to be developed and implemented with popular participation along the lines the plan’s authors envisioned, it would mark a substantial improvement to the infrastructure of everyday life in Ng’ambo. It is the first plan in the city’s history to see Ng’ambo’s ‘existing morphology of the urban fabric’ as ‘representing an important part of the largest Swahili City in the world in the late 19th and early 20th century’ (DoURP 2016: 96; Myers 1993 and 2003). It was created with the histories and impacts of the more than 57,000 residents of the 15 urban locations (shehia) in the plan area in mind. Yet every individual proposal within the plan is just that –​a proposal. Each proposal segment within the plan ends

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with a list of possible stakeholders, and each of those lists includes unnamed ‘private investors’. The clash of the plan’s ambitions with the realities of implementation is evident in several key zones. For instance, the plan sensitively reminded the reader that Ng’ambo’s Raha Leo Civic Centre was ‘a public space in the first place’ and proposed to ‘return it to the citizen’. The idea was to remake the area as a cultural zone based on history, radio, theater and cinema. It would be adjacent to a new Zanzibar CBD Metro Central Station and a shopping mall. Five years in, the only element implemented is the shopping mall, with a Chinese contractor, and it was not built where the plan envisioned, but in the planned public greenery and market area (Figure 5.2). The Kwahani redevelopment is adjunct to the City Center Plan: it lies east of the official planning area (the ‘crucified Ng’ambo’) for that program. DoURP and the Revolutionary Government seemed ambivalent about the Kwahani plan, and recognized some of the valuable history of the neighborhood, by including a few vignettes from elderly residents in their planning document for Phase I of the redevelopment. Kwahani began as an early 20th-​century Ng’ambo area, on the land of Kelbali Khan –​hence the place-​name, which is Swahili for

Figure 5.2 New shopping mall under construction, Raha Leo, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

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‘(the land) of Khan’. In the 1930s, Khan allocated small plots in long straight lines for hut construction around what the British used, until 1939, as polo grounds, which Zanzibaris called the Field of Horses (Myers 1993). Kwahani has always been subject to regular flooding in the monsoon season, with the old polo grounds becoming a swamp. As a low-​lying area at some distance from the colonial city center, Kwahani became a low-​income, working-​class African area, and eventually its residents were strongly allied to the revolutionary Afro-​Shirazi Party (ASP), and the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM, Revolutionary Party) after the 1977 unification of ASP with the mainland’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) to form Tanzania’s ruling party. It was the home constituency of Amani Karume before he became Zanzibar’s president in 2005. Perhaps given this history, it was a puzzle within the government as to what produced the Kwahani redevelopment program, since it emerged outside of the various planning initiatives discussed earlier. The only document thus far available for the plan is very limited in its details, which boil down to these three bullet points: • ‘The Government of Zanzibar is now planning to redevelop the Kwahani area by rebuilding new apartment houses; enhance services; improve infrastructure; improve green areas and restructure the accessibility. • The redevelopment will be realised in four phases… • The redevelopment of Kwahani is part of the Government’s plan to re-​build the New City Center of Zanzibar Town.’ (DoURP 2018: 7) This last claim is geographically at odds with the City Center Plan and the private views of most DoURP planners. The departments of Urban and Rural Planning, Lands, and Surveys and Mapping had been oriented around the Ng’ambo Tuitakayo, green corridor, and ZUSP programs. The first two of these projects clearly demarcated the ‘new city center’ of Zanzibar to be the four ‘quadrants’ of the ‘crucified’ Ng’ambo area, and Kwahani lies to the east beyond that (DoURP 2015). CRJE, which earned the tender from the ZSSF to build the Raha Leo Shopping Mall, and the Hainan International construction company that built the new Ministry of Lands, Housing and Construction building in Maisara (that is both projects within the boundaries for the new city center) were the subjects of rumors around who was proposing what for Kwahani in January 2019. By November 2019, the Kwahani project’s particulars had not been made public, but

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the project first phase had begun with the demolition of houses along the southern edge’s main road and construction of apartments. The new English-​language newspaper in the city launched its first issue that month with the banner headline, ‘Kwahani new city takes off’. Planners and residents accepted that the new buildings seemed well-​ built, but still out of the planning boundary, and out of character for the cityscape. Many other Chinese remakings of Zanzibar were also far from complete as of 2019. Others may never be complete. The city’s physical infrastructure would be remade in many respects once these projects reached completion. The ‘fabric of space’, as Gandy (2014) called it, would be a Chinese fabric woven under and through the city, with patches of Germany, Korea, Tanzania, or Oman. From port to airport, from a drainage network underground to the radio waves from the Chinese-​built radio station, from the playgrounds and soccer grounds to the rifles in the military parade grounds, most of Zanzibar could be claimed as ‘made’ in China. And yet, as has been seen for more than 170 years in Zanzibar town, the real fabric of space is made by Zanzibaris, in relations with one another. When Zanzibaris throw trash in an open trench or attempt to rebuild in a flood zone once a proper drainage system is in place, at some level they are consciously tearing at that foreign fabric, reinforcing the theme of Bwana MSA in Mohamed Said Abdulla’s Zanzibari crime novels: deliberately doing kinyume cha mambo, ‘the opposite of matters’. But it is not only in these contrarian, negative ways that we see the people-​as-​infrastructure reorganize the infrastructure. The Ng’ambo Tuitakayo and green corridor projects can serve as pertinent examples. The Kikwajuni ‘quadrant’ of the new town center, including the shehia (wards/​locations) of Kikwajuni Juu, Kikwajuni Bondeni, Kisiwandui, and Kisimamajongoo, has been utterly transformed from within in the last 30  years. Ng’ambo Tuitakayo envisions surgical removal of some of its single-​story homes and their replacement with northern European-​style, small-​scale modular apartment buildings, and the green corridor envisions replanting the treescape of its edges and roadways. Ordinary residents of Kikwajuni, meanwhile, often reliant on relatives living abroad –​and this is an area of the city with many translocal residents –​invested on their own in building three-​, four-​, and five-​ story buildings, often apartment buildings, based on their own plans. The Ng’ambo atlas, produced and published by the DoURP and AAM (2019) team, documented 23 multi-​story Swahili houses, 19 of what the researchers called ‘Swahili 2020’ (modernist Swahili) houses, and 13 apartment buildings (other than the socialist-​era Michenzani and

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Kikwajuni apartment buildings) by 2018 in the Kikwajuni quadrant, for a total of 55 privately developed or self-​constructed residential buildings with greater verticality; 12 more such buildings were under construction. My 1992 dissertation fieldwork mapping of the same quadrant found 32 buildings that would have fit the atlas’s categories, meaning an absolute increase of 23 –​that is, a 75 percent increase in multi-​story residential structures in 25 years. Residents have planted shrubs and trees on their own plots –​date palm, pomegranate, lime, rose, and jasmine comprise small green corridors all over these mitaa (neighborhoods). What the planners produced, one Kikwajuni resident noted, was ‘Ng’ambo waitakayo [the Ng’ambo they (the planners) want]’, whereas the Ng’ambo that the residents want would be plain as day to anyone walking its alleys. It would be a neighborhood where the socio-​cultural and physical–​technical infrastructures co-​produced one another in lively, vivid responses to state-​and outsider-​driven agendas. And this co-​production process is linked with Tanzanian and Zanzibari communities around the world. Even in 1992, one fourth of inner Ng’ambo households had access to funds sent from relatives in Europe, North America, and Asia, and they invested these funds, overwhelmingly, in the upgrading of homes and domestic surroundings (Myers 1993).

African traders in the Pearl River Delta There is a deep history of African traders in Hong Kong and the PRD, but Guangzhou has long hosted the largest number of African migrants in China, including a Zanzibari community (Mathews 2007; Mathews, Lin and Yang 2017). Unsurprisingly, the largest African communities come from larger countries, such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are significant trader populations from smaller countries like Mali or the Republic of Congo. But Tanzanian and Zanzibari residents and traders are integral to these communities (Mathews, Lin and Yang 2017). Christiane Badgley, narrator, writer, director, and producer (with Erica Marcus) of the documentary film, Guangzhou dream factory, showcased interview clips with Africans from 12 different countries in her 2016 film, including Tanzania. The flags of a half-​dozen East African countries adorn the external walls of one warehouse, also including Tanzania. Tanzanian traders typically make the long-​haul journey to Guangzhou either via Addis Ababa, Dubai, or Doha. On a Doha–​Dar es Salaam Qatar Airways flight in August 2018, eight of the ten Black Tanzanians on the flight, two of whom were Zanzibari, were coming from Guangzhou, and I  struck up a

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conversation as we waited in the Doha airport. Most people in the group (six out of eight) were men, who told me that they made this flight as many as two or three times per year; the two women said they journeyed less frequently. None of them had plans yet to move their business and trade elsewhere in China or Asia. But when I asked if this was because they liked Guangzhou or China, or because they felt that the Chinese liked them, all of the group scoffed: ‘they like our money’, said one. ‘As long as you bring money they don’t care who you are.’ A woman leader of the Ugandan community told Badgley and Marcus (2016), ‘you have to have a lot of brains to make it in China’. A Kenyan trader told Mathews, Lin and Yang (2017: 77), ‘you need to just put up with the discrimination as a lesson in life… In Africa, we have friends and we visit their home. Don’t expect that from the Chinese. In Guangzhou, it’s all business.’ The costs, harassments, and indifference in the PRD led to ‘make+shift’ solutions for many African traders. The first and easiest shifts were to nearby cities like Foshan, when Guangzhou became overly securitized for many traders. Others sought opportunities in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam (Badgley and Marcus 2016). Even as early as 2009, there were at least 2,000 Nigerian residents of Vietnam, most in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) –​enough to form a Nigerian Union of Vietnam (Spencer 2015: 86). Nigerians, though, like other Africans in Saigon, have faced ‘local unfamiliarity with African cultures and a latent racial bias toward Africans’ (Spencer 2015: 90). Nevertheless, African migrants to East and Southeast Asia were most commonly located in the PRD in the late 20th and 21st centuries, and still concentrated mostly in Guangzhou by 2019. Temporary migrants from Africa in Guangzhou may number in the hundreds of thousands in a peak year (609,800 Africans stayed overnight in Guangzhou in 2014), most of whom are in the PRD for trade (Su 2016). Demographic claims for permanent African migrants to the region are notoriously difficult. The Guangzhou government found only 16,000 Africans registered as permanent migrants in October 2014, but, with migrants increasingly flowing between Guangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan, and Hong Kong, the real number of Africans who consider the PRD as home may fluctuate dramatically between the small numbers for registered permanent residents and the massive numbers of people who circulate in and out (Pelican and Dong 2017; Su 2016). Zhigang Li’s 2012 survey research found that three fourths of Africans living in the Xiaobei area in Guangzhou were on tourist visas, and yet as many as 25 percent of these residents had been in Guangzhou for more than two years. As Ivan Su (2016: 21) put it, ‘Guangzhou turned a blind eye

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to many African traders who were overstaying their visas and opened the door to conducting business on a short-​term tourist visa’. In Su’s 2014–​15 survey research, almost half of the African migrants came from Nigeria and 90 percent were male; proximity to Hong Kong often made the circulation in and out of Guangzhou possible in visa terms –​one interviewee had been circling in and out via Hong Kong for 11 years (Su 2016). One trader from Congo had been in Xiaobei for 12 years when we spoke in 2016. He noted that ‘it is hard to say exactly how many people are here from African countries’. Even for the Congolese population, he did not know exact numbers, because the population is fluid: ‘People are moving in and out all the time.’ Despite Nigerian community leader Emmy McAnthony’s (in Badgley and Marcus’s 2016 film) optimistic vision that ‘anything is possible in Guangzhou’, he later acknowledged, ‘no one will help you’. As this chapter’s interest lies with infrastructure and with products or goods in the globalization of cities, let us examine Africans in the PRD in terms of the ‘fabric of space’. Like similar portions of Baiyun or Tianhu Districts, Baohan Street within Xiaobei in Yuexiu District has been physically and socially transformed by the influences of traders from more than a dozen African countries (Pelican and Dong 2017). Baohan Street lies in a chengzhongcun within Xiaobei, and it is directly adjacent to a set of wholesale markets where African traders operate as both buyers and sellers (Su 2016). One wholesale market that I visited had wall clocks in its administrative office that displayed the time in Brazzaville, Bamako, Cairo, Shanghai, and New York. In socio-​infrastructural terms, Africans in Guangzhou ‘make’ places like Xiaobei. In part this is because, as one trader from Nigeria told Su (2016: 20), in contrast to the West, where African migrants often perform menial labor for small salaries, in Guangzhou ‘we don’t have jobs. We set ourselves up.’ Another trader told Badgley and Marcus (2016) ‘there are no jobs here’, and, as a result, African residents must make their own plans –​people are the infrastructure. Sometimes, that entails marriage or long-​term romantic relationships with Chinese people (Lan 2015; Mathews, Lin and Yang 2017). Other migrants –​ notably western Chinese Muslim Uyghur migrants –​also set themselves up on Baohan Street. Roberto Castillo (2014:  235) noted that ‘Uyghurs have “Africanized” their grills and… prepare whole chickens and fish “Africa style” ’ while ‘Ghanaian, Nigerian, Malian, and Angolan’ migrants had ‘family kitchens run out of apartment rooms’. African Pentecostal Christians have established another kind of infrastructure, in the district’s dozens of churches for African (mainly Nigerian) congregants, as has happened in African transnational and

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translocal communities around the world (Haugen 2017; Okome 2012; Vaughan 2011). By 2015, various pressures were forcing changes to Baohan Street. On the one hand, for some long-​time African residents, prosperity led to migration out to higher-​income areas of Guangzhou or Foshan. On the other hand, the rising costs of living in Xiaobei (with rent increases between 10 and 30 percent) forced other residents into even more marginal chengzhongcun (Su 2016). Hostility from the police and from ordinary Chinese residents forced a rigorous order onto African migrants, a vigilance regarding their uses of space and documentation, and Foshan proved to have less harassment for traders (Su 2016). A Nigerian trader told Badgley and Marcus (2016), ‘people are leaving. If you come back in three years there might not be anyone for you to interview.’ Yet, by 2019, African communities in Guangzhou and the PRD had hardly disappeared. The PRD’s ‘chocolate cities’ continued to manifest the global spirit of people-​as-​infrastructure in ‘improvised lives’ (Simone 2019).

Conclusion This chapter began and ended in Guangzhou; the intent was to probe the veracity of a statement from a Nigerian businessman there in 2016: is ‘the whole world… made in China?’ Of course it is not, but it is undeniable that the rise of Chinese investments in urban infrastructures are impacting most of the world. I have focused here on sub-​Saharan African cities. While in percentage, volume, value or proportion it is evident that other regions of the world are dominant domains for these investments, China still has been more palpably impactful in urban Africa. Chinese infrastructure projects have come in the wake of very rapid urbanization in much of the region over the last four or five decades amid a dire lack of functioning physical infrastructure. The infrastructural turn in urban studies moves the conversation beyond seeing just physical infrastructure  –​perhaps particularly in global South contexts, and of absolute necessity in sub-​Saharan African contexts. If infrastructures are what make cities, then African urbanism requires one to rethink them as more-​than-​material. This is true both within a city and between urban areas across the region and the planet. This chapter follows many works in urban African studies in highlighting the human dimensions, and the notion of seeing both ‘people-​as-​infrastructure’ and the people who put infrastructures in place, maintain, or sabotage them.

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Is China’s role unique and different from what cities in Africa have had before? It has not been my aim here to weigh the geopolitical claims of China as an agent of neo-​colonialism as opposed to a completely new type of player, and others have already made a range of assessments of this. I am more interested with testing the degree to which this new era of such significant South–​South transfers of infrastructural richness are remaking urban Africa. In Glissantian thought, here articulated by his collaborator and mentee, Patrick Chamoiseau (in Wiedorn 2018: 120), the ‘problematic is… of countries… and of peoples connected to the totality of the world, who must lay the foundations and live the exchange that changes’. Surely, the infrastructures of connection and disconnection across the continent increasingly owe their physical being to the other BRICS countries alongside China, and to the World Bank, Turkey, Korea, Japan, and the traditional development partners. Chinese firms, whether state-​owned enterprises or other entities, often enter into complex partnerships with some of these other players. China’s infrastructure investments in Zanzibar show this. One sees a deeper history and breadth of concerns in Zanzibar, perhaps, in comparison to many cities in Africa, but also complicated partnering –​with the World Bank, Korea, Finland, and other agencies entering in and around China’s purview –​in how countries and people ‘lay the foundations and live the exchange that changes’. Ultimately, when we ask if the whole world is indeed being ‘made’ in China, the answers are complicated. In the Zanzibar example, it seems that the city is made, as it has been for several centuries, more by the everyday place-​making of ordinary residents, on top of or countering a ‘fabric’ intended to be shaped by Chinese designs and engineering. And, as the ending segment of the chapter shows, one can also see in Guangzhou the reverse, where African traders are ‘making’ urban China, or at least a few parts of the PRD, as they ‘live the exchange that changes’. Infrastructure and politics are inseparable, which made it hard to divide this chapter’s material from the ‘policy’ chapter that follows it. If a Glissantian poetics of relationality suggests, as Simone would have it, that relations like those creating infrastructures are the ‘tools through which political imaginations and claims are exerted’, then it is clearly necessary to delve further into those political imaginations, as Chapter 6 aims to do.

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Urban Politics and Policy in a Southern Urban Planet Introduction Analysis of urban politics is in flux within global urban studies. For years, the predominant focus of global North urban studies in analyzing urban politics resided with understanding growth machines and urban regimes (Logan and Molotch 1987; Ross and Levine 2012; Stone 1989). Recently, there has been a general change in focus from discreet units at scale (that is a city government) to a ‘relational’ approach, because ‘a bounded city perspective has become increasingly problematized with a growing recognition that socio-​spatial relations have transformed as a consequence of globalization processes’ (Davidson and Martin 2014: 3). More attention is paid to relationships between cities or to how urban areas’ politics are networked than to how finite governments, local party politics, or elite machines operate to run a city. This stress on relationality ‘has highlighted the increasingly open, porous and inter-​connected configuration of territorial entities’ in politics (Ward 2014: 48). Such insights led to policy research emphases on ‘the movement… of policies from one place to another and how… the processes of comparison and learning compared’ (Ward 2014: 51). What does this work look like, viewed from the global South? How do urbanists from the global South or those focused on its cities approach these arenas of scholarship? As with the infrastructure turn, some Southern or Southern-​focused scholars utilize or build from priorities or theoretical leads of Northern scholarship, even when critiquing those leads. But there are also alternative starting places for thinking about urban politics and policies from Southern and postcolonial perspectives. This chapter is focused on five arenas of policy

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mobilities: participatory budgeting, bus rapid transit, enclave urbanism, sister-​city relationships, and climate change adaptation/​mitigation. The emphasis resides with how the book’s case study cities intersect with these arenas.

Urban politics and policies in flux This book’s case study urban areas display different and changing configurations of government and governance maps, a diverse set of issues surrounding global relationality, distinctive formal and informal political landscapes, and variations in relative capacities for devising and implementing urban policies. In this segment, these cities’ experiences with governance and politics are contextualized as part of the pervasive uncertainty currently about the roles of the public, private, and popular sectors in governance, governing, and politics in global South urbanisms. The sharpness of meaning and clarity of triumphal vision around the global North’s intertwined ideas of urban democracy and urban neoliberalism are now in doubt, too. ‘The narrow line between formal democracy and authoritarian rule every day grows thinner as civil rights and liberties are rolled back in the name of security’ in many societies that had prior commitments to more democratic national and local politics (Chambers 2017: 26). Yet, at the same time, substantive social movements for radical democratization from the grassroots have also taken hold in urban areas, in some of the same countries experiencing revanchist authoritarianism. Arjun Appadurai (2001: 23) argued nearly 20 years ago that ‘grassroots movements’ were ‘finding new ways to combine local activism with horizontal, global networking’, and this has only continued in the years since. He argued that this phenomenon ought to shift scholars’ analytical emphases from ‘locations’ to ‘circulations’, even while distinguishing rich world cities operating ‘like city states in a networked global economy’ from ‘poorer cities’ where the citizens sought ‘new ways of claiming space and voice’. His studies of alliances between grassroots activist organizations in Mumbai highlighted these groups’ moves toward a ‘vision of politics without parties’ built around ‘negotiation and consensus building’ (Appadurai 2001: 28–​9). One must not ‘romanticize’ the ‘global protest wave’ of the 21st century as merely championing a common vision of such deeper democracy (Branch and Mampilly 2015: 2–​3). Countervailing forces often leave countries and cities in politicized states of instability –​in extreme cases, cities flounder for years without effective governance. Even where urban governance has not reached this semi-​permanent

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meta-​crisis mode, many cities are facing ‘circumstances of intense volatility and uncertainty’ (Simone 2019:  16), looking for any solutions to fiscal, political, social, or environmental problems, just when these problems loom larger. Populist or progressive movements for ‘deeper democracy’ across the global South have been flung on the rocks of real or invented fiscal crises; cultural, religious, and racial divides deepen daily in urban areas that have new capacities for cross-​cultural communications with internet technologies and social media; and global climate change is smacking the world’s cities with droughts, floods, fires, and extreme weather events that demand coherent policy responses at scales from the neighborhood to the planet. There are always varying limits on the capacity or autonomy of urban governments to affect their own solutions, whether due to the dominance of national governments or the power of the domestic private sector or international capital. Sometimes, from the grassroots up, cities are sharing paths toward ‘inventing new visions of democracy and development in which popular interests come first’ in addressing urban crises (Branch and Mampilly 2015: 6; Ismail 2014: 269). At other times, militaries and corporate elites share tactics to crush those popular interests, especially given what Mbembe (2019: 9) calls the ‘time of exit from democracy’ in many countries. Often, what seems evident is ‘some ambiguous mix of the two’ tendencies, which Brown (2015: 3) labels as ‘progressive’ and ‘revanchist’ forces (see also Stokke 2014: 257). It is remarkable to witness the degree to which policy experiments move around the world’s cities filtered through that ambiguous mix –​and the resultant politics for ordinary people, whereby ‘urban life comes to depend upon improvisation’ (Simone 2019: 4). Neoliberal urban governance frameworks are refracted into a wide variety of forms in Southern and postcolonial cities. Borrowing and learning in policy terms, for most Southern urbanisms, must be seen through histories of colonialism and imperialism. ‘The post-​colonial state, having inherited the structure of colonial governance and the project of modernization, has also inherited its concomitant view of spatial and temporal order’ (Chattopadyay 2012b: 89). This inheritance included an ‘inability of the state to comprehend the spatial dynamics of the marginalized within its own logic’ (Chattopadyay 2012b: 90). This resulted in splintered network infrastructure, but it also splintered cities’ political geographies in terms of citizenship, rights, or belonging. When looked at from some Asian urbanisms, the roles of the state stand out as fundamentally differentiated from global North experiences; in many East and Southeast Asian countries (like China), a developmentalist

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national state facilitating urban development reshaped any inherited colonialist or Northern agendas (Bae 2012). By comparison, in sub-​Saharan Africa, urban governance and neoliberalism are vastly different in theory and practice (Obeng-​Odoom 2013: 199). Obeng-​Odoom (2013:10) saw the region’s urban governance as having a ‘cluster of meanings’ linked to ‘decentralisation, entrepreneurialism and democratisation’. He noted that ‘governments still play a role in governance’ (Obeng-​Odoom 2013: 13) –​as Davidson and Martin (2014: 6) put it, ‘city governments still exist!’ Their ‘existences’, on the other hand, come in infinite variety, as the cities of this book evidence. The next paragraphs show this variety plainly. Hartford’s city government relies on the mercy of Connecticut’s state government. Neither an intervening county-​level of government (non-​existent in Connecticut since 1960) nor a metropolitan governance framework that would provide for sharing services or revenues with the MSA’s 56 other towns exist to more broadly define the urban in tangible terms. Zanzibar’s Municipal Council has nominal governing authority over Zanzibar Urban District, while West A and B Districts’ Municipal Councils comprise the other governments within Tanzania’s Zanzibar Urban-​West Region, which also has a government. Over these, the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar has a far greater urban governance and management role than any other government level. There is little of a domestic private sector, and international tourism investors have surprisingly limited say in everyday urban governance. In Trinidad, the tiny city government of Port of Spain is dwarfed by the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in the city, and by the municipal authorities of all the surrounding towns. In Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen, each city is comprised of dozens of cities or towns, all within Guangdong Province. The variability between the three in governance and autonomy in policy making is substantial, and the private sector is closely intertwined with local and national governments and the party machinery. For San Juan, the mayor of the city, Carmen Yulin Cruz (2013–​), faces a similar conundrum to the mayor in Hartford –​ lack of metropolitan governance, lack of finance, and subservience to higher levels of government –​but in worse circumstances because of Puerto Rico’s staggering public debt, the US government’s unwillingness to work toward resolution of that debt crisis, and Puerto Rico’s neo-​colonial status within the US; the mainland-​based private sector holds much of the power. Each municipality in Dakar region has a mayor, and even the communes d’arrondissements within the cities have mayors. The mayor

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of Dakar, Khalifa Sall, gained power in the mid-​2010s, but then found himself jailed and sacked by the president of Senegal, Macky Sall. On the one hand, this led to the municipal council’s selection of Dakar’s first woman mayor, Saham El Wardini; on the other hand, Wardini held little capacity in her hands for governing, as revenue flows depend entirely on the central state and are stunningly minimal given the needs of Dakar Region (Myers 2016). Private-​corporate capital is less of an obvious major force. In Cape Coast, the Ghanaian national government appoints the mayor (Obeng-​Odoom 2013: 33). A previous president of Ghana, John Atta Mills, for whom Cape Coast’s Central Region was home, upgraded it from municipal to metropolitan status, but without ceding real local government controls to the new metropolitan assembly. While Ghana has a growing middle-​class and elite, they are heavily concentrated in the Accra region, and rarely found in Cape Coast. Perhaps the most vital lens through which to make the comparisons across these highly varied particularities from Southern scholarship might be in the literature of ‘worlding’ (Ong 2011; Roy 2014; Simone 2001). Many Southern cities engage in forms of worlding, as ‘the art of being global’ (Ong 2011). Hall and Davis (2016: 54) argue that worlding ‘denotes the experimental practices that arise through actively engaging with local and worldwide connections’. Through worlding practices, ‘new channels for ideas, association and governance’ can emerge ‘that reflect the inter-​relationships between near and far worlds’ (Hall and Davis 2016: 54). Many poor global South urban communities have movements for ‘worlding from below’ (Simone 2001: 17). To once again return to Glissant, we can read these movements as the struggles for poorer cities and people of the global South to ‘enter into relation’ (Britton 1999: 12) with one another, a ‘poetics of relating… on a global scale’ (Dash 1995: 18). This ‘rooted necessity of the relation to the world’ (Glissant 2010: 64) would be fundamental to rethinking urbanism and remaking urban politics to be built on circuits of connection rather than deliberate polarization and segregation. But these worlding tactics for building a poetics of relation evidence great variation across the cities of this book, particularly given the variations in governance arrangements. Those varied urban governance relationships are important to how outside agendas –​whether originating in the global North or South –​ filter in or are transformed in local settings: in other words, is there more ‘worlding’ from above, or from below? Can the vulnerable majorities of Southern cities build a map toward a poetics of relation, or are the maps drawn for them? Do the worlding processes address

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the vulnerabilities of the urban majorities successfully? With these questions in mind, I turn to specific examples of city-​to-​city learning and policy mobilities as seen from the South in relation to the book’s case study cities. These examples are meant to highlight several of the most widespread Southern policies mobilized across the planet as well as common tactics for worlding, ending with the struggle to find what Glissant (1989: 146) called the ‘language of landscape’ for confronting the existential threat to the earth and human life from global climate change (DeLoughrey 2019; Mbembe 2019).

Policy mobilities and city-​to-​city learning Global urban studies has worked to analyze how urban governance and management policies move from city to city. ‘Motion and relationality’ are often taken to ‘define contemporary policymaking’ for cities around the world, as policies move from one city to another with seemingly undeniable rapidity (McCann and Ward 2011: xiv). Inevitably, these policies are not only identifiable with cities that initiate them, but they change –​and are changed by –​the urban-​political contexts into which they shift. Thus, there are movements of policies around the world, but then these policies arrive in a particular locality with its own governance and political trajectories (McCann and Ward 2011). While cooperation and collaboration between cities are hardly new phenomena, these trends in policy were predominantly in global North contexts until recently (Saunier 2002), when policy transfers and city-​ to-​city learning involving North–​South and South–​South cooperation have grown. There are still relationships that reside in colonial legacies, such as French cities that partner with cities in former French colonies, but it is less certain than it might have been 40 years ago that these partnerships will have imperialist power dynamics. New and different forums or networks have fostered urban policy circulation or sharing of experiences between cities. Consultants, personal connections, or web-​searches also lead urban governments to develop policies built from other cities’ experiences (Peyroux 2018; Robinson 2011c and 2018). Most urban policy mobilities literature critiques neoliberalism’s footprint within ‘fast’ urban policy circulation, largely informed by wealthier urban contexts and neoliberal restructuring (Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010; Peck and Theodore 2015; Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009). Global urban studies’ analysis of urban policy and politics has been dominated by the critique of urban neoliberalism for 20 years or more. Yet in the global South, urban neoliberalism does not look the same as it does in many Northern contexts and may not

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be the primary defining frame for questions of governance (Parnell and Robinson 2012). While there is increasing nuance to analysis in global urban studies on the variability of meaning for neoliberal policy, there remains less appreciation for how differently power structures work in global South polities. In sub-​Saharan Africa, one frequently encounters a ‘steep power gradient, in which client countries have had little choice but to impoverish their populations and significantly undermine their autonomy in developing… policies that create open economies [which] significantly reduce’ the state’s roles in cities (Robinson 2011c: 30). Robinson’s (2011c: 34) contention is that one must ‘look closely at the specific, multidimensional power relations of policy circulations, rather than assume a single narrative’ based on ‘relative political or economic power’. In global South urbanisms, choices to engage with other cities are influenced by many concerns beside neoliberalism. While Southern urban development agents value potential learning outcomes from city-​to-​city cooperation, questions about the nature and significance of actual ‘learning’ abound (Moodley 2019; Myers 2008). ‘Transnational municipal networks’ (TMNs) are becoming more common in South–​South city-​to-​city learning (Tomlinson and Harrison 2018). Rather than strictly an extension of neoliberal global North models, TMNs often work via the World Bank, UN Habitat, Cities Alliance, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, and other units or networks. Yet the actual workings of these TMNs are problematic for any simple relocation of policies from one global South context to another, as if the geographic or symbolic Southern-​ness itself suffices as a rationale for policy adoption. In successive sections, I  examine examples of policy mobilities, networks, and agendas in action in Southern and postcolonial contexts. I use vignettes from case study cities to show how different urban political contexts shape, reshape, or debilitate the mobilities and dynamics, beginning with two prominent policies associated originally with Latin America: participatory budgeting and bus rapid transit.

Participatory budgeting and bus rapid transit Participatory budgeting (PB) and bus rapid transit (BRT) systems are two examples of global South-​origin urban policy initiatives. PB strategies started in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, expanding to other cities in Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2012; Masiya 2012; Sintomer et  al. 2010). Curitiba, Brazil is usually credited with developing the world’s first BRT system in 1974. It initially spread into other South American cities before

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emerging in other global South urbanisms and Northern cities. While Pittsburgh had a BRT that began in 1977, other US cities only began experimenting with BRT in the 21st century and with PB in 2009. PB ideally ‘provides a framework that encourages civic participation at and from the community or grassroots level’ (Masiya 2012: 150). When it works, it fosters stronger bonds between ordinary people and municipal governments. For poorer cities, PB can deepen democracy and further urban service delivery (Shah 2007). Results on the ground are mixed, with great variation between or within cities. Masiya (2012: 157) contrasted the ‘robust’ and ‘progressive’ PB of early 21st-​century Johannesburg with the ‘mistrust and tension’ for its implementation in Harare, Zimbabwe. Ganuza and Baiocchi (2012) called PB an ‘ambivalent… prescription’ for deeper democracy and social justice, in part because its radical leftist roots in neighborhood activism were left behind. PB became an example of ‘fast policy transfer’ (Peck and Theodore 2015), but also of ‘democratization… from above’ –​which is not democratic (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2012: 6; Stokke 2014: 265–​ 6). Like other ‘participatory’ Southern approaches to governance, PB often ends up as a tool ‘for the political and economic elite to ensure their interests and profits’ (Nastar et al. 2018: 504). BRT policies began with populist fervor in 1974, under Curitiba’s mayor, Jaime Lerner. In the mid-​1990s, the BRT concept expanded to Quito and then Bogota, where another charismatic mayor, Enrique Penalosa, and his brother Guillermo, developed the Transmilenio system (Berney 2017). BRTs are promoted as a subway/​train network of public transport –​but by bus. Bus-​only lanes are built out like an urban subway or light-​rail system, thus producing a low-​cost system serving the masses of poorer cities. The 21st century witnessed a rapid globalization of BRT policies. By 2007, 40 cities had BRTs, and by 2016 the number of BRT cities had exploded to more than 200, most in the global South (Rizzo 2017: 143). Despite the Southern origins and generally South–​South directionality of development, BRTs have ended up as problematic policies nearly everywhere, albeit with some modestly positive outcomes in a few cities. The costs of constructing bus-​only networks and maintaining fleets of buses proved more expensive than proselytizers claim, and most financing for their construction has come from global North institutions. BRT policies, like PB, appear as technocratic and depoliticizing urban solutions, when every step of building, implementing, and maintaining a BRT is highly politicized (Appelhans and Baumgart 2020; Rizzo 2017; Wood 2015). None of the conventionally-​defined-​as-​global-​South cities in this book has a BRT system (Port of Spain has a bus lane that runs east to

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Arima, but it runs as a high-​occupancy-​vehicle lane) or a PB process; thus Hartford is the case study example here (see also Myers 2014). Hartford had limited PB in 2016–​18 and opened a 9.3-​mile BRT line to the industrial suburb of New Britain in 2015. But neither policy proved unproblematic. Hartford’s experiment with PB began in 2015, when residents were invited to vote on potential allocations of US $1.25 million, less than one fourth of 1 percent (0.25 percent) of the city budget of more than US $550 million. The vote took place in February 2016, but this coincided with a massive budget crisis for the city and its newly elected mayor, Luke Bronin. Only a portion of the money was allocated in that fiscal year, an even smaller portion was rolled over into the 2018 fiscal year, and the paltry PB gesture ended there. PB was not mentioned as the mayor unveiled the FY 2020 budget of US $573 million in April 2019 (Lurye 2019). The busway, known as CTFastrak, has had more significant impacts. It opened in Spring 2015, after 15 years of plans and three years of construction. It cost more than US $560 million to build and more than US $17 million annually to operate; it has continued to run at a loss. Monthly ridership did increase from just over 180,000 passenger trips during the first full month (May 2015) to a peak of 318,000 in October 2018, but the average monthly data had stabilized at 260,000 trips by March 2019, with average daily ridership at less than 75 percent of the projected figure after four years in operation. All dreams of expanding CTFastrak to a multi-​route metro system rest on CTFastrak buses traveling normal roads or high-​occupancy-​vehicle lanes on highways –​Hartford just has a normal metro bus transit system, with one 9.3-​mile BRT stretch in the middle. And, thus far, what little transit-​oriented-​development can be claimed surrounding CTFastrak has aimed at upper-​income residential construction. In the 54-​unit apartment complex at 616 New Park Avenue in West Hartford at the Elmwood CTFastrak station, which leased every unit by opening day in 2018, a small studio apartment costs $1,490 per month, with larger units running nearly $2,000 per month  –​75  percent of the median household income for Hartford city residents. It was clearly marketed to upper-​income West Hartford professionals. In 2018, Hartford’s financial crisis required a US $550 million bailout (roughly the cost of CTFastrak’s construction) from Connecticut’s state government, on top of millions of dollars donated directly to the city by individuals running its largest insurance corporations (Lurye 2019). Party politics and elections are largely irrelevant. Over 80 percent of Hartford voters in the 21st century have supported Democratic Party candidates in local, state, and national elections. But of the nearly

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57,000 registered voters for the November 2015 mayoral election, scarcely 8,000 voted –​even the contested Democratic Party primary election in September prompted about one fourth of registered voters to cast a ballot. Bronin won more than 75 percent of the 9,000 votes cast in the 2019 election that earned him a second term, despite merely 15 percent turnout. Far more eligible voters are not registered –​and far more adult residents are not eligible to register since they are not US citizens –​than the 7,000 people who voted to re-​elect Bronin. Hartford residents live in a climate of disenfranchisement. This is an 84-​percent minority–​majority city that has no fiscal autonomy and cannot provide basic urban services. Mayor Bronin, an Ivy League-​ educated white lawyer (in a city where Anglo Whites comprise 16 percent of the population) originally from Connecticut’s ultra-​r ich enclave of Greenwich, raised more than US $0.5 million for his 2019 re-​election from ‘a “who’s who” of Hartford’s movers and shakers’ (Blair 2019: 1), including the CEOs of its major corporations. He is a likable, highly capable urban manager –​but principally for its local elites and state overseers, with limited connections to ordinary residents. Like countless global South urban residents, Hartford’s poor majority live out an improvised politics, rarely riding the CTFastrak line, locked out of even a notional token of a PB process. The overwhelming majority of bus rides to and from Hartford are on ordinary surface streets and comprise slow journeys to work and school. What concerns predominate in the everyday lives of most Hartford residents –​unemployment, food injustice, dilapidated housing, homelessness, rodent infestations, racist police brutality, segregation, homicides, failing schools –​require ‘a new declaration of independence for modern times’ (Whitehead 2018: 4), but most residents instead ‘have to “take what they can get,” to situate themselves as best they can in surroundings where anticipations of the future seem nearly impossible’ (Simone 2019: 130).

Enclave urbanism: new town/​city construction and governance The phenomenon of new town or satellite city construction is a policy circulation common to all the book’s case study cities. Creating entirely new cities and satellite urbanisms (often with their own governance regimes) represents a crucial iteration of policy mobility around the global South. For these satellite cities, the ‘tendency to implement post-​democratic private-​sector-​driven governance will make them at best unsuitable for solving [the global South’s] urban problems, and at worst they will increase expulsions and enclosures of the poor,

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public funding injustice and socio-​spatial segregation and fragmentation’ (Van Noorloos and Kloosterboer 2018:  1223). Pieterse and Hyman (2014: 197) argue that ‘if a certain form of urban settlement is prioritized, very little remains for the rest of the city’. This is especially bad in cases where ‘governments (national and local) are seduced by the idea of building entire “new towns” to create enclaved living, working and recreational settlements of international businesses and service workers’. Martin Murray (2017) has shown the ways by which ‘privatopias’ and ‘self-​contained sequestered spaces’ are ‘undermining social cohesion, and displacing and excluding the urban poor from places where they are not wanted’. This chapter segment looks at ongoing projects for new towns outside of Zanzibar that match well with these claims. Before doing so, let me examine the broader context of urban residential and political development in contemporary Southern urbanism. Many urban neighborhoods in the case study cities bear the strong presence of self-​built housing and ‘auto-​construction’ common in the global South (Caldeira 2017). There is a modicum of effort to imbue these sorts of ‘do-​it-​yourself ’ (DIY) neighborhoods with agency in the production and reproduction of ‘insurgent citizenship’ (Holston 2008). While it is evident that ‘new modes of politics through practices that produce new kinds of citizens, claims, circuits, and contestations’ are present in these global South urban areas, one also finds ‘heterogeneity’ within the city and considerable variation ‘from one city to another’ in these ‘new modes’ (Caldeira 2017: 4). For example, two Cape Coast neighborhoods near the University of Cape Coast, Amamoma and Adisadel, are rife with auto-​construction and developments contrary to plans or regulations, yet they are strikingly different socio-​spatially, politically, and economically. One fits stereotypes of informal settlements in the global South, while the other has many higher quality single-​ family homes interspersed with DIY small-​scale industries and business enterprises. Similar variations are present in the book’s other cities. Urban management and planning policies have taken on common shapes despite these differentiations in part because the same policy makers or policy shapers see similar problems wherever they go and apply similar fixes. In cities of Africa, urban sprawl, high rates of urban growth absent economic growth to absorb new migrants, informal settlement, poor land management, poor service provision, weak governance institutions, absence of gender equity, and environmental crises are just assumed to be present; thus, it is assumed that cities need policies that address them (Lufumpa, Mubila and Yepes 2017). Given how intractable urban development management issues are in

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auto-​constructed neighborhoods, states frequently look to a starting-​ all-​over-​again mentality with new towns. These new areas become prime sites where politics and policies come to clash. In Zanzibar, the national (Zanzibari) government context for urban governance and policy matters greatly. The government planned the satellite town of Tunguu outside the boundaries of Urban-​West Region. Tunguu was intended as a new town, an alternative to what the government conceived as its failures to implement the 1982 Master Plan’s NUs. In practice, Tunguu’s most successful developments are the new campus of the government’s State University of Zanzibar, the private, gated campus of Zanzibar University, and the satellite United Republic of Tanzania Parliament. The residential areas of Tunguu developed in patterns that replicate the semi-​planned and highly uneven development of the 1982 plan’s NUs. The administration of Zanzibar President Ali Mohamed Shein (2010–​20) also facilitated creation of two private satellite suburbs, Fumba Town and Fumba Uptown Living, on the Fumba peninsula in West B District. Both operate with gated entry, CCTV cameras along every street, and private security forces. CPS Live’s Fumba Town was, by early 2019, more of a functioning satellite town, with 337 units nearing completion. Most units were already sold; the plan was to roll out a steady expansion over the next decade. The planners envision a self-​contained mini-​city, with its own schools and hospitals, because, as one estate agent rhetorically asked, ‘who would want to go to the hospital in Stone Town?’ CPS Live markets the community as an alternative to Stone Town, as if the rest of Zanzibar Urban-​West Region does not exist or could not produce acceptable urban living conditions. This is because the primary markets for buyers are elite Zanzibari Stone Town residents selling their properties to make room for tourist development, former Stone Town elites (mainly Omani exiles returning to Zanzibar), and Europeans. Neither access road from the main Fumba Road had tarmac by January 2019, and signage to the development was obscure and unhelpful: this is a privatopia in every way. It largely replicates the Arab–​Indian–​European colonialist segregation of Stone Town; prices range from US $19,900 for ground-​floor, 19 square meter studios to US $269,900 for four-​ bedroom, 262 square meter seafront townhouses. Payment plans ensure that no poor or working-​class Zanzibaris could imagine affording even that ground-​floor studio –​a US $2,000 down-​payment would be followed by steady payments of 20 percent of the cost every few months until the full payment would be completed inside 12 months. The median-​price units, two-​bedroom townhouses for US $59,900,

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would require that initial US $2,000 down-​payment followed by a US $21,000 installment a few months later. The President’s Office (2011: 58) report on poverty reduction in Zanzibar calculated that 44.4 percent of the population lived on less than US $1 per day and that the Millennium Development Goal for 2015 of reducing this to 30.5 percent was ‘not achievable’. In that context, these incredibly exclusionary financial tactics of Fumba Town facilitate the further enclavization of Fumba (Figure 6.1). Yet CPS Live’s Fumba Town is practically an open neighborhood compared to Fumba Uptown Living. The dream town of Zanzibari–​ Tanzanian billionaire tycoon Salim Said Bakhresa, Fumba Uptown was still in fantasy mode as of early 2019, with its Madison Avenue and Las Vegas, Sunset, and Barack Obama Boulevards curving around a seafront promenade. Luxury condominiums and single-​family homes are priced above the most expensive of CPS Live’s homes or apartments, at US $400,000 and up. The aesthetic result is a southern California beach enclave mixed with Dubai’s extravagant luxury waterfront developments. The eventual plan would have had a yacht marina, but Bakhresa ultimately opted to build the exclusive marina at his high-​ end resort complex at Mtoni, north of Zanzibar city.

Figure 6.1 CPS Live Fumba Town, under construction, Zanzibar

Source: Author.

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Neither development has improved the quality of life of Fumba’s poor farmers and fisherfolk. Most land between the semi-​planned neighborhoods at the peninsula’s far northern end and the two privatopias at the other end, like most of the West Districts, comprise ‘catchment zones for the urban poor… industrial land… ruined leisure zones, waste dumps’ and ‘a compost machine processing the leftovers of city life into a mulch of strange contiguities that don’t know what to make of each other’ (Simone 2019:  128). Simone lists Istanbul, Beijing, Bangkok, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, and Brooklyn as the urban areas that inspired this description above of the new urban ‘periphery’ –​all much larger, of course, than Zanzibar. But even in small, secondary urban areas of the global South like Zanzibar, it is viscerally evident that ‘urban landscapes are increasingly marked with the conceit of enclosure’. The burning question Simone (2019: 128) asks remains unanswered: ‘where is everyone going to go’ in the ‘leftovers’ of the ‘peripheries’? He argues that ‘urban politics will largely be a peripheral politics’ in the overcrowded districts in between the luxurious enclaves –​like Zanzibar’s West Districts (Simone 2019: 128). These are politics that vacillate between ‘an abandonment of any generalized humanity’ (Simone 2019: 128–​29) and improvisational ‘rhythms that enable surprising, frustrating, sometimes confusing, sentiments and practices of residents caring for and enduring with each other’ (Simone 2019: 137).

Sister cities The next example for Southern policy mobilities centers on formalized relationships between urban areas as ‘sister cities’. Sister-​city relationships are important for 21st-​century urban studies beyond the global South within the field’s ‘relational’ turn (Sullivan 2014). A variety of institutional systems have emerged for forging sister city partnerships. For US cities, the most well-​known is the Sister Cities International (SCI) program. Founded by US President Dwight D.  Eisenhower, SCI is a prominent institutional lever for these sorts of relationships. SCI’s 2018 annual report showcases sister-​city relationships focused on the arts and culture, business and trade, community development, or youth and education. Despite the limited emphasis on global South partners in the annual report, SCI’s global map of relationships does show a more complex and involved picture than the partnerships that they highlight might suggest. This book’s cities are rather weakly represented in current SCI activities, however. Although seven Tanzanian cities have US partners,

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Zanzibar does not. Four Connecticut cities are listed (New Haven has seven international ‘sisters’), but not Hartford. Dongguan has no official SCI sister. Guangzhou is classed as a ‘friendship city’ with Oakland, and has partnerships with Los Angeles and Cupertino, California. Haizhu District in Guangzhou has an SCI link with Urbana, Illinois. Cape Coast’s official and not-​very-​active SCI sisters are Buffalo and Hanover Park, Illinois. Dakar is merely one of 14  ‘sisters’ of Washington, DC and one of 28 partners of Miami. Port of Spain is one of Atlanta’s 19 sisters, as is Shenzhen, which is also a partner with Houston. San Juan has SCI partnerships with Jacksonville, Florida and Killeen, Texas. Yet these formal sister city partnerships through SCI are only a small sliver of the basis by which cities form sister-​city relationships. Southern cities often actively seek out ‘sisters’ in both the global North and South. In Ghana, the Ghana Sister Cities Foundation (GSCF) and Africa Global Sister Cities Foundation (AGSCF) programs have built links with other cities around the world. Under GSCF, nine Ghanaian cities formed alliances with US cities, for example (Obeng-​Odoom 2013: 34). To examine the broader phenomenon of Southern sister-​ city relations in more detail, the focus here is on Dongguan’s sister-​city relations with Hartford. Dongguan is the only sister city Hartford has had in Asia of any kind. The relationship formally began in February 2001 ‘for the purpose of expanding bilateral exchange of friendship and expanding understanding and friendship, between the peoples of the two cities, through friendly discussion’ (Peters and Xing 2001). The formal intent was to ‘commence exchange and cooperation’ between the cities with emphases on ‘economy, trade, science and technology, culture, education, sports, public health and tourism’ (Peters and Xing 2001). One official who served in the administration of Mike Peters, Hartford’s then mayor, who went on the formal visit to Dongguan in 2001 told me anonymously that he felt Dongguan was a poor match with Hartford because it lacked a comparable history and –​at that point –​was known only for factories and prostitution. Perhaps due to this perceived mismatch, the sister-​city partnership fizzled out quickly, but it was then revived in 2018–​19, with the impetus largely coming from Dongguan. In 2019, Dongguan sent an official trade delegation to Hartford and an official entry to the largest Asian cultural event of the year in Hartford, the annual August ‘Dragon Boat Races’ where its team was unquestionably the strongest and fastest in the competition –​Dongguan is the birthplace of the Lingnan culture’s dragon boats (Yuhua 2018).

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What are the motivations for a city of 8.3 million people central to the early 21st-​century world’s manufacturing heartland to (re)build a sister-​city relationship with a shrinking city of 125,000 in the center of the late 19th century’s global manufacturing heartland? Dongguan hosts more than 11,000 foreign-​funded enterprises, 15,000 garment firms, and 49 Fortune-​500 companies, and ranks third in China in the value of its foreign trade. It has its own ‘Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau’. About 25 percent of the world’s smart phones and 30 percent of the world’s toys are made in Dongguan, and large volumes of many other products. Each of its 28 ‘towns’ and four districts are larger than Hartford –​an average of more than twice as large. Why would it seek out a partnership with Hartford? Part of the significance that Dongguan leaders grant to the relationship rests with the fact that Hartford was ‘the first city to formally establish [a]‌Sister-​city relationship with Dongguan’ (Pan 2019a and 2019b). Hedges in the sloped lawn outside of Dongguan’s municipal government headquarters are shaped to spell ‘inclusive of the world’, and officials are very keen to raise the city’s global profile. One said to me anonymously that he ‘cannot really say’ what draws Dongguan to Hartford, but, having visited Boston, New York, and San Francisco –​ all cities and metro regions more comparable to Dongguan and its Greater Bay Area (GBA) –​he nonetheless said other GBA cities might be ‘jealous’ of Dongguan partnering with Hartford: it remains a status symbol to have a sister-​city relationship with a Western city, and a US one at that. City officials in neighboring Huizhou and Shenzhen spoke of their admiration for Dongguan’s leaders’ outward and forward vision, even as the Dongguan officials looked cautiously south to Shenzhen –​Dongguan clearly benefits from Shenzhen’s growth, as in Shenzhen-​based smart-​phone giant Huawei’s construction of a massive new campus in Dongguan, but it must distinguish itself on its own to avoid future consolidation and loss of identity. Xinchao Pan (2019b), Executive Deputy Director of the Standing Committee of the Dongguan Municipal People’s Congress, was impressed with Hartford’s cultural diversity and educational resources, but ‘advanced manufacturing, finance and insurance’ were central to the ‘broad prospects’ Dongguan leaders saw for the relationship (Pan 2019a). Dongguan leaders see Hartford as a smaller industrial cousin, with a past that compares with Dongguan’s present. Yet Dongguan –​ despite 5,000 years of human settlement within its borders –​is also a very new city. Everything changed for Dongguan with the ‘opening up’ of China in 1978–​79 and its shift from a collection of agricultural villages to an industrial powerhouse and, as of 1988, a ‘prefecture city’

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separated administratively from Huizhou (Luo 2019). Dongguan’s leaders identify with Hartford as an historically significant urban region saddled with an in-​between geography: as Hartford lies roughly equidistant from and overshadowed by New York and Boston, Dongguan’s government sees itself as ‘located at the center of the Greater Bay Area’ triangle of Macao, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, and its officials sought to build the Hartford relationship out of these similar ‘distinctive geographical advantages’ –​so that they might not be disadvantages (Pan 2019a). Since the global financial crisis, its leaders also harbor a genuine fear of its future decline as a factory town; building the link with Hartford offers a means to examine how an American city has (or has not) dealt with post-​industrial decline (Luo 2019). The Trump administration’s trade war with China led Dongguan officials to shy away from science, technology, or industry emphases in reconnecting to Hartford in 2018 and 2019. Instead, the team sought to focus on sports, education, arts, and culture (Pan 2019b). This led to the dragon boat team’s engagement, but also enthusiasm for potential partnerships between sports teams, art museums, universities and colleges. Dongguan’s foreign affairs office organized its 16th international roundtable and summer camp for representatives and select children from its sister cities in July 2019, making a special pitch to Hartford’s youth. It remains to be seen what will come of Dongguan’s efforts to build its relationships to Hartford, but the potential exists for Dongguan to play a major role in Hartford’s revitalization, as Dongguan moves forward in establishing its planetary significance. Building toward a kind of ‘worlding’ from below from Dongguan with Hartford as cities ‘in relation’ would, undoubtedly, depend much more upon fostering the friendships that seemed to emerge in August 2019 from the socializing of the dragon boat team with ordinary Hartford residents.

Climate change adaptation and urban policy: San Juan and Hurricane Maria Perhaps the most urgent arena for urban policy mobility in the world concerns global climate change. Naomi Klein (2014: 107) points to the world’s five-​fold increase in extreme climate events in the last 30 years as an obvious marker of the need for entirely rethinking, in her terms, ‘everything’. Yet knowledge bases and policy frameworks are often as wrongly skewed as maps of projected impacts. Addaney and Cobinah (2019: 7) note that sub-​Saharan ‘Africa’s contribution to global climate change is comparably negligible’ yet ‘it remains the

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most affected region’. It is also under-​researched in urban studies: their book is the first comprehensive survey for the region’s cities. Simon and Leck (2014: 613) show that what they more broadly refer to as global environmental change research is much more developed for cities of the global North than for the global South (see also Du Toit et al. 2018). Global South actors and agents have less of a voice in developing and implementing global climate change adaptation and mitigation policy frameworks. Policies imposed from hegemonic global North actors often ‘undermine’ local actions to combat climate change, ‘privileging international actors and financial markets’ (Ernstson and Swyngedouw 2019: 15; Silver 2019). ‘Are we not left’, Swyngedouw and Ernstson (2019: 37) ask, ‘with the gnawing feeling that, despite the elevation of the ecological condition to the dignity of a global public concern, the socio-​ecological parameters keep eroding further?’ This erosion, along with the gap between the global North and South, extends to more general or popular literature on climate change. Klein’s (2014: 91 and 108) provocative book is nonetheless skewed toward North American and European urban understandings. There is little nuance to her references to diverse global South contexts, or appreciation for how inappropriate her dashed-​off lists of policy solutions may be outside of the Northern contexts that form her prime focus (Klein 2014: 108). Klein (2014: 459) does use Fanon (1961: 55) to argue that ‘the issue which blocks the horizon… is the need for a redistribution of wealth’, in claiming that the ‘the unfinished business of liberation’ requires policies to address climate change that also combat inequality. But too often this sort of critique of neoliberalism as it intersects with the ‘planetary ecological crisis and global political insecurity’ somehow ‘feels compelled to rely on Dickensian metaphors to describe contemporary urban processes in the non-​West that are structurally different from that of nineteenth-​century Europe’ (Chattopadyay 2012b: 75). Simon and Leck (2014: 613) contend that ‘diversity within the south’ on policies for mitigation of or adaptation to change is ‘so profound on all variables, that comparable historical colonial legacies are no longer adequate markers of post-​colonial identities and senses of shared futures’ on a dramatically transformed planet. Gottlieb and Ng (2017: 262) highlighted the diversity in perspectives and policies for addressing climate change impacts between Hong Kong and the mainland cities of the PRD, so that ‘the most far-​reaching and potentially devastating global issue’ was approached from dramatically different directions on either side of that border. Addaney and Cobbinah’s (2019: 4) edited volume forges past the potentially debilitating realization that such diversity might engender, for Africa, even while acknowledging that

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‘adaptation to… climatic variations has become a daunting task for governments, city authorities and residents’. Authors in the edited volume show the diversity within Ghana, between impacts in Northern towns like Tamale and coastal cities like Accra  –​and even Accra’s many low-​lying settlements face greater threat than the comparably higher-​elevation but still coastal circumstances of most settlement areas in Cape Coast (Addaney and Cobbinah 2019). Addaney (2019: 482) notes that in Africa the urban vulnerabilities ‘are well-​documented’ but ‘less attention has been paid to how the city government plans to adapt to climate change and enhance the resilience of the local population’. On the ground in many poorer cities in the world, in Africa and beyond, ordinary residents have demonstrated direct awareness of climate change realities. Okaka and Odhiambo (2018) found that over 90 percent of their 290 research subjects in Mombasa were aware of climate change and could trace its primary causes. But policies and implementations are different matters than such cursory awareness. Southern cities are not always hopelessly ‘behind’, though. Simon and Leck (2014: 624) highlight the role of some Southern cities in the C40 learning network, and the Sustainable Urban Development Network out of UN-​Habitat in Nairobi for launching the Cities and Climate Change Initiative in 2008. Klein (2014:  407) writes that ‘after [Hurricane] Katrina, New Orleans became a laboratory for corporate interests intent on capturing and radically shrinking the public sphere, attacking public health and education and leaving the city far more vulnerable to the next disaster’. San Juan has had forces attempting to make it into a similar laboratory, in a ‘new gold rush’ for investors (Bonilla and Lebron 2019; Fajardo 2019a; Klein 2018). Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans and devastated the island’s infrastructure in 2017. For Puerto Ricans on the island ‘instead of BC and AD, here it’s Before Maria and After Maria. BM and AM’ (Loreana Gonzalez Lazzarini, in Modak 2019: TR6). The vulnerabilities of ‘AM’ San Juan make for a staggering setting in which to contemplate climate change mitigation and adaptation policy mobilities. Glissant (1989:  244) sardonically claimed of Caribbean peoples that ‘we do not dare admit that we like hurricanes. They bring us so much. The periodic shudder originating out there in the sea, the announcement that follows that we’re an official “disaster area”.’ There would be few survivors who would look back to Hurricane Maria to say it ‘brought us so much’. Mostly, it brought death and destruction. The island of Puerto Rico took a direct hit from this extremely powerful storm on 20 September 2017, just 15 days after Hurricane

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Irma had knocked out electrical power for hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans; residents then endured months without electricity or functioning infrastructure. Other areas of the island may have been hit more directly, but damages in San Juan were sufficiently catastrophic that two years on from the storm, it was easy to say that the metro had not ‘recovered’ from the disaster. Some reasons for saying this are obvious –​nearly a quarter of all residential structures were abandoned as of July 2019; but others are subtle, like the thousands of Boricuas who rebuilt their homes without repurchasing homeowners’ insurance, because their previous insurance policies paid out less than 5 percent of their estimated Maria damages. And everything about this ‘natural’ disaster was political. Even the death toll became politicized. The initial official total of 64 deaths formed a tool in the hands of the Trump administration to claim how successful its disaster response had been; when the Puerto Rican government raised the official death toll to 2,975 a few months later, the Trump regime claimed that it was ‘fake news’. The literature on climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience has ‘coalesced’ with the literature on disaster risk reduction (DRR) over the last decade or so (Simon 2016: 75). Urban fragility in the era of climate change has become the tether connecting cities across the planet and connecting climate change and DRR work (Commins 2018). The ‘increasing severity and… frequency of extreme events’ join the slow, inexorable rise in sea level as the main impacts of climate change on coastal cities (Simon 2016: 76). The ‘structural vulnerabilities’ in these cities thoroughly ‘constitute a form of unfairness or injustice’ (Simon 2016: 77). For San Juan in 2017, the injustice of the disaster rested on decades of what Yarimar Bonilla (forthcoming) has termed the ‘slow, structural violence’ of the US ‘racial, imperial formation’ that produced the ‘colonial roots’ of the island’s ‘climatic disasters’. In the context of Puerto Rico’s unserviceable US $72 billion public debt, on top of costly tax holidays for scavenger investors and already deteriorating and degrading urban infrastructures, ‘feeling abandoned by the government became habitual’ in San Juan (Bonilla forthcoming). Hurricane Maria caused an estimated US $90 billion worth of damages in Puerto Rico, but, by March 2019 –​18 months after the storm –​only a small proportion (less than 10 percent) of the US $40 billion in disaster relief approved by the federal government had made it to the island, and not ‘a single dollar of the money’ from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for housing, infrastructure, or electricity had arrived (Acevedo 2019). Even the pro-b​ usiness Weekly Journal in San Juan gave the PROMESA Oversight Board junta a ‘nearly failing grade’ (Fajardo 2019b).

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This venal incompetence at the federal level and lame capacity in the island government had two consequences for the governance and politics surrounding DRR work. On the one hand, this situation opened the door for pirates in the private sector or preachers of ‘resilience’ who fed the security apparatus to offer snake-​oil solutions –​crypto-​ currency barons wanted to use the island as an experimental lab-​rat for a post-​money economy, high-​tech entrepreneurs wanted to make the island all-​solar and to make all transportation via electric cars as profiteering traps, and a Montana energy company with two employees earned a ridiculous US $300 million contract to rebuild the electricity grid (Bonilla and Lebron 2019; Klein 2018). Bonilla (forthcoming) termed all of this ‘the logics of disposability at work’, given the history of ‘racialized neglect’ that San Juan and Puerto Rico had already endured. Maria ‘ripped the veil off of Puerto Rico’s colonial status’ and revealed the ‘material ruin’ and ‘imperial debris’ of ‘a failed neocolonial experiment’ (Bonilla 2019; Bonilla and Lebron 2019) (Figure 6.2). On the other hand, community organizing and self-​reliance blossomed in response to disastrous governance and disaster capitalism, producing a ‘hopeful pessimism’ (Gonzalez Mendez 2019). In Casa Pueblo, for example, the community rejected both government-​led Figure 6.2 Old San Juan, under reconstruction

Source: Author.

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and private sector-​led reconstruction of its electricity supply network and collaborated to build its own solar power system. As one activist told Bonilla, amid all this suffering and degradation and death, people could only ask, ‘who are we waiting for?’ Ricardo Gonzalez Mendez (2019) of the University of Puerto Rico Medical School put it this way, after discussing the two years of struggles his institution had endured in trying to offer basic health care services in ‘After-​Maria’ greater San Juan: the main lesson learned from Maria is that ‘people know that this government is not the solution and the government of America is not going to save people. No one will save us but ourselves.’ This hopeful pessimism may be exactly what Simone (2019:  23) meant by the ‘improvised lives’ in the ‘uninhabitable’ districts of the urban majorities in the global South.

Conclusion Urban politics and urban policies have entered uncertain times. Uncertainties abound regarding governance and politics in urban global South. In most urban studies scholarship, the emphasis now rests more on relational understandings rather than bounded cities in politics, and the movement of policies now more than the local context alone. Global South urban scholarship has highlighted, among other themes, the notion of worlding from below, and the struggle for deeper democracy, negotiations, and populist consensus building or demonstrations on the one hand and an era of deepening divides, inequalities, injustices, and authoritarian tendencies on the other. The competing progressive and revanchist trends in global South urban politics produce a set of enduring questions. What capacities reside with local governments and with ordinary ‘vulnerable majorities’ for affecting change? To what extent can we see a poetics of relating on a global scale? To what extent are these efforts to engage in relation successful in bringing deeper democracy? Does it make a difference when the tactics, strategies, or policies originate in the global South? There is great variation across the global South in the answers, as the case studies of this book suggest. In this chapter, the emphasis was on five arenas, and then how case study cities linked with that particular conversation. The exploration of PB and BRT might suggest largely negative answers to the list of questions here: they have not been very democratic or populist, have not affected great change for the vulnerable urban majorities (as the Hartford example demonstrates). With enclave urbanism versus DIY urbanism at the peripheries, as seen in the Zanzibar case, the emerging

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peripheral politics place elite enclosure literally side by side with the rhythms of endurance of the poor majority, and it has yet to be a productive tension for deeper democracy, or a worlding from below that lessens vulnerabilities. Sister cities twinning politics surely begins as top-​ down worlding from above, but can it become more? The Dongguan case leaves us without any certainty. Finally, when it comes to climate change mitigation and adaptation, global South cities have often been left off the map of policy development. San Juan’s example shows how conditions of limited autonomy further that marginalization. Yet we also see the work toward deeper democracy, in the streets. There is great variation even among the nine cities in the book on politics, policies, and governance dynamics, or on the extents to which public, private, or popular sectors dominate or merge in urban politics and policies. Regardless of this variation, though, peripheral politics, people power, and worlding from below that are clashing with the global rise of the right and revanchist politics and policies produce volatile and uncertain times. Intermediaries, networks, or global platforms sit alongside personal relations as generative agents for the movement of policies or forms of politics, but with unpredictable outcomes. A post-​political or post-​democratic dystopian future rides alongside auto-​constructed, DIY urbanism. The volatility and uncertainty led to the proliferation of efforts to start all over again and build new towns, satellite cities and gated communities, built by the state or by private capital, but there is great variation in the character and outcomes for such projects. And for every dystopia of enclosure, space of ‘unfinished’ liberation or return to coloniality politics and policies, one finds a hopeful moment of community self-​reliance in the face of climate disaster or seemingly incomparable cities potentially finding the means for ‘sisterhood’ relationships that strengthen each end. Might this be the age of ‘hopeful pessimism’ in urban policy and politics around the Southern planet?

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Epilogue Rethinking urbanism means rethinking it from the ground up, from literal and metaphorical places ‘South’ of where urbanism has been previously defined. This book is reckoning with a world of interconnected cities linked to one another in a process of planetary urbanization, but which I have tried to see here, following Glissant, as a process of ever-​ changing ‘relation’ between cities. Glissant emphasized the importance of returning to the ‘point of entanglement’, and I have attempted to do so in numerous ways in this book. Many scholars from Slater (1992) to Robinson (2016a) and beyond have stressed the centrality that learning from ‘elsewheres’ must assume in a cosmopolitan and truly global urban studies. With the growing literature of planetary urbanization pushing toward a more global urban studies, my aim here has been to recenter the discussion southward, with that ‘South’ reconceived. This book asked what has been shaping contemporary urbanism and urbanization for the new urban planet, and what shapes urbanism and urbanization take. A half-​dozen thematic starting places toward answers were suggested. Historical processes –​from the ‘underside of our history’ –​genocide and persistence, slavery and emancipation, and, perhaps most of all, colonialism and postcolonialism, remain central to the making and reframing of urban areas and urban environments. Along with colonial processes, the geographical patterns of land use planning and design and resistance to them form another starting place. Migration, translocality, and their cultural creations served as another. Infrastructure and trade joined flows of policies as further means for analyzing the urban planet. Walsh and Mignolo (2018: 1) stress that ideas such as ‘pluriversal’ thinking or relationality are not means to replace one universalism with another; to claim to be ‘in possession of a decolonial universal truth would not be decolonial at all’. Thus, this book is not arguing for replacing what Glissant would call a Euro-​American ‘mono-​root’ with a different mono-​root. Likewise, neither the thematic starting places nor my urban areas of focus could be considered comprehensive or

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all-​encompassing. Thinking of ‘common pots’ as a way of reimagining the urban planet does not mean saying everyone fits in the same pot. Fluidity and mobility flow through the chapters. This is literally the case for the cities examined, since all are or were port cities. But the fluidity is also metaphorical. The book explored ideas out of Southern urbanism, some of which are more ethereal, alongside tangible or policy concepts. The urban areas studied are all places that are ‘cut’ in this world, or ‘pillaged Carthages’ in Glissant’s poetic phrasing. Achille Mbembe (2017: 179–​80) concluded his Critique of black reason with this: The question of the world –​what it is, what the relationship is between its various parts, what the extent of its resources is and to whom they belong, how to live in it, what moves and threatens it, where it is going, what its borders and limits, and its possible end, are, has been within us since a human being of bone, flesh and spirit made its first appearance under the sign of the black man… In the end, there is only one world. It is composed of a totality of a thousand parts. Of everyone. Of all worlds. I have tried to show this ‘whole-​world’ through narratives of some of the processes, patterns, postcolonialities, people, products, and policies connecting Hartford, Zanzibar, San Juan, Port of Spain, Dakar, Cape Coast, and three cities of the PRD in a transversal, postcolonial, Southern version of planetary urbanization. Sullivan (2014: 99), who applied a transversal vision of Los Angeles-​in-​the-​world in his book Street-​level, contended that in urban studies ‘we must catalyze a profound shift in our entire way of being in the world… a new ontology which allows us to perceive and to embrace, both rationally and emotionally, such an interconnected reality’. He argued that ‘the transversal city, in all its interconnectedness, makes sense… Politically, it ties together that which was never sundered: the planet’; this notion of transversality pointed ‘to the direction in which urban theory needs to go… to reconfigure both the notion of the city as well as the notion of being in the city’ (Sullivan 2014: 121). While the argument here is in accord with Sullivan, I have worked toward a transversal rethinking that builds from Southern and postcolonial thought on –​and not just case studies of –​contemporary urbanism. This book provides an exploration of the transversal as a Southern discourse, an invisible presence that can evoke the submarine and subterranean connections between and comparability of cities. Lest the framework seem convoluted or vague, I am reminded of Wiedorn’s

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(2018:  121) claim that Glissant saw these connections as part of the ‘respectful and enriching’ comparisons through which Glissant remained ‘engaged in the political sphere’. The complicated real world of cities remains a world of hope, but it is surely also a world of darkness. Rhizomes sprout and grow; they also wither and die. Some defy colonial logic, some do not. I am arguing for at least starting the discussion of 21st-​century planetary urbanization from the ideas and concepts and perspectives that emerge from both the intellectual and everyday Southern urban worlds. ‘Worlding from below’ is the way forward for fighting what Mbembe termed the ‘retreat from humanity’ that is all around us now. ‘World-​thinking’ from the South may be the only way the planet will survive. I have combined literary analysis, archival analysis, policy analysis, interviewing, fieldwork observations, photographic and cartographic interpretation, and extensive reading of secondary sources to build this argument. As I have researched and written the book in the last seven years, much has been changing in urban areas and scholarship about them; it is hard to hit moving targets. The world is becoming more and more ‘urban’, but what that means on the ground varies dramatically across the planet. I focused mainly on British colonialism and how it attempted to make or remake urban landscapes. Not only were the colonies each different from one another in countless ways, but also the post-​colonial era has had quite different outcomes. In some cases, coloniality has endured and continues to shape cities –​perhaps most glaringly in San Juan, an American colony. In other cases –​like Guangzhou –​cities have moved well beyond it. Some resist, and some embrace, both colonial and post-​colonial visions of the powerful. The PRD cities like Guangzhou are admittedly different from the other six cities. They are bigger, wealthier, and less directly impacted by slavery or colonialism. Yet their presence in the book is vital, for showing that there are many varieties to Southern urbanism and yet comparability and relationality remain, whether in villages in the city, infrastructure, or policy mobilities for climate change. One need not discard everything produced in or about the global North, or force its cities into being understood only with a Southern lens. Smart cities, shrinking cities, postindustrial cities, suburbanization, gentrification, segregation, environmental justice, the right to the city –​there are many conversations in this growing realm of global urban studies that are predominantly Northern conversations. Indeed, there are too many themes for me to have ever covered even tangentially. But we simply need to conceptualize with and from Southern

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perspectives to see the ‘whole-​world’. Thus, I built from Southern thought and Southern urbanism to speak back to –​but also to contribute to –​the ‘canon’ of Northern-​dominated global urban studies. Friedmann, Sassen, Massey, Taylor, Soja, Harvey, Castells, Lefebvre, and all the work that has flowed from their work, can still be meaningfully deployed in this world –​but alongside and in dialogue with Southern understandings. Critics of Southern and postcolonial urban studies complain about scholars overgeneralizing the Eurocentrism of global North scholarship, but it is most assuredly there. I will never forget listening to back-​to-​back keynote addresses from two star figures of Northern urban studies at the 2000 ‘Urban Futures’ conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, as they effectively dismissed ‘Africa’ as insignificant to the networked urban world they had excavated and mapped for the (predominantly African) audience, only to be followed by Simone poetically evoking a different urban world from which I do not think the previous headliners had yet heard. That dialogue has begun. The headliners have been hearing from the ‘whole-​world’ for two decades or more. I am merely seeking a path for extending conversations, moving them in multiple directions instead of what are still too often one-​way streets. Instead of framing the work as contributing lessons from postcolonial studies, I might have framed it as part of ‘decoloniality’ studies. I chose to situate the book in the former because of its much deeper, broader, and recognizable reach as a field. Still, one might say that I am seeking a decolonized approach to global urban studies, or an anti-​colonial approach. Rethinking urbanism from the ‘underside of our history’ leads to the recognition that the contemporary period is a makeshift era, and that it is time to redescribe urbanism on the planet, re-​membering indigenous and colonized narratives. Implicit throughout this book, one can see arguably the central puzzle and its solution: who makes urbanism? In most Southern cities, and in Hartford, alongside and underneath the prevailing dominant order, it is ordinary poor and working people, marginalized in the power structure, consigned to shadow worlds, improvising with makeshift tools.

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219

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

A AAM (African Architecture Matters)  143–​4, 148 Abdulla, M. S.  19–​20, 100, 148 Accra, Ghana  17–​18, 120, 122, 159, 173 Addaney, M.  171–​3 AfDB (African Development Bank)  140 African Architecture Matters  see AAM Afro-​Caribbean migration  35, 101, 122 Afro-​Shirazi Party (Zanzibar)  see ASP AGSCF (Africa Global Sister Cities Foundation)  169 Algonquian communities  27, 28–​30, 32–​ 4, 44, 45, 71 Alice Yard, Port of Spain  113 Allen-​Walton,  S.  72 American Revolution  35 Anand, N.  136 Angel, S.  134 Appadurai, A.  156 Arima, Trinidad  81 Artists Collective, Hartford  39–​40 ArtPlace  119 Ashmead, J.  34, 35 ASP (Afro-​Shirazi Party), Zanzibar  147 assemblage theory  133

B Bach, J.  54 Bacon, N.  25 Badgley, C.  149–​52 Baiocchi, G.  162 Bakhresa, S. S.  167 Barber, J.  41 Batty, M.  134 Belmont (formerly Freetown), Port of Spain  70, 91, 95, 112 Belt and Road Initiative, China  see BRI Benin  70, 95, 112 Bennett, B.  85, 86

Best, S.  40 Bingham, A. Y.  43 Black Caucus  40–​1 Black Panthers  40–​1 Bonilla, Y.  174–​6 Bowles, B. D.  88 Branch, A.  157 Brandt Line  2 Braschi, G.  115–​16 Brazil  10, 140, 161 Brenner, N.  10, 12, 13, 25, 74 BRI (Belt and Road Initiative), China  131, 139 Britain, colonialism  Cape Coast  120–​2 India and  108 Uganda and  124 urban parks and gardens  77–​103 Zanzibar  126–​7, 128, 147 Britton, C.  26, 159 Bronin, L.  163, 164 Brooks, L.  17, 28–​9, 30, 33 Broome, Lady  88–​9 Brown, J.  157 built environment  58, 62, 118, 139–​40 bus rapid transit (BRT) systems  161–​3 Bwana MSA (fictional character)  20, 100, 148

C C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group  173 Caldeira, T.  165 Camp, J.  40 Cape Coast, Ghana  35, 119–​24, 128, 159, 165, 169, 173 Carapichaima, Temple in the Sea  109, 110 Carrion, A. M.  117 cartograms  7–​9

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Casa Taft 169, San Juan  118–​19 Caset, F.  8 Castillo, R.  151 CCM (Chama cha Mapinduzi) (Party of the Revolution), Tanzania  147 Center for Latino Progress, Hartford  42, 43 CGA (Clove Growers Association), Zanzibar  78, 86, 88 Chaguanas, Trinidad  81 Chama cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution), Tanzania  see CCM Chambers, I.  3, 14, 20, 156 Chamoiseau, P.  153 Chattopadhyay, S.  44, 136, 157, 172 Chen, K.-​H.  16, 53 Chen, X.  25, 131, 138 chengbiancun(on-​the-​city-​suburb-​edge)  49, 54, 58, 66, 70 chengwaicun (in the suburb)  49, 58, 66, 70 chengzhongcun(in-​the-​city)  49, 53, 57–​8, 60, 61, 65–​6, 71, 151, 152 Chicago School  6, 9, 14 China  foreign direct investment in Africa  138–​40 Lefebvre on  12 Pearl River Delta (PRD)  49–​75, 149–​52 postcolonialism  3 products and infrastructure  131–​53 SEZ (special economic zone)  55 sister cities  169–​71 southern industrialization  50 and Zanzibar  63, 141–​9 China Merchants Port Holdings  131–​2 China Railway Jianchang Engineering Company  see CRJE Chinese Communist Party  51, 66 Christianity  42, 122, 151 Christie, J.  93 city-​to-​city learning  160–​1 Civic United Front, Tanzania  see CUF climate change  197, 157, 160, 171–​7 Clove Growers Association, Zanzibar  see CGA Coates, T.-​N.  38 Cobbinah, P. B.  171, 172–​3 Colt, E.  43 Colt, S.  30, 31 Coltsville  30, 32 communism  51, 66, 68–​9, 144 comparativism  14–​16, 19, 21, 53, 79 Connecticut  26–​8, 35–​7, 42, 43, 71, 72, 158, 169 Conway, D.  101–​2, 108 Cosco Shipping Ports  131–​2

cosmopolitanism  15, 35, 43, 67, 113 Cotto Morales, L.  118 Couva, Trinidad  81 Cowan, T.  74 Cozier, C.  113 creolization  50, 88, 106, 108, 109, 116, 128, 129 CRJE (China Railway Jianchang Engineering Company)  144–​5, 147 Cruz, C. Y.  158 Cruz, J.  41, 42, 43 CTFastrak  163, 164 CUF (Civic United Front), Tanzania  69 Curitiba, Brazil  161, 162

D Dachong, China  64 Dafen village, China  65, 67 Dakar, Senegal  GaWC ranking  9 infrastructure  137, 139 local government  158–​9 population  57 sister city  169 urbanization  49, 54–​8, 66–​8 Daley, M.  72 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania  141 Dash, J. M.  45, 159 Davidson, M.  155, 158 Davis, J.  159 Deep River, Connecticut  34 deindustrialization  7, 23–​4 Delano, J.  116–​118 DeLoughrey, E.  81, 94, 108 Deng Xiao Ping  51 Derudder, B.  8 Derudder, B. et al. (2012b)  9 D’haen, T.  109–​10 diasporic communities  106, 107, 120, 124, 125, 129 Diego Martin, Trinidad  81 disaster risk reduction  see DRR Dodoma, Tanzania  141 Dongguan, China  158, 169–​71 Dovey, K.  133 DRR (disaster risk reduction)  174–​5 Du Bois, W. E. B.  38 Durban, South Africa  109

E East African High Commission  82 Eisenhower, President D. D.  168 Elden, S.  12 Ellington, D.  113 Elmina castle, Cape Coast  120, 122 emancipation  35, 95, 101, 111 Emancipation Day, Cape Coast  121

222

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Emperor Valley Zoo, Trinidad  94 employment  24, 55, 58, 122, 140 Ernstson, H.  172 essentialism  18 Eurocentrism  19, 53, 182

F Fabian, E.  101, 110 Fair, L.  94 Fan, S.  72–​3 Fanon, F.  18–​19, 29, 111, 172 Ferguson, J.  18 Fern, A.  116 Finland  140, 144, 153 Fondes Amandes (organization)  96–​7 Forodhani Gardens, Zanzibar  97 Förster, T.  54 Fox, S.  135 France  11, 80, 81, 89, 160 Fredericks, R.  137 Friedmann, J.  7, 10, 24 Frog Hollow, Hartford  41–​2, 71 Fumba Town, Zanzibar  166–​8 Fuoni, Zanzibar  54, 57, 62–​4, 69 Futian Civic Center, Shenzhen  61, 63

G Gandy, M.  133, 148 Gangxia, China  50, 60, 61, 62, 64 Ganuza, E.  162 Garcia-​Ellin,  J.  115 gated communities  61, 108, 114, 166 GaWC (Globalization and World Cities) research group  7–​9, 24, 55, 133–​5 genocide  26, 28, 33, 44 Georgetown, Guyana  109 Germany  80, 81, 124, 140 Ghana Sister Cities Foundation  see GSCF Gift, S.  95, 96 Glasser, R.  42 Glissant, E.  4–​5, 13–​14, 16, 21–​2, 26–​7, 33, 36, 46, 50, 54–​5, 74–​5, 78, 79–​ 81, 83–​4, 106–​7, 124, 134, 159–​60, 173, 179–​81 Glissantian approach  19, 28, 32, 45, 51, 53, 102, 108, 109–​10, 113, 123, 153 Globalization and World Cities research group  see GaWC Gonzalez Lazzarini, L.  173 Gonzalez Mendez, R.  176 Goodfellow, T.  135 Gottlieb, R.  172 Government House, Port of Spain  88–​9 Graham, S.  135, 137 grassroots movements  39, 98, 119, 156, 162

GSCF (Ghana Sister Cities Foundation)  169 Guangzhou, China  9, 64, 65, 131, 141, 149–​52, 158, 169 Guangzhou dream factory (film)  149 Guattari, F.  4 Gurnah, A.  126–​9 Guyana  109 Gyasi, Y.  123–​4

H Hahn, T.  111 Hainan International  147 Hall, S.  159 Hall, T.  101, 110–​13 handshake-​houses  58, 59 Hartbeat Ensemble  40 Hartford, Connecticut  23–​47, 71–​2 African-​American communities  27, 35, 38–​41, 43 Afro-​Caribbean communities  35, 41 deindustrialization  23–​4 demographics  23 disenfranchisement  163–​4 GaWC ranking  9 indigenous communities  27–​34 migration  34–​8 Latinx communities  27, 34, 37, 41–​3, 113 participatory budgeting (PB)  163–​4 policies  40–​1 sister city  169–​71 white flight  41 al-​Harthi clan family  92 Harvey, D.  xx, 138 He, C.  138 Hernandez, O.  117–​18 Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)  150 Hopkinson, T.  117–​18 housing  Cape Coast  122 Chinese investment in Africa  139–​40, 147, 148 elite  166–​7 Hartford  39, 41, 42 Puerto Rico  114, 118, 174 self-​built  165 submarine urbanism  127 urban villages  55, 57–​61, 64, 65, 66, 68–​9 Huawei Corporation  141, 170 Hubei, China  50, 60, 61, 65 hukou(registration), China  55, 64 Hunter, M. A.  3, 71, 72 Hurricane Irma  174 Hurricane Katrina  173

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RETHINKING URBANISM

Hurricane Maria  28, 37–​8, 42, 113, 114–​16, 119, 173–​6 Huruma, Nairobi  58 Hyman, K.  135, 137, 165

I Ibadan, Nigeria  80 Ideanomics  132 indentured servitude  106, 108 indigenous communities  14, 17–​19, 27–​ 34, 55, 58, 61, 86, 93 Institute for Community Research  39–​40 Ismail, S.  157 Irizarry, G.  119 Irizarry, Reverend E.  43–​4 ivory  34, 35, 45, 124 Ivoryton, Connecticut  34

J Jacobs, J. M.  17, 79 Jamaica  35, 40, 43, 71, 82 Jamhuri Gardens, Zanzibar  98 Jazeel, T.  4, 13, 14, 16 jouvay urbanization  101, 108–​13

K Kanai, M.  10 Kariokoo, Dar es Salaam  58 Karume, A.  147 Kenya  82 Khan, K.  146–​7 Kikwajuni, Zanzibar  54, 94, 148–​9 Kingston, Jamaica  82 Kirk, J.  84–​5, 92 Kisiwandui (Smallpox Island)  100 Kiteme, O. K. O.  95, 96 Klak, T.  108 Klein, N.  171, 172, 173 Kloosterboer, M.  164–​5 Koistinen, R.  42 Kouoh, K.  139 Kwahani, Zanzibar  142, 146–​8 Kwinitekw river  see Quinniktuket river

L La Maraña  118–​19 La Perla, Puerto Rico  70 Larkin, B.  136 Laughlin, N.  113 Laventille, Trinidad  70, 81, 88, 91, 95 Lawhon, M. et al. (2018)  137 Lebron, M.  115, 118 Leck, H.  172, 173 Lefebvre, H.  xviii, 9–​13, 22, 51 Legg, S.  16 Leonard, S.  113

Lerner, J.  162 Lewis, B.  71–​2 Li, Z.  150 Lin, Y.  150 local government  64–​6, 68, 159 Lordstreet Theatre Company  101, 110–​11 Los Angeles School  9–​10, 14, 53

M Mabin, A.  20 Machuchal, Puerto Rico  118–​9 Magufuli, President J.  141 Mampilly, Z.  157 Mao Zedong  6 Marcus, E.  149, 150–​2 Martin, D.  155, 158 Martinique  80 Marvin, S.  135, 137 Marxism  9 Masiya, T.  162 Mason, F.  41 Massey, D.  7, 24 Mathews, G.  150 Mattabesset (Middletown), Connecticut  29, 30, 34 Matthews, G.  91 Mauritius  108–​9 Mbembe, A.  xxi, 5, 16, 26, 106, 157, 180, 181 Mbuya, F.  142 McAnthony, E.  151 McFarlane, C.  136 McKittrick, K.  16, 34 Meier, P.  50, 102, 132 Menatian, M.  42 Merrifield, A.  11, 13, 25 Middletown, Connecticut  see Mattabesset Mignolo, W.  xx, 44, 179 Migombani Botanical Garden, Zanzibar  84, 92, 95, 97–​100 Miller, J.  40 Mills, J. A.  159 Mintz, S.  116–​17 Mnazimmoja Park, Zanzibar  92–​4, 98, 99 Mnazimmoja Recreation Ground  93, 97–​8 Modak, S.  173 modernism  19 Mohegan communities  28, 29–​31, 72–​3 Monson, J.  138 Moral Mondays CT  39, 43 Morris, A.  44 Moscoso Arabia, M.  118–​19 Mpakani, Zanzibar  100 Muñoz-​Erickson, T. A.  114 Munoz Marin, Luis  36, 117

224

Index

Murray, M.  6, 10, 165 music  95–​6, 118

N NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)  40–​1 Nahm  41 Naipaul, V. S.  109 Nantou, China  50, 52, 60 Narragansett communities  29, 30 Nastar, M. et al. (2018)  162 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  see NAACP nationalism  18, 138 nationalization  27, 62 nativism  18–​19 NECAP (North End Community Action Project), Hartsford  41 neoliberalism  12, 13, 25, 50, 118, 156, 157–​8, 160–​1, 172 Nesbitt, N.  16, 19, 27 Netherlands  143 New England  27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37 new towns, construction of  164–​8 New York  6, 12, 30, 37, 70, 115–​16 Ng, S.  172 Ng’ambo, Zanzibar City  92–​4, 100, 126–​7, 142–​9 Ngugi wa Thiong’o  28 Nigeria  70, 80, 150–​2 Nipmuc communities  29 Nixon, R.  109 North End Community Action Project, Hartsford  see NECAP Northend Agents  39 Nyerere, J.  83

O Obeng-​Odoom,  F.  158 Odhiambo, B. D. O.  173 O’Donnell, M. A.  54 Okaka, F. O.  173 Old Lyme, Connecticut  34 Old San Juan, Puerto Rico  70, 114, 175 Old Saybrook, Connecticut  34 Oldfield, S.  2 Ong, A.  159 open spaces  60, 93 Operation Bootstrap, Puerto Rico  37 Ouakam, Dakar  58

P Pan, X.  170, 171 Park, R.  6 Parnell, S.  2

Pawlowski, R.  42 PB (participatory budgeting)  161–​4 Pearl River Delta, China  see PRD Pemba, Tanzania  81, 124 Pemberton, R.  85 Penalosa, E.  162 Penalosa, G.  162 Pentecostal Christians  42, 151 Pequot communities  28, 29, 30–​1, 72 Peschier, C.  89–​90 Peschier, H.  89–​90 Peters, M.  169 Pieterse, E.  15, 16–​17, 135, 137, 165 Pikine, Senegal  57, 58, 62, 64, 66–​8, 139–​40 Port Louis, Mauritius  108–​9 Port of Spain, Trinidad  81–​2 bus rapid transit (BRT)  162–​3 Chinese investment in  132 culture  107 diasporic community  125 GaWC ranking  9 jouvay urbanization  108–​13 Naipaul on  109 sister city  169 suburban development  108 urban village  69–​70 Water Riot  111 Porto Alegre, Brazil  161 Portugal  81, 120 post-​industrialisation  23, 25, 33, 171 Potter, R.  101–​2, 108 PRD (Pearl River Delta), China  49–​75 African traders  149–​52 appropriation of agricultural land  59–​61 policies  172 Puerto Rico  27–​8, 36–​7, 70–​1, 113, 115–​19, 158, 173–​6 Pulido, L.  40 Puritans  30, 31, 44 Pwani Ndogo, Zanzibar  93, 97, 98 Pyquaog (Wethersfield)  29, 30, 31

Q Qing dynasty  60 Quayson, A.  17–​18 Queen’s Park, Savannah  88, 90, 91, 94–​6, 102, 132 Quinniktuket (Kwinitekw) river, New England  28–​9, 31, 33–​4, 43

R Red house (fire! fire!)(play) (Hall)  111–​13 Red House, Port of Spain  111–​13 Revolutionary Party, Zanzibar  68–​9, 100 Riggio, M.  111 ‘River Indian’ communities  29–​30

225

RETHINKING URBANISM

Rivera, I.  119 Rivera, L. A.  115 Rizzo, M.  19 Robinson, J.  8, 15, 17, 20–​1, 46, 161 Robinson, Z. F.  3, 71, 72 Roosevelt, President F. D., New Deal  116, 118 Rosemberg, M.  79, 106, 107 Roy, A.  5, 14, 53, 78, 79 Royal Botanic Garden, Port of Spain  85, 86, 88, 89, 94–​7, 102

S Sadhu, S.  109 Said, E.  18–​19, 29 Sall, K.  159 Sall, M.  159 San Juan, Puerto Rico  113–​19 GaWC ranking  9 Hartford and  35–​7 landscapes  95 policies  158, 173–​6 sister cities  169 urban villages  70 San Juan Center, Hartford  42 Sassen, S.  7, 10, 24 Savory, E.  102 Schindler, S.  13 Schmid, C.  10, 12, 13, 25, 74 Schmid, C. et al. (2018)  13 Schoon, S.  65 SCI (Sister Cities International)  168–​71 Scott, A. J.  19, 20 Sea Lots, Trinidad  70 securitization  108, 114–​15 Selders, J.  39 Senegal  57, 74, 137 Shafi, A.  125–​6 Shanghai Construction Company  132 Shaonan, L.  138 Shein, President A. M.  166 Shenzhen, China  9, 51–​6, 59–​65, 138, 141, 152, 158, 169, 170 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/​ Architecture  52–​3, 55, 57, 60, 65, 66, 70 Sheriff, A.  145 Shin, H. B.  59 Sidaway, J. D.  17 Sierra Leone  35 Silver, J.  172 Simon, D.  172, 173, 174 Simone, A.  2, 3, 5, 16–​17, 35, 38–​9, 136, 157, 159, 164, 168, 176, 182 Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography  17 Singh, J.  4, 79 Sister Cities International  see SCI

slavery  Africa and  55, 69, 93, 95, 108, 119–​24 Glissant on  16, 106–​7 Hartford and  34–​5, 44–​5 indentured servitude  106, 108 indigenous peoples and  31 Smith, L. T.  32–​3 Smith, M. P.  105 Smith, N.  12 Smith, R.  8 SMOLE (Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment) program, Zanzibar  144 Soguk, N.  27 Soja, E.  10, 53 South Africa  109 Spain  70, 79, 80, 81, 89 Sparke, M.  3 Spencer, J.  134, 150 Spivak, G.  17 St Kitts  31, 35 stereotypes  18, 31, 165 Stone Town, Zanzibar  82, 93, 100, 124, 142, 166 Storper, M.  19, 20 structuralism  9 Stuempfle, S.  89 Su, I.  150–​1 Suckiaug (later Hartford)  29–​30, 44, 71 Sullivan, R.  180 Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment program, Zanzibar  see SMOLE Sustainable Urban Development Network  173 Swyngedouw, E.  172

T Taino communities  113 Takeuchi Yoshimi  53 Tanganyika  82, 83, 141, 147 TANU (Tanganyika African National Union)  147 Tanzania, United Republic of  83, 125, 141, 147, 148, 149, 158, 168 Tanzania–​Zambia Railway  141 Taylor, P.  7, 8, 134 Thiaroye, Dakar  54, 57, 62, 64, 66–​8 ‘thin-​line sky’  58, 59 TMNs (transnational municipal networks)  161 tobacco  37, 45 tourism  diasporas and  125 governance and  158 heritage  119–​22 housing and  166

226

Index

infrastructure  82 landscape  88, 92, 97 and urban villages  69–​70 Trafford, A.  113 translocality  105–​8, 109–​10, 112, 113–​16, 119, 125–​6 Transmilenio system, Bogota  162 transnational municipal networks  see TMNs transversality  4–​5, 27, 34–​8, 46, 111, 119, 123, 180 Trinidad & Tobago  migration  108–​12 postcolonialism  79–​84, 85, 94–​7, 101–​2 urban parks and gardens  77–​103 Williams and  77–​8, 85, 86–​92 Tsing, A.  33 Tunguu, Zanzibar  166

U Uganda  82, 124 Unanue, S.  118, 119, 129 unemployment  41 Unguja, Trinidad  81, 82, 93, 124, 145 United Nations-​Habitat  140 Urban, F.  70 US (United States)  Africa and  140 Black and Brown city communities  71–​2 bus rapid transit (BRT)  161–​3 Chicago School  6 Chinese industry  132 colonialism  79, 83 House Un-​American Activities Committee  117 Lefebvre on  11 migration  35–​8 military stations  83 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs)  23 New Deal  116, 118 participatory budgeting (PB)  162 and Puerto Rico  113–​19, 158, 174–​5 Sister Cities International (SCI)  168–​9, 170 and ‘South’  3

V van Noorloos, F.  164–​5 Varela-​Zapata,  J.  109 Vargas, E.  72 Verne, J.  105 Victoria Garden, Vuga  97 Vientos Gaston, N.  119

Vietnam  150

W Wa Samaki cooperative  97 Walcott, D.  102 Walsh, A.  26 Walsh, C.  xx, 179 Walsh, S.  43 Wangunk communities  29–​30, 44, 71 Ward, K.  155 El Wardini, S.  159 Wiedorn, M.  4, 19, 45, 50, 74–​5, 78, 106, 107, 153, 180–​1 Williams, E.  83, 109 Williams, R. O.  77–​8, 85, 86–​92 Williams, R. O., Jr.  89 Wing, B.  19 Wirth, L.  6 Wolff, G.  7, 24 Wong, W.  54 Woods, C.  40 Woon, C. Y.  17 World Bank  140, 142, 143, 144, 161 world cities hypothesis  6–​7 worlding  5, 121, 159–​60, 171, 177, 181

X Xiaobei, China  65–​6, 131, 150–​2 Xiaohong, T.  65 Xiaoyang, T.  138 Xing, T.  169

Y Yang, Y.  150 Yoruba communities  69–​70, 95

Z Zanzibar  124–​8 China investment  141–​9, 153 Hartford and  34 Millennium Development Goal  167 National Spatial Development Strategy (DoURP)  145–​7, 148 policies  158, 166–​8 Revolution  124, 126, 144 tourism  119–​20 urban parks and gardens  77–​103 urban villages  54–​8, 62–​4, 68–​9 Zanzibar Spatial Data Infrastructure (ZANSDI)  144 Zanzibar Town  83, 92, 93, 148 Zhiqiang, Z.  65, 68 Zhu, S.  138 ZNP (Zanzibar National Party)  126

227

“Not content to follow the usual tropes of urban studies, Myers challenges mainstream urban theory at a time of great uncertainty about urbanism on a world scale.” Martin J. Murray, University of Michigan

RETHINKING URBANISM

This book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism by using a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of who and what makes urban environments.

G ARTH MYER S

Garth Myers is Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies at Trinity College.

Myers explores the global hierarchy of cities, the criteria for positioning within these hierarchies, and the successes of various policymaking approaches designed specifically to boost a city’s ranking. Engaging heavily with postcolonial studies and Global South thinking, he shows how cities construct one another’s spaces and calls for a new understanding of planetary urbanism that moves beyond Western-centric perspectives.

@policypress

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

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B R I S TO L

ISBN 978-1-5292-0445-2

RE T HI N K I N G URB AN I SM L E S S ON S F ROM P OSTCOLON I AL I S M AN D T HE G LOB AL S OU T H G A RTH MY E R S