CONCEPTUALIZING AFRICAN URBAN PERIPHERIES

Recent years have seen a rising interest in peri-urban spaces, urban frontiers and new suburbanisms, including in African contexts. However, given the scale of urban growth and the extreme diversity of formations emerging on the geographical edges of African city-regions, a deeper understanding is needed of the drivers of peripheral urbanisms and the lived experiences of urban change in these spaces. Based on a comparative research project in South Africa and Ethiopia, this article draws out the epistemologies of researching African urban peripheries and presents a new conceptual framework. It offers a language for interpreting processes of peripheral development and change, highlighting five distinct but overlapping logics which we term speculative, vanguard, auto-constructed, transitioning and inherited. Rather than describing bounded peripheral spaces, we argue that these logics can co-exist, hybridize and bleed into each other in different ways in specific places and at different temporal junctures. Centring our methodological practices of comparative analysis, and privileging the voices of those living in urban peripheries, the article employs critical readings of urban scholarship before exploring how these five logics illuminate the complex processes of urban peripheral evolution and transformation. Formulating these logics helps to fill a lacuna in urban conceptualization with potential relevance beyond African contexts. Introduction Reflecting on a major international research programme on ‘global suburbanisms’, Keil (2018: 41) notes that we live ‘in the age of the urban periphery’. Scholarship on African cities has recently begun to explore this, evidenced by the proliferation of literature on peri-urban spaces (Mbiba and Huchzermeyer, 2002; Kinfu et al., 2019), urban peripheries (Sawyer, 2014), suburbanisms and ‘new centralities’ (Mabin et al., 2013; Güney et al., 2019), by-pass urbanism (Sawyer et al., 2021), urban frontiers (McGregor and Chatiza, 2019) and ‘postcolonial suburbs’ (Mercer, 2017). Collectively, this literature bolsters Keil’s claim that urban peripheries exhibit greater diversity ‘than perhaps anywhere else in the modern history of city-building and re-building’ (Keil, 2018: 13). It is increasingly apparent that the geographical edges of cities are characterized by dynamism as well as stagnation, boredom as well as violence, and luxury alongside destitution. Meanwhile, debates on ‘extended’ urbanization and its ‘planetary’ reach (Brenner, 2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2015) render a focus on urban frontiers, liminal spaces and dispersed urban forms all the more important. Indeed, if it is in the peripheries that twenty-first century urbanization is ultimately taking shape, then despite some recent scholarly attention, the work of researching, analysing and conceptualizing this has only just begun. METH, GOODFELLOW, TODES AND CHARLTON 986 This article discusses our conceptualizations of African urban peripheries following our ESRC/NRF-funded research project, ‘Living the Urban Periphery: Investment, Infrastructure and Economic Change in African City-Regions’ (2016–2019). Our research focused on how transformation is shaped, governed and experienced in the spatial peripheries of three African city-regions: Gauteng and eThekwini in South Africa, and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Comparing these urban formations enables us to explore countries that are vastly different in terms of economic status and urban land tenure systems, but which have important similarities in their developmentalist orientation and the dominance of state-sponsored housing provision. We argue that the distinctiveness of these countries in being at the forefront of peripheral housing and infrastructure provision in Africa makes them especially relevant for thinking about the development of urban peripheries more generally. Meanwhile, our comparison of Gauteng and eThekwini within South Africa enables us to examine the peripheries in areas of former mining and industrial investment, sometimes now in decline, alongside those being reshaped by new state-led and commercial mega-projects. Through these multiple lines of comparison, drawing on Robinson’s (2016) exhortation to engage in comparison beyond the usual conventions of comparability, our wider project generates fresh insights, with broader relevance to urban peripheries globally. The article’s contribution is specifically conceptual, drawing out the epistemologies of researching African urban peripheries and offering a conceptual framework to inform the practice of analysing geographic peripheries. It opens with a critical reading of theoretical and empirical material examining urban peripheries, with an emphasis on work on African cities. Attention is drawn to the insights but also limitations of some of this work, particularly its varied ability to engage with the complexities of urban change as narrated by residents in these spaces. The article then centres our methodological practices, which privilege the voices of those living in the urban peripheries in shaping our conceptualization, and reflects on our ability to generalize through the comparative analysis of these cases. We show how our mixedmethod approach places a particular emphasis on in-depth, multi-method qualitative research with residents, alongside a range of other methods. Based on the extensive body of empirical research underpinning this project, we argue that peripheral spaces are not simply Cartesian spaces identifiable through mapping and boundaries and understood through abstracted trends, but that they reveal their essence through the voices and views of those living there. Thus, we are concerned less with the representation of these spaces than with peripheries as ‘lived space’, although we also explore the economic and political drivers and planning processes that produce these spaces. Because its focus is conceptual, the article does not detail the complex experiences of residents revealed through our project, although it builds on their narratives (alongside those of key informants involved in shaping and governing urban peripheries from the outside) to inform our conceptualizations. Following a discussion of our project’s methodological approach and case selection, the article turns to its core contribution: the conceptualization of five distinct (though often intersecting) logics of urban peripheral development emerging from our research. We became aware during the course of our project that defining the periphery as a singular concept was insufficient; we are also attuned to Schmid et al.’s (2018) call for new vocabularies to describe processes of urbanization, given the limitations of dominant concepts in Urban Studies––particularly in capturing urban formations in the global South. Our main contribution in this article is therefore to unpack the urban periphery concept in new ways, through placing attention on peripheral areas, urban processes and practices evident in peripheral sites, as well as the experiences of a wide variety of residents living in these areas. Drawing on these various epistemologies of the periphery, the five peripheral logics we propose are speculative, vanguard, autoconstructed, transitioning and inherited. The value of this classification lies not in CONCEPTUALIZING AFRICAN URBAN PERIPHERIES 987 describing exclusive bounded instances of the urban periphery; indeed, we reject this approach. Instead, we argue for an approach that recognizes these modes of peripheral development as logics that can co-exist, hybridize and bleed into each other in specific places and at different temporal junctures. Rather than being discrete categories, the five logics privilege the dynamic, interconnected and multi-scalar aspects of urban change occurring in African cities. We conclude the article by considering the significance of these logics for studying other urban peripheries, within Africa and beyond. Existing conceptualizations of urban peripheries Urban peripheries have been conceptualized in a number of ways, which variously highlight their drivers, economic dynamics, spatial characteristics and key actors, with most accounts focusing on one or other dimension. Early conceptions of urban peripheries saw them as places on the urban edge, transitioning from rural to urban, with limited economies, and where land costs, densities and access to economic opportunities were lower than more central areas. This was often conceptualized as a moving edge, as earlier peripheries were absorbed into the city and new ones emerged. Literatures on peri-urbanization have emphasized this rural-urban interface, the processes of urbanization, changing land uses and associated land conflicts, and the influence of tenurial systems, inter alia (Mbiba and Huchzermeyer, 2002). This literature has been important in African contexts such as Ghana, where growth is occurring on customary lands at city edges, with distinct tenurial and management systems (Gough and Yankson, 2000). The peri-urban concept is also relevant for those African cities where urban-rural distinctions are blurred and where the absorption of densifying rural settlements (Potts, 2018), or piecemeal lateral expansion (Sawyer, 2014), are significant parts of urban growth. Such edges might be less regulated spaces, providing easier access for migrants and cheaper housing for the urban poor (Simon, 2004). However, while the earlier literature often saw these as places of poverty, more recent work documents increased middle-class occupation and housing construction (Mbatha and Mchunu, 2016; Bartels, 2020; Mercer, 2020). The equation between geographic peripherality, poverty and marginality has also been challenged by authors such as Peberdy (2017), drawing on Wallerstein’s conception of the periphery as a social and political rather than spatial construct, and Pieterse (2019), who points to deep poverty and social marginality in cent