Abstract
This chapter analyses the role of informality in contemporary African cities not by focusing on emergencies or on what is missing, but by considering the positive aspects that have developed within the slums and the benefits that informal neighbourhoods can bring to the whole urban system. Following this approach, the chapter examines some solutions and innovative ideas that have developed in the slums of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, to promote self-strategies of space management and the development of activity in the informal economy. The self-organisation methods found in the slums of Freetown have effects on the entire urban system, in particular regarding the reduction of sprawl, waste management and the development of alternative and more sustainable transport and supply systems. These positive benefits contribute to relieving different problems affecting Freetown, highlighting how the contemporary African cities are complex ecosystems based on a precarious but effective balance between formality and informality.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The assessed slums are Kroo Bay, Susan Bay and Destruction Bay in the central wards and on the Upper Blackhall Road, and the Old Wharf in the East Wards.
- 2.
The UN’s five indicators for a slum, defined in the report “The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements” (2003) are lack of tenure, poor access to services, overcrowding, inadequate housing standards and hazardous locations.
- 3.
In 1808, the Freetown region was declared a British colony, while the country’s hinterland was annexed as a protectorate, an administrative subdivision that lasted until independence in 1961.
- 4.
Liberated slaves from the entire Atlantic coast or from the Caribbean gave birth to a lingua franca based on English, a unique architectural style and a polycentric urban agglomeration, divided into ethnic villages. According to a census of 1850, the approximately 25,000 residents belonged to over 200 different ethnic groups.
- 5.
According to the latest data, only 26% of households are served by municipal waste collection; the main Freetown landfills are not equipped for waste differentiation, and they are all located in areas with high environmental risk: along riverbeds or near the sea.
- 6.
The interventions, developed by the Freetown City Council or by NGOs, have provided for the transfer of some small communities of slum dwellers to new settlements with buildings and small plots of land offered under concession. Despite this, the location of the areas in the extreme east of the city (the only place with available building areas), more than 15 km from the city centre, has led almost all the beneficiaries to return progressively to their slums of origin by subletting the buildings under concessions.
- 7.
The most interesting example is the shantytown of Kroo Bay, one of the largest slums in the city, located in a marshy area at the mouth of the Alligator River. The settlement developed around a large, central square used as a meeting place, market, sports field and entertainment area: the square has been kept intact, while new houses were built raising the land from the sea, a solution that required considerable work and financial disbursement. Keeping this large open space totally unbuilt implies the existence of rules and efficient control systems.
- 8.
Article 170, Clause 1 of The Constitution of Sierra Leone states that “the law of Sierra Leone must include […] customary law: the norms of law which, by custom, are applicable to particular communities in Sierra Leone”.
- 9.
The absence of cadaster maps and registration systems and the corruption of some public officials have led to the proliferation of false property certificates, so much so that over half of the trials in the Freetown High Court concern land tenure cases. Buying land in Freetown is now an almost impossible task, as anyone can claim ownership on the basis of counterfeit documents. It is common for buyers to discover, after years, that they have purchased land from people without any rights to it.
- 10.
Of a sample of 64 households interviewed (about 2.5% of the residents of Kroo Bay), 13% claimed to work in the formal economy and 11% to work in public administration (in some cases with high-level tasks). In the National Census of 2003, the percentages of these categories in the Freetown region were 7 and 5.5% respectively. Such a large difference is justified by the location of the slum, a few hundred metres from public offices, institutions and health services.
References
Alie JD (1990) A new history of Sierra Leone. Macmillan, London
AlSayyad N (2004) Urban informality as a “new” way of life. In: Roy A, AlSayyad N (eds) Urban informality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, pp 7–30
Bairoch P (1985) De Jéricho à Mexico. Villes et économie dans l’histoire. Gallimard, Paris
Butt-Thompson FW (1926) Sierra Leone in history and tradition. Witherby, London
Choplin A (2017) African urban subalternity. Hegemonic planning, subaltern practices and neoliberal citizenship. In: Pennacini C, Gusman A (eds) L’Africa delle città, urban Africa. Accademia University Press, Turin, pp 103–116
CODOSHAPA and FEDURP (2011) State of 11 coastal slums in Freetown. Available via SSDI. https://knowyourcity.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/State_of_11_Coastal_Slum_in_Freetown_Sierra_Leone.pdf. Accessed 19 Dec 2017
Davis M (2006) Planet of slums. Verso, New York
Doherty J (1985) Housing and development in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Cities 2(2):149–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/0264-2751(85)90116-7. Copyright © 1985, reprinted with permission from Elsevier
Freund B (2007) The African city: a history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Fyfe C, Jones E (1968) Freetown: a symposium. Sierra Leone University Press, Freetown
Holston J (2009) Insurgent citizenship in an era of global urban peripheries. City 21(2):245–267
Johnson M (2009) An assessment of the urban conditions contributing to slum development in Freetown. Available via SLURC. http:/www.slurc.org/uploads/1/0/9/7/109761391/an_assessment_of_the_urban_conditions_and_systematic_issues.pdf. Accessed 1 Mar 2018
Johnson OEG (2011) Reforming the customary land tenure system in Sierra Leone. IGC Working Paper, 11/0558. London School of Economics and Political Science, London
Kandé S (1998) Terres, urbanisme et architecture creoles en Sierra Leone. L’Harmattan, Paris
Koroma B, Rigon A, Walker J, Sellu S (2018) Urban livelihoods in Freetown’s informal settlements. SLURC, Freetown
Lourenço Lindell I (2001) Social networks and urban vulnerability to hunger. In: Tostensen A, Tvedten I, Venn M (eds) Associational life in African cities. Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Stockholm, pp 30–45
Monica F (2017) Dinamiche di auto-organizzazione dello spazio urbano e di autocostruzione negli slum di Freetown. In: Pennacini C, Gusman A (eds) L’Africa delle città, Urban Africa. Accademia University Press, Turin, pp 185–196
Monica F (2009) Shack sweet shack, soluzioni progettuali per un insediamento informale a Freetown, Sierra Leone. Master’s dissertation, University of Parma, Faculty of Architecture
Monica F (2014) Scrap cities. Strategie e strumenti per il miglioramento degli slum di Freetown. PhD thesis, University of Parma, Department of Engineering and Architecture
Montero GM (2016) Analytic framework: resettlement vs. upgrading. The case of Colbot in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College, London. Available via SLURC. http://www.slurc.org/uploads/1/6/9/1/16915440/dissertation_mgm_final_low_.pdf. Accessed 15 Mar 2018
Myers G (2011) African cities: alternative visions of urban theory and practice. Zed Books, London
Parvez N (2011) Visual representations of poverty: the case of Kroo Bay, Freetown. City 15(6):686–695
Pellow B (2002) Landlords and lodgers: socio-spatial organization in an Accra community. Praeger, Westport, CT
Pieterse E, Parnell S (2014) Africa’s urban revolution in context. In: Parnell S, Pieterse E (eds) Africa’s urban revolution. Zed Books, London, pp 1–17
Ministry of Lands, Country Planning and the Environment of Sierra Leone (2015) Final national land policy of Sierra Leone. Available via FAO. http://extwprlegs1.fao.org/docs/pdf/sie155203.pdf. Accessed 5 Mar 2018
Pushak N, Foster V (2011) Sierra Leone’s infrastructure. A continental perspective. Policy Research Working Paper 571:31–35
Roy A (2004) Transnational trespassings: the geopolitics of urban informality. In: Roy A, AlSayyad N (eds) Urban informality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, pp 289–317
Roy A (2011) Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism. Int J Urban Reg Res 35(2):223–238
Simone A (2004) People as infrastructure: intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16(3):407–429
Simone A (2006) Pirate towns: reworking social and symbolic infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala. Urban Studies 43(2):357–370
Simone A (2011) No longer the subaltern: refiguring cities in the Global South. In: Edensor T, Jayne M (eds) A world of cities: urban theory beyond ‘the West.’ Routledge, London, pp 31–46
Simone A (2014) Infrastructures, real economy and social transformation, assembling the components for regional urban development in Africa. In: Parnell S, Pieterse E (eds) Africa’s urban revolution. Zed Books, London, pp 221–236
Statistics Sierra Leone (2013) Survey of charcoal businesses in urban centers of Sierra Leone. Available via STATISTICS SIERRA LEONE. https://www.statistics.sl/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/2012_report_on_survey_of_charcoal_businesses_in_urban_centers_of_sierra_leone.pdf. Accessed 2 Feb 2018
Statistics Sierra Leone (2014) Sierra Leone integrated household survey 2011. Available via STATISTICS SIERRA LEONE. https://www.statistics.sl/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/sierra_leone_integrated_household_survey_2011-1.pdf. Accessed 9 Jan 2018
Statistics Sierra Leone (2016) 2015 Population and housing census. Summary of final results. Available via STATISTICS SIERRA LEONE. https://www.statistics.sl/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/final-results_-2015_population_and_housing_census.pdf. Accessed 10 Apr 2018
Tranberg Hansen K, Vaa M (2004) Reconsidering informality: perspectives from urban Africa. Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala
Turner JFC, Fichter R (1972) Freedom to build. Collier McMillian, New York
United Nations (2003) The challenge of slums: Global report on human settlements. United Nations, New York
United Nations Statistics Division (2015) Global SDG indicators database. Available via UNSTATS. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/database/. Accessed 18 Feb 2019
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Monica, F. (2021). Slums as Opportunities? Spatial Organisation, Microeconomy and Self-made Infrastructures in Freetown Informal Settlements. In: Faldi, G., Fisher, A., Moretto, L. (eds) African Cities Through Local Eyes. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84906-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84906-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84905-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84906-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)