I have been here for six years, but I don't think any right thinking person would want to be South African... They are just so contaminated.

Lesotho migrant in Johannesburg, 2005

(Author interview)

African Urbanization and the Meaning of Belonging

Histories of mobility and marginalization have generated overlapping systems of exchange, meaning, and privilege in Africa's primary urban centers. Rather than coalescing into discrete communities, many of these cities face heightening disparities of wealth and ever-diversifying linguistic, ethnic, and national heterogeneity, all cross-cut by shifting gender roles, life trajectories, and inter-generational tensions (see for example Diouf 2000; Sommers 2001; Tomlinson et al. 2003; Winkler 2006). Moreover, through geographic movement—into, out of, and within cities—urban spaces are increasingly the loci of economic and normative ties with home villages and diasporas spread (and spreading) across the continent and beyond (Diouf 2000; Geschiere 2005).

Accepting that successful “development” is premised on a population's participation in a collective undertaking (see Evans 2002), we must understand urban residents' interactions and ambitions. As effective engagement and mutual recognition are not something we can impose on communities (Evans 2002: 141; Potts 2008), we must recognize, as Kabeer (2005: 1) does, that “[we] do not know what citizenship means to people—particularly people whose status as citizens is either non-existent or extremely precarious—or what these meanings tell us about the goal of building inclusive societies”. In these agglomerations of geographic and social mobility, it is unclear what forms of inclusion, solidarity or mutual recognition are desired by those who live there. This paper argues that the pursuit of three objectives—profit, protection and passage—is shaping these cities’ social formations in ways that limit the ability of official and non-official institutions to interweave these aspirations—however temporarily—to promote a common and mutually beneficial future.

Given the lack of systematic accounts from across the continent, this paper starts from the premise that the novelty of the emerging social forms within Africa's cities requires a willingness to induce: to build a conceptual vocabulary of belonging reflecting practices of those living in and moving through Africa's cities. Only after doing this will we have the building blocks for further debate. With this in mind, this paper works towards a pair of modest, interrelated objectives. The first is to challenge three premises often informing discussions of mobility and urban politics: (1) the presence of a dominant host community or political order; (2) that cities are destinations and not points of transit; and (3) that state institutions are the primary source of exclusion and the most potent tool for fostering inclusion in a collective endeavor. The second, more speculative, objective is to consider one form of membership and inclusion that can emerge where the presumptions outlined above do not hold. In doing so, I point to what I have termed “tactical cosmopolitanism”, a set of discourses and practices that can subvert ethnic or national chauvinism and restrictive migration or anti-urbanization policies and practices. Drawing primarily on examples from Johannesburg, I show how migrants negotiate partial inclusion in transforming societies without becoming bounded by them. The paper ends by reflecting briefly on the challenges such tactics pose for generating a collective urban project.

Reading and Revealing Urban Inclusion

This essay draws on an ecumenical set of data in illustrating sub-national and transnational migration dynamics and the socio-institutional responses to them. Most of the information reflected here stems from migration-related research in Southern and Eastern Africa—beginning with Johannesburg—undertaken by the author between 2002 and 2008. This includes new survey research undertaken in 2006, complemented by formal and informal interviews with migrants, service providers, advocates, and local government representatives. The 2006 survey was conducted with partners in Johannesburg, Maputo, Lubumbashi, and Nairobi. This essay draws on data from three of the four survey cities: Johannesburg, Maputo, and Nairobi. A brief overview of the nationalities surveyed and the neighborhoods in which we worked are included in Tables 1, 2, and 3.

Table 1 Johannesburg sample (%) by nationality and neighborhood, 2006
Full size table
Table 2 Maputo sample (%) by nationality and neighborhood, 2006
Full size table
Table 3 Nairobi sample (%) by nationality and neighborhood, 2006
Full size table

In all instances we sampled in areas with significant migrant populations, a factor that undoubtedly points to heightened transience while excluding wealthier, more settled communities. However, within the sites selected for the surveys, we used a mix of random and cluster sampling to ensure reasonable levels of randomness and representativity. As such, the data provide critical illustrations of trends and challenges while not necessarily reflecting the cities' demographic composition. They also demonstrate the value of comparative work on experiences of migration, highlighting important characteristics and differences among international migrants, recently urbanized citizens and more sedentary population groups.

Reconsidering Belonging in Africa's Cities

This section briefly challenges three of the primary premises that inform discussions about inclusive cities and, more broadly, inclusive citizenship. Whether explicit or not, these presumptions typically inform discussions of how to build effective institutions and a range of other policies including housing, policing, health care, and investments in physical infrastructure.

The Presence of a Self-Identified Host Community or Dominant Culture

Much of the writing on migration and urbanization explores how host communities make space—or do not—for the new arrivals, both domestic and international. Beneath these debates over xenophobic exclusion or cultural accommodation is a presumption that there is a set of identifiable, dominant values and institutions that are being challenged and reshaped by heightening social heterogeneity. The data presented below suggest we should be wary of ascribing undue social coherence to the cities' current populations, populations characterized as much by ethnic heterogeneity, economic disparity, and cultural pastiche as by solidarity (see Larkin 2004; Mbembe 2004; Simone 2004).

The 2006 survey data illustrate the degree to which the urban population is also a “new” population. In Johannesburg, only 16% of the non-citizens we surveyed had been in the inner city for ten or more years. More surprisingly, only in Maputo had more than 50% of “hosts” (i.e., citizens) lived in the city for more than a decade (55% in Maputo, 46% in Nairobi, and 48% in Johannesburg). Instead of a vision of hosts and new arrivals, in all three cities there are relatively small differences in the time the two groups have occupied the city (see Table 4). Equally important, both citizens and non-nationals move frequently after coming to the city, trends retarding the formation of collective organization and solidarity. (In Johannesburg, non-nationals have moved an average of 3.1 times and citizens, 2.0 times. In Nairobi, the ratio is 1.5 to 2.0. For Maputo, both non-nationals and citizens average 1.8.)

Table 4 Average length of time (years) in city among “host” populations and non-nationals, 2006
Full size table

If nothing else, these data illustrate the degree to which long-term residents, domestic migrants, and non-citizens are simultaneously finding their ways in a new (and ever-changing) social landscape. Even domestic migrants may have as little in common with the people they find in the city as those coming from across international boundaries. In Johannesburg, the bases for commonality are also remarkably limited. When asked, 29.9% of the citizenry mentioned Zulu as their mother tongue, 19.9% Xhosa, 11.5% Sotho, 7.9% Tswana, 6.8% English, and 2.6% Afrikaans. While Protestantism initially suggests some basis for commonality (59.7% of Johannesburg's citizenry reported being Protestant, compared with 18.5% having no religion, 14.1% Catholic, and 6.8% Muslim), a closer look reveals enormous diversity and, occasionally, hostility among the city's Protestant sects that range from Anglican and Lutheran to myriad charismatic and born-again churches.

Cities as Destinations

The rapid growth of cities across the African continent, as elsewhere in the world, is often taken as evidence of ever-growing urban communities. While millions are moving to cities, we must not assume that the first move will be the last. Repeated movements within the city, oscillating movements between rural and urban areas, and passages through cities all question the intention or ability to achieve a life and livelihoods sustained by a single urban center.

Movement, in all of its forms, challenges institutions charged with tracking and responding to urban populations. Presumptions of a sedentary population only make it more difficult to respond effectively to a population that moves with considerable frequency into, within, and out of cities. Perhaps more importantly, regular movement potentially heightens people's emotional distance from their neighbors and the physical space they occupy. At the very least, it retards the formation of the kind of Putnamian social capital much of the development literature identifies as a prerequisite for development. Although people move with varying degrees of frequency—again, Johannesburg tops the chart—it is difficult to speak of a stable and potentially coherent community.

Connections and regular shifts between rural (or peri-urban) and urban areas are a critical factor in slowing the emergence of an urban citizenry. For many moving for work, the primary motivation is profit and the need to extract urban resources to subsidize the “real” life they live elsewhere. Indeed, in many instances, spouses and children remain elsewhere while single men and women earn money in the cities to sustain them. Although urban residents may establish second urban families, in many instances, social, ethnic, and political ties to rural areas prevent full social integration into urban communities. The intention to retire in the countryside also leads many to minimize their financial and emotional investments in urban areas.

In some instances, significant numbers of foreign-born population—or non-local citizens—have arrived in the city seeking protection from conflict and persecution. In Luanda, Lubumbashi, Kampala, and to some extent Maputo, urban growth has significantly accelerated as people have sought refuge from violence elsewhere in the country. Cities like Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Dar es Salaam have also received large numbers of international migrants fleeing conflicts across the border. As with other migrants, refugees often see cities of residence as temporary alternatives to camp-based living. When the war is over in their home countries, many will return to their communities while others will stay on in urban centers or move elsewhere. Others remain in the city with the hope of being resettled in Europe or North America. Cities as places of refugee resettlement, as discussed above, are but the most overt example of a broader phenomenon: of seeing (and using) cities as gateways.

The data in Tables 5 and 6 indicate how fluid urban populations are and how cities are, in Castells' (2004) words, places of flows. Although many people will be unable to make lives for themselves elsewhere, the orientation to extra-local sites remains.

Table 5 Expectation among non-nationals as to place of residence in 2 years time (percentage of sample), 2006a
Full size table
Table 6 Expectation among nationals as to place of residence in 2 years time (percentage of sample), 2006
Full size table

Even in Maputo, the study's most demographically stable city, significant numbers of people—both citizens and foreign—wish their children to be raised elsewhere (see Tables 7 and 8). If the best indicator of a population's commitment to a city is its desire to see its children raised there, then there are strong reasons to reconsider how dedicated many urban populations are to staying in and improving their cities of residence.

Table 7 Where children should grow up among non-nationals (percentage of sample), 2006
Full size table
Table 8 Where children should grow up among nationals (percentage of sample), 2006
Full size table

Given the population's volatility, social networks within cities are spread thinly across many people and places. It is little surprise then that people sampled in our surveys show remarkably low levels of trust between ethnic and national groups and, surprisingly, within them. There are ethnic and immigrant networks, but these are typically limited to assisting others only to overcome immediate risks, when there are direct, mutual returns, or if a corpse needs returning to a country or community of origin (Andersson 2006; Madsen 2004). Even among citizens, levels of social capital—trust of each other and of their public institutions—are remarkably low (see also Putnam 2007). Among neither migrants nor the nominal host population can we speak of a community or set of overlapping institutions that can be opened (or is being forced open). This heterogeneity allows for a de facto degree of permeability and coexistence, but without an enacted or articulated collective awareness.

Modes of Belonging and the Challenge of Participation

Africa's urban centers undeniably exhibit socio-economic and political fragmentation, marginalization, and violent exclusion. As a result, millions of people live in slums with tenuous access to the minimum requirements of survival (UNCHS 2003). This poverty, violence, exploitation, and political marginalization increasingly shape the activities, expectations, and ambitions of cities' newcomers and long-term residents (Mbembe 2001; Simone 2004). But, despite the traumas, trials, and marginalization they offer, Africa's cities are not only sites of exclusion. If they were, growth rates would have stabilized or declined: people would stay “home”, return to their countries and communities of origin, or move elsewhere. The expanding presence of an ever-diversifying population suggests a kind of de facto inclusivity in which most people are able to meet their survival needs. The question, foregrounded by the statistics provided above, is: within what systems of power and authority are people being included? I wish also to suggest that what at first appears to be exclusion—social, legal, or political marginalization—may be the result of novel strategies of inclusion. I discuss these further in the remainder of this paper.

My efforts are intended to reveal at least two dimensions of inclusion and belonging that are noticeably absent in my review of the planning literature (although they do appear, albeit under different labels, in sociological and anthropological literature on migration and cosmopolitanism). The first continues the reasoning outlined above, by challenging the mutual exclusivity of inclusion and exclusion. Here, we see emerging forms of conscious self-exclusion reflected in the statement made by the Lesotho migrant included as an epigraph preceding this text. This is at once a form of self-alienation—often in response to ascribed alienation—and one of inclusion.

In response to the violence, abuse, and discrimination many foreigners experience in Johannesburg, they have developed a rhetoric of self-exclusion that fetishizes their position as the permanent outsider or wanderer (see Malauene 2004). So, rather than striving to integrate or assimilate, non-nationals' extended interactions with South Africans are leading to a reification of differences and a counter-idiom of transience and superiority. Whatever the source of exclusion, only 45% of foreigners we surveyed felt they were part of South African society: 38.6% among Congolese, and 54.1% among the Somali population (95.7% of South Africans felt they were “in”). (In Maputo, 60.3% of foreigners felt they were part of Mozambican society. In Nairobi, the figure fell below that of Johannesburg, to 42.8%.) Fittingly, foreigners often brand locals with the same flaws ascribed to them: dishonesty, violence, and vectors of disease. Few trust the host population, and only a small minority speaks of close relationships with them. In South Africa, this is complemented by a sense that citizens are uneducated and do not appreciate the opportunities they have for education. Moreover, they are seen as promiscuous (female promiscuity is particularly jarring), overly tolerant (especially regarding the acceptance of homosexuality), and unreligious; imagining themselves as superior and worldly, they are thought to look down on the communities around them. While many more foreigners would like their children to learn English, Portuguese, or another “local” language, they are clear that this is only for practical purposes. Among their worst fears are that their children consider themselves as local.

Denying even the desire to integrate and settle, foreign populations in Johannesburg and elsewhere are shaping their own forms of transient belonging, a way of living in the city without becoming a permanent part of it. Clinging to the status afforded those belonging to the “mobile classes” (see Bauman 2000), migrants hover above the soil by retaining loyalties to their countries of origin and orient themselves towards a future outside their country of residence. This emerges from a combination of both original intent (i.e., why people came to a given city) and a counter-response to the hostility or exclusion they face when they arrive. Whatever its origins, many migrants deny ever having held aspirations of assimilation or permanent settlement (i.e., total inclusion). Others claim they would refuse such opportunities were they available. For them, status as allochthons is not a badge of shame, but is instead a self-authored form of inclusion into a world that is somehow far greater and more valuable than the city in which they live. So, instead of transplantation and legibility to the society and political systems in which they live, many foreigners and newcomers alike strive for a kind of usufruct rights: a form of exclusion that is at least partially compatible with social and political marginalization.

The second point emerges from my earlier interrogation into what, exactly, people are seeking or becoming included in. In African cities—as elsewhere—inclusion is something more than claiming a “right to the city” or becoming part of a stable urban community. We must avoid assuming the existence of such communities, but also recognize that, for many domestic and (especially) international migrants, the process of moving to the city—or towards larger, more networked cities—is also, if not primarily, a step into a global “imaginary”. Through urbanization, they not only hope to access a place to stay or work, but also global youth culture, new universal urban lifestyles (however understood), or, more concretely, opportunities for onward journeys. Whether or not they ever realize these ambitions, the city is nevertheless a space where one can access trading and travel opportunities unavailable in rural settings or even in the capital cities of less economically networked countries and communities.

But, for relatively poor migrants, the global cultures they wish to join are not always the same as those that Ong (1999) and Sassen (2002) describe. These may color their imaginations, but the networks they join are also those shaped by their diasporas of kin, co-ethnics, co-religionists, and co-nationals. Given that the cities in which these networks exist function as primary nodes of communication, banking, and cultural exchange, the movements of people into cities represent what Portes (1997) terms a “globalization from below”. Inclusion in their networks may facilitate an initial relocation and provide the resources (material and otherwise) needed for business formation, sustenance, and onward travel. Where integration or inclusion into a city of residence is either impossible or undesirable, these decentred, globalized networks may represent an urbanite's most significant form of membership (see Kankonde forthcoming). Even when not achieved, it may continue to serve as an aspirational ideal that shapes other more localized strategies and struggles.

The characteristics I have just described—the desire for usufruct rights, self-alienation, and global membership—are all visible in what Haupt and I have termed “tactical cosmopolitanism” (Landau and Freemantle 2010). As non-citizens encounter and attempt to overcome opposition to their presence, they draw on a variegated language of belonging that makes claims to the city while positioning them in an ephemeral, superior, and unrooted condition where they can escape localized social and political obligations. The remainder of this paper explores the content of this fragmented and heterogeneous discourse. In doing so, it illustrates foreigners' agency in mitigating discrimination by at once inserting themselves into city life and distancing themselves from it.

Unlike theoretical or “high” cosmopolitanism, its tactical variety need not be grounded on normative ideas of “openness” or tolerance. Rather, migrants practically and rhetorically draw on heterogeneous systems of rights to position themselves, however shallowly, in the networks and spaces needed to achieve specific practical goals. This is a “decentred”” approach that emphasizes individualism, generality, and universality, all “central pillars” of cosmopolitanism (see Pogge 2002: 48; also Roudometof 2005: 121). However, they do so variably and often contradictorily, furthering their personal needs and interests without necessarily generating an inclusive “”cosmopolitan consciousness”. This leaves them, in Friedman's words, “participating in many worlds without becoming part of them” (cited in Vertovec 2006: 3–10; see also Simmel 1964).

Kihato's (forthcoming) work on migrant associations in the inner city describes Awelah, a Johannesburg-based group offering up a new kind of Pan-Africanism. In the words of its founder, quoted in the paper:

We want to shift our patriotism to the continent, not to a country. We Africans share a history together; we are bound together by a neo-colonialism. When you dig up these feelings all Africans have the same history. This is the link that we have got now, we are African even though we butcher each other but we are African. In our day-to-day living we are all confronted with problems of nationality, ethnicity and so on. But when you have this [broader African] perspective you do not see these problems anymore.

There is more here than a desire to build a community of all Africans. Rather, the evocations of Pan-Africanism—drawn from 1960s liberation philosophy, Mbeki's notion of African Renaissance, and the rhetoric of Africa's World Cup to be played in South Africa in 2010—are particularly designed to erode the barriers that separate foreigners from South Africans. By helping South Africans to realize connections to their continental kin, they undermine the legitimacy of any barriers to inclusion that South Africans may erect in front of them. Ironically, the foundation for such mobilization remains firmly rooted in a transnational articulation of Ivorian identity, as most of the new members come from there. Through this, rhetoric migrants adopt a de facto cosmopolitanism that demonstrates a willingness to engage a plurality of cultures, openness to hybridity, and multiple identities (see Hannerz 1990: 239). However, this is not an openness without boundaries, but rather one that draws on multiple identities simultaneously without ever accepting the overarching authority or power of one. Importantly, their rhetoric is distinctly non-transnational. Nowhere does this new language speak of maintaining ties to a specific location. Rather, it is a tactical effort to gain access to the city, but without a view of becoming exclusively or even partially bound to it or to any other concrete locale.

Elsewhere, migrant groups have used South Africa's relatively liberal—if inconsistently applied—asylum laws and its Constitution to claim rights of residence and work. However, few refugees use an abstract language of refugee rights to justify their position in the country. Rather, they call on norms of reciprocity—claiming rights to the city (and the country) based on their countries' contributions to ending apartheid. Nigerians, for example, will often claim (with some justification) that African National Congress (ANC) activists were given full university scholarships in the 1970s and 1980s, opportunities that were not always available to citizens. Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, and even Namibians claim that they personally suffered from wars tied to South Africa's anti-communist campaign and efforts to destroy ANC or Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) strongholds within their countries. If they did not experience the war firsthand, then they were deprived by an economy that had been destroyed by years of fighting. Others plausibly argue that because South African business derives so many profits from investments in their countries—in the past and now—they have a reciprocal right to South Africa's territory and wealth. In this way, South Africa's own transnationalism—past and present—serves as justification for transcending national residential restrictions. Although these are peculiarly South African examples, migrants in other cities refer to ill-defined ideas of ubuntu or African fraternity to legitimize their presence.

Perhaps the most powerful mode of transcendent belonging comes from religion. The ever-expanding pool of foreign-run Pentecostal churches operating within Johannesburg's inner city (and elsewhere on the continent) is fashioning an organizational form that at once bridges barriers with South Africans (and South Africa) while preparing people for a life beyond South Africa. Indeed, in many cases, the churches prepare people for a life beyond any territorially bounded nation. Many of these offer up the “health and wealth” promises seen elsewhere in evangelical communities, alluring alternatives to the material deprivation many migrants experience in their current locations.

Although the churches often speak of helping to build strong communities in Johannesburg and are often presumed to do so by outside observers (see Winkler 2006), the practices are often quite the opposite. In many churches, the South African representation is small and also disaffected. Where larger numbers do attend, the solidarity achieved during the service is short-lived, with nationals and non-nationals quickly dividing on the pavement after the service. Moreover, many church leaders seem content to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's” and stay out of local politics.

Like their parishioners, many church leaders also see their presence in Johannesburg as part of their passage elsewhere. With their strong links to communities in Nigeria, Ghana, and the USA, the churches rely heavily on connections outside the country. For many of the churches' founders, South Africa is primarily a place where they can enter global discourse and influence the lives of people across the continent and beyond. In the words of the Nigerian pastor at the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Church, “Africa is shaped like a pistol and South Africa is the mouth from where you can shoot out the word of God”. And, consequently, anyone doing the work of God has divine right to South African territory. But this right, and his charisma, comes not from embedding himself within South Africa, but from remaining above it. While church ideology may potentially generate community, the new rapidly growing Charismatic churches are far too flexible to offer a coherent, stable alternative organizational form. Instead, the churches are often functional units, helping people to find jobs, transcend boundaries, or find ways (physically or spiritually) out of Johannesburg's hardships. If successful, these resources often physically help people out of the city (or at least the inner city) and onto more prosperous grounds.

Conclusion: Belonging and Participation in African Cities

The forms of belonging we see in many African cities are, as Beck (2004: 134) suggests, often “side effects” of efforts to achieve other economic, social, and occasionally political goals. As such, they do not reflect a “strategic” movement or alternative, articulated, and centralized order. Rather, they are a motley collection of actions undertaken by groups that are often divided by language, religion, legal status, and mutual distrust. Critically, many of these groups remain only loosely committed to long-term change in the places where they operate.

Unlike the sans papiers in France or Latino movements in the USA, migrant organizations in Johannesburg—and to some extent elsewhere on the continent—have rarely fought for formal rights to the city or for formal political incorporation. Where such movements exist, they represent a minority voice. Instead of claiming membership and rooting their futures in a single city, many migrants are careful to avoid the mutual obligations and politics that come from close association with other “exiles” (see Mang’ana 2004; Misago 2005). Although there are instances in which migrant groups assert a collective (usually national) identity, these are often based on instrumental and short-lived associations. Amisi and Ballard's (2005) work on refugee associations throughout South Africa, for example, finds an almost universal tendency towards repeated reconfiguration and fragmentation. As Götz and Simone suggest (2003: 125), “these formations embody a broad range of tactical abilities aimed at maximizing economic opportunities through transversal engagements across territories and separate arrangements of powers”. Rather than integrating or assimilating, the form and rhetoric of organization reinforces their position as the permanent outsiders in ways that “[distance] him or her from all connections and commitments” (Said 2001: 183). As Simmel (1964) notes, these strangers are not fully committed to the peculiar tendencies of the people among whom they live. This fluidity, fragmentation and extra-local orientation raises considerable challenges to how we understand urban citizenship and the institutions intended to foster collective, local action.

The discussion of inclusion for those who may be seeking “usufruct” rights or opportunities for transit raises broader questions about the issues of rights and duties associated with belonging. Much of the philosophical literature on cosmopolitanism and participation—a form of inclusion that recognizes, if not celebrates, diversity—demands mutual recognition and a set of at least minimal reciprocal obligations among all residents. While many authors focus on state obligations to build inclusive societies and others speak about countering xenophobia or other forms of discrimination, these imperatives typically stem from a model of political community comprising those who wish to be part of it and where parties at least minimally recognize each other's legitimacy and right to space. In environments where significant elements of an urban population—citizens and aliens—exist outside official recognition or in violation of official policy, the terms of engagement are significantly altered. Without the presence of an alternative moral authority, there will be increasingly heterogeneous normative frameworks operating within Africa's urban spheres.

There are difficult ethical and institutional issues to be addressed in translating the processes and trends described in the previous pages into planning prescriptions. If building cities means facilitating some form of participation among all urban residents, domestic, and international migrants' intentions and ways of living present an acute challenge. Throughout much of the policy-oriented literature on urban inclusion and belonging among immigrants, the state, its agents and civil society fight, collaborate, and negotiate patterns of inclusion and exclusion. This model assumes a state that is deeply embedded in the social, economic, and institutional lives of those it ostensibly governs. Such presumptions may reflect European, North American, and some Latin American countries where history has situated the state at the heart of socio-economic life (see Bendix 1977; Dean 1996; Marshall 1950). Although Africa's colonial and post-colonial cities have been the one geographic site where the state's influence is most evident (Bratton 2006; Herbst 2000), it is rare to see an effective, centralized authority in contemporary urban Africa (see Bayart 1993; Chabal and Daloz 1999). Where formal laws and institutions exist, their power rarely extends systematically beyond the central business districts, government bureaucracies, and wealthy residential suburbs. And even here, effective power is often shared in ad hoc ways with private security firms and landowners who consciously fragment and delimit the state's authority (Ballard 2005; Dirsuweit 2002; see also Caldeira 1996). As the recent violence in and around Johannesburg so dramatically and tragically reveals, it is mobs and mafias who are often the true sovereigns of African city streets (see Landau and Monson 2008; Misago et al. 2009). Elsewhere, urban governance regimes are characterized by patronage politics, irregular policing, and neglect (benign and otherwise).

For these and other reasons, the state's position as the center of policy formation, protest, and service delivery is far from assured in Africa's cities. Consequently, many urban residents effectively live in the “brown areas” beyond its direct influence (see O'Donnell 2004). These are not necessarily spaces outside the realm of government influence or “non-state spaces” (see Scott 1998). They are, rather, areas where state action has only indirect or partial influence, influence that is often evident only in efforts to elude or hinder policy. With neither embedded state institutions nor a population—citizens and non-citizens—who wish to engage with them, building inclusive and sustainable cities means fundamentally rethinking the ethics and mechanisms of participation and urban citizenship.