Introduction

Difference always matters. Whether manifested in broadly social, material, or symbolic forms, and whether with historical or more recent origins, difference maps—and maps onto—spaces, bodies, institutions, infrastructures, rationalities, practices, and relationships. It does so in ways that significantly define the unequal conditions of possibility and impossibility of living—or for some, just surviving—in the present and the future.Footnote 1 Empirically, every space and time has its own structural and social configurations of difference, and hence of power and politics. Depending on the particular historical and spatial context, patterns of difference can be concerned with questions of class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, age, political ideology, and so on, either in the singular or in combination. Such differences shape access to resources and opportunities as diverse as public services, property, justice, and livelihoods. In turn, they inform differentiated experiences of urban life, including different levels of subjection to or protection from various forms of violence, linked to, among other things, politicized systems of selective national belonging and hierarchies of personhood. In all cases, the co-constitutive governing and living of urban life entails uneven encounters between multiple authorities—such as central or local state agencies, political parties, religious or traditional authorities, landowners, or even international development agencies—and variously positioned and repositioned citizens, where complex dynamics of power are always at play.

However, it is not simply the ‘fact’ of differences, and the apparent and actual divisions they create, that matters, nor finding rational policy fixes for ‘problematic’ urban divides. Rather, of particular interest is what happens at the messy points of intersection of difference. In relation to this, the combined intellectual and political imperatives of the juxtacity approach and of this special issue are aimed at reading and revealing difference and divide in ways that make visible their diversity, simultaneity, and relationality, and the generative frictions associated with their interweaving. In this special issue, we argue that it is critical and productive to focus both analytically and methodologically on the juxtaposition of differences, that is, to focus on the multiple spaces, moments, and ways in which differences articulate with each other. A focus on the juxtaposition of differences situates questions of urban division in relation to their historical and contemporary manifestations, and helps track and analyze the implications these have in particular for urban governance and citizenship. It assumes and reveals a more complex set of multi-layered interactions and often-unpredictable outcomes than any simplified notion of ‘divide’ on its own allows. In this vein, the notion of juxtacity offers a set of analytical lenses specifically focused on the urban, through which to identify and explain the origins, dynamics, and effects of urban divides and divisions. Additionally, the work in this issue draws attention to how changing forms of authority and citizenship, and the power relations and practical encounters between a range of specific authorities and differentiated citizens, are shaped in and by particular configurations of entangled differences.

The special issue explores these questions and this approach in a range of urban settings in both Asian and African contexts.Footnote 2 In working with urbanization in both Asia and Africa in their New Urban Worlds book, Simone and Pieterse (2017) identify certain resonances that make this cross-regional conversation meaningful, while also recognizing the intricate differences that limit any direct comparison. Among other similarities, they refer to Asian and African cities sharing ‘the problems of producing more spectacular built environments, accommodating large numbers of recent and usually poor residents, and managing vast and easily bubbled property markets’ (ibid: p. 4). They point to ‘substantial demographic changes’ confronting cities in both regions, especially the continuing youth bulge, ‘which means a key challenge is the provision of work, particularly in cities largely centered on both informal and industrial labor markets, now increasingly overcrowded’ (ibid: p. 6). They suggest that the ‘present rules of the game for urban governance and development do not work in most of the geographies [they] are concerned with’ (ibid: p. 10), and that frequently, ‘[m]aterials and places are put to use for functions for which they were not intended’ (ibid: p. 16). While the wealth of scholarship in and on both regions may well challenge some of these generalized claims, what Simone and Pieterse are calling us to do is to more actively think conceptually and politically across regions. Including cases from different parts of Asia and Africa, this special issue employs a form of openly comparative southern urbanism that contributes to the wider project of theorizing from the south/southeast (Watson 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Robinson 2016; Yiftachel 2016).

At the same time, and in support of the larger project of Urban Forum, there is a desire to enhance the inclusion of more African perspectives in urban theory more generally. Despite the growing interest in urban research in Africa, relatively speaking African cities and African urbanism are still at the margins of urban theory, and visible urban research in Africa is rather unevenly concentrated in fairly few intellectual centres. Although some African metropoles such as Lagos, Luanda, Kinshasa, and Johannesburg are becoming increasingly visible on a global scale, there is far less attention being given to the wide array of urban forms and processes on the continent. Yet learning and theorizing from and with African cities cannot happen in isolation. Rather, it needs to engage with experiences and thinking from elsewhere (Robinson 2016). The conversations between African and Asian case studies in this issue are important in this regard. The seven empirically grounded papers speak from diverse urban realities in six southern/southeastern contexts: Jakarta in Indonesia, two cases from Maputo in Mozambique, Quetta in Pakistan, Manila in the Philippines, Kigali in Rwanda, and Cape Town in South Africa. However, as we argue, the juxtacity approach and the insights it generates are relevant for critical urban research anywhere, evident in the two invited reflection essays, which conclude the issue and help us to expand and deepen the approach.

This issue builds on ideas of urban difference that are more commonly viewed through frameworks of urban divide. An important and varied scholarship exists on divided, dual, fractured, polarized, segregated, or fragmented cities, usefully summarized by Gaffikin and Morrissey (2011). The literature points to an intensification of a range of systemic social, material, and spatial divides in cities of the global south or southeast (Koonings and Kruijt 2007; Yiftachel 2009; Roy 2011; Watson 2013) as well as the global north.Footnote 3 Among some of the more obviously ‘divided’ global south/southeastern cities, we might think of mega-cities like Lagos (Gandy 2006), Jakarta (Simone 2014), Kinshasa (De Boeck 2011), Manila (Tadiar 2007), and Rio de Janeiro (Perlman 2010); or less-large, yet profoundly, divided cities such as Cape Town (Lemanski and Oldfield 2009; Lemanski 2017) and Jerusalem (Yiftachel 2016). We might also consider smaller towns, not least those emerging on rural-urban frontiers: literally on borders (Vlassenroot and Büscher 2009), on natural resource-related frontiers (Bryceson and MacKinnon 2012), or on peri-urban fringes (Trefon 2009). Urban divisions rest on both historical (largely, but not only, colonial) and newly emerging, more diverse dimensions of difference, with local, national, or even global significance. Tensions and overt violence associated with specific urban divides are often bound up in questions of recognition, and related hierarchies of access to key symbolic and material rights and resources, both public and private (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012; Hammar 2014; Collins 2016; Alves 2018; see Yiftachel this issue).

At the same time, even in the context of these divisions and conflicts, there is evidence of inclusive or negotiated forms of governance within fragmented urban spaces (see, for example, Millstein, Miraftab, Qayyum, van Voorst, this issue), double-edged as these forms and their effects may be (Beall 2001; Jensen 2004; Millstein 2011; Patel 2016). Additionally, there is the demanding, often risky, yet also potentially redemptive, labour of autonomous agency and activism among marginalized citizens in resisting, contesting, and re-shaping such divides, disparities, and practices of exclusion, dispossession, and violence (Appadurai 2002; Caldeira 2014; Das 2011; Holston 2011; Hammar 2017; see in this issue Millstein, Miraftab, Qayyum, Shearer, van Voorst, and Yiftachel). Holding together, analytically, this combination of relevant points of reference, is key to the critical lens that juxtacity provides into the dynamic interconnections between urban division, authority, and citizenship.

The notion of juxtacity developed through this special issue explores the production of and within urban divides in themselves, paying attention to their generative qualities and effects, as well as the ways these divides and their juxtaposed elements are produced and sustained. More specifically, juxtacity as an approach provides a relational lens through which to examine the dynamic articulation between forms, processes, and practices of urban difference and division, which are intertwined in the production of and contestations over urban authority and citizenship. The following two sections articulate the conceptual logic and dimensions of the juxtacity approach, as well as explain our particular emphasis on the co-constitutive relationship between urban difference, divides, authority, and citizenship.

Juxtacity, an Approach to Urban Difference and Divides

Drawing from and evolving through the present combination of cases from different African and Asian urban contexts, the juxtacity approach necessarily positions itself within the body of scholarship that critiques and counters EuroAmerican-as-universal urban theory (Parnell and Robinson 2012; Parnell and Oldfield 2014; Sheppard et al. 2015; Roy 2016) and as universal urban planning model (Miraftab 2009; de Satgé and Watson 2018). It joins the calls for re-thinking and re-imagining the urban—but also the world—through and from multiple, marked locations and positionalities, whether these are identified as being in ‘the South’ or ‘Southeast’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Roy 2014; Robinson 2016; Yiftachel 2016; Simone and Pieterse 2017). It recognizes this work as a matter of both ethical responsibility and intellectual integrity, in terms of decentring—in multiple senses—the experiences and knowledge from which theory is seen and validated. Intentionally, juxtacity is an approach that incorporates a commitment to the collective project of opening up and re-drawing the maps, mental and physical, that have sustained historically narrow ‘geographies of theory’ (Roy 2016: p. 207; Simone and Pieterse 2017), and to continually thinking politically about our sites and ‘objects of reference’ (McFarlane 2010: p. 726).

Through the notion of juxtacity, we first critically re-visit the (over)emphasis on porosity, fluidity, and flow across boundaries, strongly present in recent urban studies literature. Even if that has evolved as an understandable reaction to the analytical limitations of binary thinking more generally, we echo Angelo’s (2017) view that rather than dismissing binaries, we ought to turn these into—or at least include them as part of—our object of research. Some of the more familiar conceptual binary pairings that have shaped, as well as limited, investigations and interpretations of urban differences and divides include the following: formal/informal, legal/illegal, urban/rural, insider/outsider, traditional/modern, rational/irrational, ordered/disordered, stationery/nomadic, spectral/real. To work in and beyond these binaries, in the juxtacity approach we adopt a conscious analytical (re)engagement with those very dimensions of difference that have informed binary readings of urban space and that have defined and often reified divides. However, our own focus is not on dichotomy per se, but rather on urban divides as active, situated domains in themselves that provide key opportunities for further understanding and theorizing complex urban dynamics and their differentiated effects. We thus aim to understand urban divides in their varied and inter-related spatial, temporal, social, political, economic, material, and symbolic senses. Folded into this framing is a special interest in how and why differently situated actors across the spectrum of urban governing authorities, and among the range of urban residents, produce, reinforce, or contest particular urban divides as they encounter each other, and in turn how they get re-defined in the process of such encounters.

In this mix, we pay attention to and conceive of divides as particularly generative ‘intermediate’ and ‘kinetic’ arenas (Lutzoni 2016). That is, they are spaces energized by the entanglements of difference, within and through which a range of contested urban visions, relations, structures, and practices articulate with each other and either get re-shaped and/or reinforced in more or less overt, and more or less (temporarily) stable, ways. In turn, such juxtaposed dynamics and their frictions on the one hand affect, and often alter, the nature of existing urban divides and the urban lives within them, and on the other, precipitate the formation of new urban divisions. Through the juxtacity approach, divide is, therefore, understood in terms of the juxtaposition of contrasting yet co-constitutive spaces, temporalities, things, persons, ideas, visions, institutions, infrastructures, and practices. In this approach, we emphatically focus on three key elements of difference and division—their relationality, articulation, and productive co-constitution—and their differentiated effects.

The juxtacity approach to urban division offers us a way to identify, investigate, and theorize the generative qualities of multiple urban differences and divides in their specific empirical contexts. We think of juxtaposition in terms of two (or more) relatively distinct or contrasting phenomena in close relational proximity to one another, and in some way interacting and co-producing, countering, or altering one another. In the initial imagining of the term ‘juxtacity’,Footnote 4 it was conceived as the productive articulation between a diversity of proximate differences within the urban (see for example De Boeck and Plissart 2004; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008; Simone 2014; and all the contributors to this special issue). Here, articulation implies interaction or imbrication as well as ‘friction’, generating change of some kind. Potentially (and often in reality) this includes changes to forms and practices of both authority and citizenship, hence possible shifts in the dynamics of power. Contra Gaffikin and Morrissey (2011), we do not view difference-generated divides as only or necessarily framed by direct conflict or contestation, though of course they may be and often are. Rather, as a starting point, urban divides are characterized by dynamics of encounter within and across a wide spectrum of distinctions, whose specificities require empirical investigation.

Instead of focusing on difference inevitably in terms of separation, competition, or antagonism, we explore urban divides more openly and experimentally (see Nielsen this issue), as revelatory objects of analysis in themselves (see van Voorst this issue). The juxtapositions of difference in urban spaces thus produce and shape a range of outcomes: from difference-as-distinction (here one might consider cities divided formally or informally by ghettoization or gentrification (see Roque this issue), or where differentiated notions of citizenship are used to legitimize delays, eviction, resettlement, or expulsion (see Millstein and Jensen et al. this issue)), to difference-as-conflict (such as cities at war or neighbourhoods fraught with ethnic, racial, religious, or party-political violence (see Qayyum this issue)), and difference-as-bridge (where solidarities or interdependencies are built around or in spite of socio-cultural or economic differences, for longer or shorter periods (see Shearer this issue)). This openness to reading difference and divide through multiple lenses resonates closely with Simone and Pieterse’s (2017: p. 12) call to explore urban change through the frictions and ‘reciprocal complicities, divergences and interdependencies’ at the boundaries where differentiated urban forms ‘meet’.

More concretely, in the special issue papers, examples of such proximate juxtaposed contrasts include informal settlements or markets beside upmarket neighbourhoods (Roque); entire resettlement areas beside the ‘proper’, ‘ordered’ city (Jensen et al.); temporary shelter next to permanent, formal housing (Millstein); combinations of legal and illegal forms of habitation within a single building (Nielsen); informal street vendors alongside or entangled with corporate enterprises (Shearer); and the co-presence of different kinds of authorities, and differently classed, ethnicized or in other ways differentiated citizens within particular urban territories (Qayyum, van Voorst). In exploring this range of contexts, various kinds of material-physical-spatial, and social-political-symbolic juxtapositions and divides are made visible, as well as their varied political, economic, social, and spatial effects. It is these effects, and the work they do, that we examine and argue are critical in relation to the relationship between authority and citizenship.

Our analytical interest is not simply in pairing or placing practices, actors, visions, or structures beside each other merely in order to reveal their differences as a form of what Yiftachel (this issue) refers to as a ‘horizontal’ approach to understanding the urban. Nor is it to limit our readings of difference and their profoundly complex differentiating effects through singular versions of ‘vertical’ domination and conflict. We argue, instead, that there are important, multi-layered differences occurring at, in, and through what are commonly viewed more mono-dimensionally as urban divides. These differences and their complex interactions generate transformative frictions that require close attention. Simone and Pieterse (2017: p. 12) refer to these kinds of interactions as ‘a moment when something transitions into something else, passes from one medium or scale to another’. We think of them as moments and arenas of articulation, as interstitial spaces layered with multiple differences, in which relationships between authorities and citizens are activated and potentially altered, and where urban life can either be stabilized or destabilized or productively transformed.

The primary intention, then, is not merely to map out or explain what causes urban divides per se, although this is clearly important. Neither is the aim to prescribe particular ‘solutions’ for the challenges of urban divides. The insights from applying a juxtacity approach are intended critically, and perhaps optimistically, to make visible the complex origins and often contradictory workings and effects of both past and present patterns of domination and exclusion. In grounding this approach in a range of complex urban contexts, the work in this issue makes visible multiple forms and scales of division, as well as myriad modes of adaptation and resistance evident in urban divides. The main analytical ambition hereis to examine what such divides produce, to guard against simplified readings of difference and division, and to make visible a more comprehensive range of patterns and their implications. This offers a lens for analyzing authority and citizenship as co-constituted through the juxtaposition of and frictions between urban differences at multiple levels, as well as revealing how potentially new governing and citizenship practices emerging in these spaces may reproduce, interrupt, or reshape urban divides. Scholarly attention to these particular relational dynamics is essential, and uncommon.

Linking Urban Differences, Divides, Authority, and Citizenship

The juxtacity framework fills a gap in the urban literature on the relationship between urban differences, divides, authority, and citizenship. It offers an approach that engages the multiplicity of productive exchanges through which authorities and citizens in varied spaces of cities of the global south/southeast draw upon, resist, and remake particular divides. A juxtacity approach prompts a double reading of these relational dynamics. On the one hand, it leads us to examine how different actors produce, reinforce, contest, or use urban differences and divides. On the other hand, it helps reveal how authorities and citizens of different kinds get ‘made’ or re-made through the production of or resistance to key urban differences and divides. In doing so, juxtacity offers a lens to examine the ways in which these differences and related dynamics articulate and shape authority and citizenship.

We view authority as inclusive of, but also beyond any particular, fixed institutional actor or governing structure such as ‘government’ or ‘the state’ or ‘municipality’. Authority can be understood, in its most mundane sense, as simultaneously a form of expression and a recognition of legitimate power, wherein legitimacy can be formal or informal, licit or illicit, and permanent or temporary. It may derive as much from traditional, familial, or gendered hierarchies or from moral-political grounding or charismatic appeal, as from legal or official sanction. It might be expressed through overt or passive, violent or caring means, and be performed through particular technologies and practices. Notably, authority is viewed as neither singular nor static, and never entirely comprehensive or complete in its coverage. There are always multiple domains of authority, and always multiple, shifting authorities within specific spatio-social contexts (Lund 2002; Moore 2005; Roitman 2005; Alexander 2006; Hammar 2007; Stacey and Lund 2016). This complexity can give rise to competition, negotiation, or consensus among different authorities and citizens, for example in relation to public services and infrastructure, to labour and livelihoods, to rights and security, or to identity and belonging. Miraftab (this issue) theorizes such spaces of encounter and political practice between authorities (or states) and citizens relationally, in terms of invited and invented spaces. In relation to specific issues generating specific struggles, citizens move between such spaces, in the process reshaping both authorities and themselves and the wider terrain of politics.

Authority as a manifestation of power is situated and institutionalized in many overlapping and contradictory forms and spaces. Those diverse actors in whom authority is vested, are authorized in different ways to make determining decisions over the actions of others, and to define, categorize, regulate, or control people, things, spaces, and temporalities. But even if authority is recognized, it does not mean it is always effective, nor that it is not or will not be contested (again, see Miraftab this issue). The effects of seemingly failed or ineffective authority are as significant as its apparent successes, while resistance to authority is as much constitutive of it as overt recognition (Tsing 1993). Limited attention has been paid to this multiplicity of authorities specifically within urban contexts (exceptions include Stacey and Lund 2016; Collins 2016). The juxtacity approach, and the contributors to this special issue, bring such mixed realities and their effects to the fore. Qayyum’s case (this issue) of contesting state authorities overlapping one another, and simultaneously being challenged by a security-threatened and ‘guarded’ community, in the violently fractured, highly volatile, yet paradoxically ordered, Pakistani city of Quetta, provides one such illustration of the non-binary nature of urban divides.

Questions of citizenship open up parallel imperatives. Urban citizenship in particular is dynamic and is increasingly conceptualized in diverse ways. Citizenship is viewed increasingly in a multi-spatialized way and as a ‘contested terrain’ (Hammett 2017). Citizenship is shaped and acknowledged in both its legal-statutory versions associated with formal rights and obligations, and its substantive forms, variously conceptualized as ‘active’, ‘insurgent’, ‘residential’, and so on (see for example Holston 2011; Neveu et al. 2011; see Miraftab in this issue). Thinking of urban citizenship in this way draws attention to both the structuring and enabling of residents’ political agency within diverse urban contexts. Co-existing forms of citizenship manifest unevenly across space and time as well as between and within particular political or social communities, reflected in such notions as differentiated or graduated citizenship (Bezabeh 2011; Doshi 2013; Holston 2011). This is informed by such politicized social distinctions as class, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, sexuality, ability, religion or party-political affiliation, alone or in combination.

Citizens seek and generate agency through practice, actively engaging with structures of authority through political demonstrations or negotiations, or by ignoring or countering it through diverse everyday practices of citizenship. The intensity of such actions, formal or informal, may waiver between highly active and passive, depending on context and circumstances. And they may not necessarily be intended to disrupt entirely the hegemonic social and political order. A politics of rights-claims, for example, may articulate with localized struggles over identities and belonging through which differentiated citizenship may be reproduced rather than challenged and contested (Hammett 2017). This raises questions as to whether or when urban residents are acting as clients, subjects, or citizens. Either way, as the contributions here illustrate, land, property, infrastructure, public services, and markets, as well as security, dignity, and a sense of liveable futures—defined by context-specific configurations of structural domination, shaped over time by what Yiftachel (2016) calls ‘dynamic structuralism’—are core arenas of struggle within urban settings. Importantly, these struggles are not linear processes towards the ideal ‘liberal’ citizen-subject, but a complex, situated politics of multi-dimensional citizen-making, both individually and collectively, often within larger visions of political and structural transformation.

The distinctions and frictions among and between citizens and authorities that a juxtacity approach highlights, constitute certain kinds of symbolic-material divides, which overlay and co-produce actually lived urban divides. The individual papers in this issue, summarized below, provide examples of such divides and their effects.

An Outline of the Special Issue

The special issue builds from seven empirical papers and two commentaries, which explore diverse contexts of urban differences and divides, and their relevant authority-citizenship dynamics. As noted previously, these include both African and Asian cases—four and three respectively—not in any directly comparative way but with more implicit echoes of contextual commonality and thematic interconnectedness instead. These are outlined below.

Marianne Millstein’s paper examines the juxtaposition of various forms of housing and housing rights and restrictions for the urban poor in Delft, a township at the edges of Cape Town, which exemplifies South Africa’s familiar spatially racialized and classed segregation. It is an area characterized by the close physical proximity of state-built permanent housing of varying quality, state-built and managed temporary resettlement areas, and a range of informal backyard and other structures. Simultaneously, it features the co-presence of different and sometimes contradictory housing policies and diversely managed development projects of both national and municipal authorities. Additionally, different kinds of residents occupy different forms of housing and different legal status: some as homeowners, some temporarily relocated for assorted reasons and on waiting lists for permanent resettlement nearby or elsewhere, some as precarious backyard tenants, some considered ‘proper’ citizens, others viewed as troublesome outsiders. The Delft case helps illuminate the relationship of juxtaposed material, spatial, and temporal differences in housing infrastructure and their relationship to a politics of differentiated urban citizenship. This is a politics expressed in both everyday citizen-making and more formalized struggles over rights. It is a politics informed by an interplay of the promise and limits of different planning rationalities, the tensions between differently categorized and entitled residents, and the awkward articulation of the formalities and informalities, and permanence and temporariness, of both houses and lives on the urban fringes.

While Millstein addresses the juxtaposed differences informing a wider politics of housing and citizenship mapped across Cape Town’s urban periphery, Morten Nielsen explores a case of ‘vertical urban divide’ within a single inner-city building in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Situating this one dilapidated apartment block in relation to a generally declining urban governance system, Nielsen then heuristically ‘cuts off’ the wider context to concentrate more closely on the inner social and material workings of the building itself. The paper itself focuses on differently positioned residents in the building and their roles in the ‘contestations and appropriations’ of its rooftop spaces. Such spaces are considered collective property in principle, for all apartment owners. Yet in practice, rooftops have been appropriated and divided up ‘privately’ by some owners who have built precarious structures for relatives or tenants to live in, or which they themselves occupy while renting out their own apartments below. Additionally, they illegally connect to and put pressure on the building’s already-fragile electricity, water, and drainage systems. Together with other recent scholarship on urban verticality, Nielsen’s close reading of rooftop occupation in Maputo unfolds for us the complexities of its internally differentiated ‘socio-material forces’. These reveal the forms and effects of multiple juxtapositions: of differently resourced neighbours, of both formal and informal and legal and illegal infrastructure and modes of occupation, and also of co-existing ‘registers of rights’ and responsibilities associated with collective versus private property. Paradoxically, argues Nielsen, it is the material challenges and social tensions inherent in such juxtapositions that produce an internal ‘precarious stability’ within these kinds of urban spaces in Maputo.

Investigating other dimensions of juxtaposed differences in Maputo, Sandra Roque, Miguel Mucavele, and Nair Noronha explore the long-term presence of the popular local market, Barracas do Museu, alongside the high-end residential and commercial properties of Bairro Polana in Maputo’s formal ‘cement’ city. On the one hand, this reflects the spatial juxtaposition of both materially distinct infrastructures and class-based forms of life and livelihood within the city that urban planning authorities would prefer to remove in the name of both social and material urban ‘congruence’. On the other hand, the Mercado has long been experienced by its multiple vendors and clients—as well as observers—as a dynamic space of ‘encounter, confrontation, and negotiation’ between a range of culturally, socially, and economically diverse urban inhabitants; a place of ‘productive social plurality’ and ‘creative urban imbrication’. With gentrifying intentions to ‘upgrade’ the market, such productive plurality would be disrupted, even while certain modernizing benefits might accrue to some. Such intentions and prior demolitions of informal street markets draw attention to ongoing contestations both over urban space itself and over different meanings of what urban space and urbanity are or should be. These are ultimately contestations over urban citizenship and belonging. They pit centralized, elite-based, globally inflected ideas of the urban, and the political weight of municipal and central state authorities, against decentred, economically poorer, more locally connected traders and citizens, politically more vulnerable yet at greater ease with accommodating juxtapositions of difference in the city.

Samuel Shearer’s paper introduces us to the dynamically contested yet persistent street economy of Kigali, through which he examines the generative juxtaposition—and ‘internal contradictions’—of a set of ‘divergent economic, political, and city building processes’. These play out both symbolically and literally through the complex relationships between: the street’s informal, ‘nomadic’ merchants or abazunguzayi, a majority of whom are women; the city’s essential workers and primary street economy clients; city authorities and their various representatives, including planners and police; different national regulatory authorities; and a more invisible yet powerful network of national and international finance capital and property investors. Through the juxtacity approach, Shearer reveals the profound relationality of the city’s ‘juxtaspaces’, marked by the close proximity and interactions of these Kigali actors. Importantly, he deconstructs the idea of street economies as ‘bounded’ informal systems, either working in parallel to a city’s formal economic structures, or working against the state’s project of transforming Kigali into a high-tech, highly ordered, tourist-friendly world-class city. Rather, Kigali’s ‘juxtanomics’—as Shearer refers to the interconnected, hybrid mixing of formal and informal economies—points to the high levels of co-dependency and co-constitution of ‘seemingly divergent’ economic spheres. This includes elite real estate development on the one hand, that imagines its autonomy, and street-level ‘discount economies’ on the other, that sustain the very labour upon which all forms of capital development in the city depend. Additionally, he highlights tensions between the state’s branding of Rwanda as Africa’s most gender-progressive nation through high-level women’s empowerment, and an older colonial logic that underpins the violent removal and detention by municipal authorities of women street traders in extralegal detention centres. Kigali’s street traders themselves, while still vulnerable, have nonetheless come to recognize the political openings of such internal contradictions, made more visible through a juxtacity lens.

In her paper, Roanne van Voorst brings to our attention the ways in which physically, socially, and legally vulnerable urban riverbank dwellers in Jakarta are faced simultaneously with the threat of flooding, and of evictions by the state linked to its flood-related disaster management policies. In mapping the political terrain of this contradictory conjuncture, she unfolds the juxtaposition and articulation of very differently positioned actors. These include the riverbank settlers themselves, the formal urban planners and politicians, and an assortment of activist academics, professionals, and journalists. Their differences are defined by a combination of their diverse spatial locations, socio-material conditions, and lived class distinctions; opposed urban planning and management visions from ‘above’ and ‘below’; and conflicting political ideologies about urban rights and citizenship. Adding a ‘revelatory approach to disasters’ to the juxtacity lens, van Voorst uses the phenomenon of flooding to examine the paradoxical ways in which such juxtaposed differences, and the structural and social divides they seemingly represent, get both reinforced and challenged in reality. Focusing especially on ‘everyday practices of citizenship’ in a context of disaster, poverty, and displacement, she demonstrates how, over time, not only does the intensification of vulnerability and violence deepen political consciousness among poor urban dwellers. In addition, in struggles against eviction, alliances between marginalized citizens and a range of well-resourced yet politically sympathetic actors alter the former’s organizing strategies and claims to urban citizenship. In the process, actual and assumed divides get blurred, revealing themselves instead as arenas within which both profound threats and opportunities for transformation co-exist. This discussion resonates more broadly with some of the literature on everyday citizenship practices in urban settings in African cities, especially in relation to questions of eviction and resettlement. (With regard to such dynamics in Cape Town for example, see Miraftab and Wills (2005) and Millstein (2017, and this issue).)

In their paper on social and spatial reconfigurations in Manila, Steffen Jensen, Karl Hapal, and Salome Quijano use the conceptual lens of juxtacity to investigate the strategic discursive and material constructions of juxtaposed differences by municipal authorities, and their relationship to state practices of displacement and resettlement of disposable citizens. As the authors point out, not only did these imposed binary notions of ‘order/disorder, purity/danger, and ‘wealth/poverty’ justify such exclusionary reordering of the city. Through the practice of resettlement, they reinforced actual structural urban divides—that is, between the ‘proper’ city and citizens of Manila and its neglected resettlement peripheries and populations—as well as producing a range of new structural, spatial, social, and political forms and dynamics. The authors focus on four dimensions of change. Firstly, they note the decline in progressive left-wing politics among those who initially attempted to resist eviction or make claims for compensation, and the partial replacement by patron-client relations within the new resettlement areas. Secondly, they point out that while resettlement predictably deepened the wider classed divides between central Manila and its distant edges, it also generated ‘new forms of class differentiation’ within the resettlement sites themselves. Thirdly, the exacerbated physical distance between the resettlement sites and the city’s dynamic urban centre, confined residents to the economically depleted peripheries, ‘rendering survival more difficult’ in general, and creating a class of indigent young men especially vulnerable to extrajudicial state violence. Lastly, in the process of planned resettlement and the need for political legitimacy, the state initially became more engaged with those it was relocating. But ‘at the moment of resettlement’, with the displaced no longer in the way of ‘metropolitan dreams’, the pressures and responsibilities for the authorities to engage reduced substantially and the links became increasingly tenuous. Applying a juxtacity approach to this case provides a far more layered reading than would otherwise have been likely, of the hardening of physical, structural, and social urban divides and undermining of political agency, wrought by the Manila municipal authorities in the name of ‘progress’. This offers valuable insights for unpacking similar layers and effects of the all-too-familiar practice of state mass displacement of vulnerable urban inhabitants in African environments (see for example Gastrow 2017 on Luanda).

Finally, Faizaan Qayyum describes Quetta in Pakistan as ‘the ultimate juxtacity’. Marked by intense ethno-religious tensions and violence aimed disproportionally at the city’s small Hazara Shi’i community, the case provides a close-range perspective on a combination of inter-related juxtaposed differences—spatial, social, cultural, institutional, political—and their implications both for securing and governing the city and for practices of everyday urban life. Quetta is now spatially divided by ‘walls, barriers, and check posts’ that demarcate ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’ zones. Together with the constant threat of death and being in a perpetual state of ‘secure insecurity’, this defines patterns of movement and confinement especially but not only of minority Hazara residents. Security concerns further shape the city’s territorial divides and physical infrastructure, and both formal and informal practices of sociality (including between the living and the dead), as well as the particular configurations and contestations of co-existing civilian, judicial, and militarized modes of urban administration, including policing. At the same time, Qayyum examines the specific forms of politics generated in Quetta. This encompasses the institutional power politics of uneven and contested control among diverse authorities over the city’s juxtaposed spaces and communities, the identity politics of ethnic and sectarian difference, and the activist politics of solidarity building, grassroots defiance, and claim-making over security, services, and development within a context of unprecedented and persistent violence. What Qayyum’s study of Quetta both asserts and clearly demonstrates is the value of a juxtacity lens to map the productive relations and paradoxical outcomes of the ‘complexity of interactions’ generated by multiple juxtapositions of difference. Such a lens might be usefully applied to African cities confronted with similar extremes of violent fragmentation along context-specific lines of difference and division, such as war-affected Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Büscher 2015), or violent areas of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, affected by conflict between Ethiopia’s Muslim communities and the state (Stockmans and Büscher 2017).

Two shorter commentaries by urban scholars, Faranak Miraftab and Oren Yiftachel, conclude the special issue, pieces that help reflect on the juxtacity approach and concept. Both draw on their own urban research and their long-term critical engagement with urban theory from southern and southeastern perspectives—much of it drawn upon in the papers in this collection—to reflect constructively on the juxtacity approach. In her essay, Miraftab recognizes juxtacity’s conceptualization of the ‘productive articulation of contradictory realities and spaces’, particularly as this relates to the ‘inter-related domains of authority and citizenship’. This has resonance with her own well-established notions of invited and invented spaces of citizen participation and contestation of authority, which in this essay she applies to the Toilet Wars waged by the urban poor in Cape Town’s townships, and to the street politics of the Homeless Workers Movement in São Paolo. In keeping with juxtacity’s emphasis on the generative frictions at the interface of juxtaposed differences, she concludes that it would be ‘a great misrepresentation’ to portray these contrasting spaces ‘as binary rather than as co-constitutive and relational’. Indeed, drawing on our own phrasing, she argues for seeing these as dynamic spaces in which different authorities and citizens get ‘made or re-made’.

In his essay, Yiftachel reflects on the juxtacity approach to introduce the spatially inflected analytic optic he terms ‘conceptual topography’, through which he maps different ways of engaging conceptually and politically with ‘dimensions of power in the making of urban division and citizenship’. Grounded empirically in the realities of intensely ethnically divided cities in Israel/Palestine, and in a southeastern perspective, his topographical framing distinguishes between three ideal-typical conceptual terrains: vertical, diagonal, and horizontal. These constitute a continuum of sorts in terms of their relative levels of ‘attention to oppressive power’. Horizontal concepts are defined as ‘mainly descriptive…without analyzing or critiquing the origins or consequences of their power relations’. Vertical concepts are at the opposite end of the spectrum, with the deepest attention to ‘the oppressions imposed by societal powers in the making of urban society’, which often remain unrecognized. In-between are ‘diagonal’ concepts, ‘which hint at uneven power relations’ but do not necessarily follow through with a direct critique of power.

Sympathetic to Yiftachel’s emphasis for the need for critical cartographies of the workings of power, we would suggest such work entails unpacking specific cases of ‘subjugation, resistance, and possible transformation’. The juxtacity approach indeed aims at and actively facilitates such an analytical practice, as the papers in this collection demonstrate in a range of urban settings. Far from being a descriptive approach to urban difference and divides and processes or urban change, as Yiftachel suggests, juxtacity’s focus on authority and citizenship in their multiple manifestations and imbrications is both explicitly and implicitly about making power, politics, and transformation visible. Significantly, the juxtacity approach to mapping the complexity and relationality of urban differences and divides, and of the dynamics of power and spheres of politics, is overtly ‘pluriversal’ (see Yiftachel this issue). Inclusive of but not limited to the more overt, visible structures of domination of many of the cities of the south and southeast, and increasingly also in the north, juxtacity consciously counters the ways in which more commonsense hierarchies of power leave out a wide range of subtler forms of inequality, domination, exclusion, and violence (Ferguson 2007: p. 385). These are crucial to questions of difference and division in cities around the world.