A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Provisioning the Counter-City: Alternative imaginaries of urban futures from Harare, Zimbabwe
Abstract Drawing from critical urbanists, this article conceptualizes provisionality—flexible, improvisational, and adaptable practices, as an ethos and practice that holds utility and possibility for alternatively understanding cities in ways that counter conventional modernist imaginaries of urban life and spaces. By attending to how cities are rather than how they “should be,” this article offers a conceptual and analytic counter to re-animate, re-imagine, and re-world cities beyond conventional and modernist frames. Using ethnographic observations supplemented by 22 semi-structured interviews, I trace how Hararians' provisional approaches to surviving political and economic precarity reveal collaborative networks and transgressive cross-border economic communities. I argue that the relationalities and spatialities of people's interdependent and provisional arrangements reveal economic circumventions, social collaborations, and spatial transgressions, across and beyond the city that push back against static modernist renderings of the urban. This reading of the counter-city examines the ephemeral, emergent, and cross-cutting forms of sociality within them, positioning urban spaces as frontiers of inter-dependent experimentation, fluid mutuality, and collaboration.
Highlights Modernist city visions are preoccupied with maintaining social orders and hierarchies. Provisional urban practices understand cities socially and spatially. A counter-city imaginary is one that is people-centered and mutually constituted. This is a re-orientation to cities as differentially spatialized and negotiated.
Provisioning the Counter-City: Alternative imaginaries of urban futures from Harare, Zimbabwe
Abstract Drawing from critical urbanists, this article conceptualizes provisionality—flexible, improvisational, and adaptable practices, as an ethos and practice that holds utility and possibility for alternatively understanding cities in ways that counter conventional modernist imaginaries of urban life and spaces. By attending to how cities are rather than how they “should be,” this article offers a conceptual and analytic counter to re-animate, re-imagine, and re-world cities beyond conventional and modernist frames. Using ethnographic observations supplemented by 22 semi-structured interviews, I trace how Hararians' provisional approaches to surviving political and economic precarity reveal collaborative networks and transgressive cross-border economic communities. I argue that the relationalities and spatialities of people's interdependent and provisional arrangements reveal economic circumventions, social collaborations, and spatial transgressions, across and beyond the city that push back against static modernist renderings of the urban. This reading of the counter-city examines the ephemeral, emergent, and cross-cutting forms of sociality within them, positioning urban spaces as frontiers of inter-dependent experimentation, fluid mutuality, and collaboration.
Highlights Modernist city visions are preoccupied with maintaining social orders and hierarchies. Provisional urban practices understand cities socially and spatially. A counter-city imaginary is one that is people-centered and mutually constituted. This is a re-orientation to cities as differentially spatialized and negotiated.
Provisioning the Counter-City: Alternative imaginaries of urban futures from Harare, Zimbabwe
Kataneksza, Jacquelin (author)
Cities ; 145
2023-11-27
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
British Library Online Contents | 1996
Home Industries and the Formal City in Harare, Zimbabwe
| British Library Conference Proceedings | 2004
Zugluft - Bürohaus in Harare, Zimbabwe
Online Contents | 1996