News Archive 2018-2020

Originally published 17.09.2020, written by Idunn Lüllau Holthe

For years Edwige Yekple used to walk past the area where she is now doing research. One day, however, the gated community in the middle of the village caught her attention. Asking herself “why is there a gated community inside the village?” Edwige started developing her research project. Gradually, she became both a researcher and an interlocutor of her own project.

Edwige Yekple started her PhD at the Department of Geography at the University of Bergen in January 2020, and is an affiliated researcher of the project Enclaving: Patterns of global futures in three African cities (UrbanEnclavingFutures).

Exploring how gated communities affect the livelihoods and socio-economic development of local communities, Edwige's project focuses on the gated communities of Ayi Mensah and Oyarifa in the peri-urban areas of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area. "I want to explore whether the locals around the sites are ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’.  Their farm lands have been leased and converted into a gated community – but can they get some benefit from it?" Edwige asks.

When the field comes to your backyard

Edwige’s initial field of Ayi Mensah was a site that she was already familiar with from everyday life. "Over the years I studied this place walking past it, before I realized there was a gated community inside the village. On one side, you see beautiful walls and concrete houses, and just beside it, you have dusty roads and mud houses. It was such a big contrast to me – and that is how it all started", she explains.

On one of her initial visits to the field her personal connections to it became even stronger. During a conversation with a Sales Executive from the estate, she learned that the next planned project would be located in Oyarifa, where Edwige is living with her family.

Parts of the land in Oyarifa belong to private landowners and constituted part of the road reservation. However, some private landowners have leased portions of their land and road reservation to shop owners. Among these shop owners was Edwige’s husband. The estate developer was planning to clear that portion of land and expand the road towards the estate They were coming to clear the area. I was thinking ‘wow, that is where my husband’s shop is’!"

After learning that her home area would be the site of a gated community, even developed by the same estate developer she was already studying, Edwige decided to include the site in her research. In this way, she is looking at both a completed gated community and one under construction.

The fieldworker as an insider and an outsider

"I have a very personal connection to the field. Perhaps this will be part of my methodology – to explain the choice of research site", Edwige says.

In her project, Edwige is both an outsider and an insider. As a researcher she might be regarded as an outsider, but she is also an insider, being an inhabitant of the communities affected by the construction of the gated communities. Following this, her mixed role could contribute to new perspectives, insight, and knowledge about gated communities.

Edwige’s initial plan is to return to Accra to do fieldwork from November 2020. Although the current pandemic is causing some challenges, she still hopes to be able to carry out some form of fieldwork, even if she has to turn towards more digital forms of communication and interaction in her research.

Taking on the SDGs

The Urban Enclaving Futures project engages with several of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, and SDG8: Decent Work and Economic Growth. However, the project is also critically addressing the SDGs, particularly looking into the equality aspects of the phenomenon of enclaving, and how this can be seen in relation to SDG11 - Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

As with the Urban Enclaving Futures project, Edwige’s research closely engages with the SDGs with its focus on how socio-economic and cultural consequences of gated communities shape the resilience of households and livelihood opportunities.

Originally published 10.08.20, written by Idunn Lüllau Holthe

“Something peculiar is happening in cities across sub-Saharan Africa: without political coordination and lacking overall synchronization of collective and governmental strategies, cities are beginning to move at a similar socio-economic velocities as if prompted by the same ‘urban engine’”.

With this captivating introduction, the authors begin their detailed and insightful analysis of the concept of enclaving in sub-Saharan African cities. Focusing on Mozambique, Nielsen, Sumich and Bertelsen offer three separate vignettes enlightening current changes in Maputo’s urban scene.

‘Enclaving’ is here seen as “a generative and transformative cultural orientation regarding the relationship between urban social life and the city’s built environment based on a notion of special detachment by which social actors engage with and co-produce the urban order”. The authors take this concept forward, looking into enclaving not only as a physical form of separation, but also as an ‘aesthetics of imagination’. Following this, the paper illustrates the social drive of spatial detachment, and shows how an aesthetics of imagination is represented by different social practices and spaces and various economic and political aspirations.

In contrast to American and European cities, physical separation in sub-Saharan Africa seems to be less focused around material forms of segregation, and more about the migration of spaces and material forms, the authors conclude. Enclaving as an aesthetics of imagination gives the city concreteness, solidity and magnitude without necessarily trapping it physically, and it might therefore be necessary to go beyond localized spatial fixity of enclaving to understand the contemporary urban processes in sub-Saharan Africa.

Read the full paper here (external link).

Originally published 11.03.20, writte by Idunn Lüllau Holthe and Austin D. Ablo

The public lecture was arranged as a part of the Urban Enclaving Futures'(UEF) second project workshop held in Accra in February 2020. The project teamed up with the Department of Geography and its sister-project African Metropolitan Futures(AMF) to arrange the lecture.

Enhancing collaboration between universities

“The UEF project is one of the major steps by AMF network members towards knowledge co-production on African cities. The overall goal is to produce practical knowledge for policy with the AMF as the platform for knowledge dissemination not just to policy makers and academics but to society as a whole”, says Dr Austin D. Ablo from AMF.

The collaboration between the University of Ghana and the University of Bergen is critical for enhancing the impacts of research, and has been especially strong since UEF established its collaboration with the University of Ghana and AMF in 2018. The Urban Enclaving Futures project is expected to finish in 2022, but the collaboration will be carried forward.

Lecture on urbanization and resilience governance in Africa

The lecture, held at the University of Ghana, had a great number of students and researchers attending. Welcome remarks were made by Professor Martin Oteng-Ababio, the Head of Department of Geography and Resource Development. The moderator was Dr Ebenezer F. Amankwa. Professor Samuel Agyei-Mensah from the Provost College of Humanities was the chairperson. Also present was Emerita Professor Elizabeth Ardayfio-Schandorf.

The guest lecture was given by Professor Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, and titled A lesser human? Utopic registers of urban reconfiguration in Africa. Looking into the urban Anthropocene in Mozambique, Bertelsen discussed ‘resilience governance’ in Mozambique and explored the involvement of utopic registers as responses to such developments.

Following Bertelsen’s lecture was a presentation by Dr Austin D. Ablo on the African Metropolitan Futures Network, a research network hosted by the Department of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana, with support from the University of Bergen. The African Metropolitan Futures explores the future-oriented African epicentres of urban expansion and transformation, as well as their global reach and connectivities.

Lastly, a presentation was given by Jason Sumich, Univeristy of Essex, on the project Enclaving: Patterns of global futures in three African cities.

Originally published 05.12.19, written by Idunn Lüllau Holthe

The research project “Urban Enclaving Futures” has received a new grant to establish a comparative research component in China.

With the new funding, Ole Johannes Kaland, visiting scholar from NLA University College at the Department of Social Anthropology, will conduct fieldwork in China in 2020. The grant, received from the University of Bergen’s seed money for research and education cooperation with China (Såkornsmidler for forskning- og utdanningssamarbeid med Kina), will offer new opportunities for comparative research on urban enclaving in Africa and China.

The international, interdisciplinary research project Urban Enclaving Futures explores the processes of enclaving in the cities of Maputo, Johannesburg and Accra. The project looks into urban development in African cities, focusing on the distribution of urban resources in regard to housing and inequality. The project has a clear emphasis on sustainability, and engages closely with the Agenda 2030 programme and the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).

Investigating inequality and housing in Shanghai

Urban Enclaving Futures is now initiating a comparative research component looking into processes of urban enclaving in one of the world’s most populous cities, Shanghai. “This is an interesting case not only because of its diverse and heavily populated areas, but also because the city itself is a result of generations of enclave formations, from the historical semi-colonial areas to the sub-urban areas of migrant workers,” says Kaland.

China’s significant economic growth the last decades is visible in the country’s urban skyline. A well-known example is that of the special economic zone of Pudong in Shanghai, which has come into being since 1990. China’s rapid economic development has strongly decreased the overall poverty in the country, but also increased inequalities. In the reform-era, the state has progressively forwarded the responsibility of welfare to the individual, while Mao-era governmental systems, such as the household registration system (hukou), has been maintained. This limits people’s access to public welfare and rights to the place where they are registered, constituting a major challenge for the many migrant workers in the cities. The growth of cities through influx of migrant workers is one of the key mechanisms leading to growing urban inequality, including in the housing market.

Focusing on these challenges, Kaland will conduct fieldwork in Shanghai and explore the housing market as an arena for social differentiation, where expressions of social and economic inequality are manifested. “Although there are multiple quantitative and structurally oriented studies on urbanization in China, few studies are looking into the actual human experiences and meaning of such communities”, Kaland states.

Strengthening research collaboration with China

With the new comparative project in China, Urban Enclaving Futures will contribute to increased collaboration between research communities in Bergen, China and Africa. The project will mainly work with researchers from Fudan University and China Eastern Normal University in Shanghai.

Ole Johannes Kaland is an anthropologist with 15 years of experience working on China. He has lived in China for four years and speaks Mandarin. Ole Johannes is Associate Professor in intercultural studied at NLA University College and has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen since 2017.

Originally published 01.10.19 written by Isabelle Hugøy

What kind of subjectivities are produced by the urban order? How are they resisted and contested? These were some of the central questions in the presentations held by Prof. Bjørn Enge Bertelsen in September.

In September, Prof. Bjørn Enge Bertelsen presented preliminary findings at Bergen Anthropology Day and a Reseach Seminar organized by the Department of Social Anthropology. He connected these findings to one of the Sustainable Development Goals with which Urban Enclaving engages.

The demise of the city

Prof. Bertelsen shared his thoughts on the emergence of a new urban order characterized by the rise of enclaves in its many forms, and the demise of the city as we know it. That is, the long-standing centric notion of 'the city', or the well-ordered polis as the philosopher Plato would name it.

"What we see now are contours of a right-less post-polis urban context where the ideal of citizenship no longer holds", claimed Bertelsen. This is also reflected in the formulation of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: 'Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable', he stated.

The goal does not mention any right to the city and urban citizenship. Rather, the rise of securitized gated communities and the sporadic popping up of enclaves in less affluent areas restricts the mobility of those who do not have access, and thus right to such spaces. What, then, does the SDG11 reference to "inclusive" mean when the ideal of equality is abandoned?, Bertelsen asked.

The dark side of resilience

Another lack he identified in the SDG11 phrasing is the terminology of "safe, resilient and sustainable" which signals a true post-development moment also at an ideological level. He illustrated photos of grandiose and privatized cities and the 'mushrooming' of elite miniature enclaves that pop up in poor areas. These are examples of materializations of the end of development which leaves ruins of what he called 'lesser human beings' .

He argued that "in such urban orders, the ideological convergence of resilience and sustainability entails that the urban poor have their living spaces, their relational and social orders, as well as their physical spaces altered, destroyed or violently appropriated. The poor are repurposed to serve the more wealthy; as security guards, cleaners of houses and cars, nannies and the like. This is the dark side of resilience."

Yet, Bertelsen ended on a rather positive note when delving into ethnography about the utopic registers that contest such developments. That is, teams (groups of people) that seek to reclaim life-affirming utopias in the face of urban marginalization.

Bertelsen has recently submitted a paper on the production of 'a lesser human' in context of urban reconfiguratons.

Originally published 16.10.19 written by Isabelle Hugøy

Can security practices of economic enclaves transform citizen-subject relations?

How can security practices of economic enclaves that span the spectrum of coercive and inclusive methods of security (both public and private), shape and be shaped by the types of citizen-subject relations on which they are based?

This is a central concern in enclaving researcher Jason Sumich's recently published article 'No Smoke withouth Fire': Citizenship and Securing Economic Enclaves in Mozambique (external link), which he co-authored with Lars Buur.

Based on ethnography from Mozambique, the authors explore the complex interrelationship between economic enclaves, their associated security practices and the formation of national citizens.

They do so by focusing on the sugar sector as an economic enclave where extractive investments are secured by mixtures of private and public security arrangements. The focus on both private and public security provisions means that Buur and Sumich move beyond the nation state as the sole creator of the disciplinary project of producing national subjects.

They argue that "the study of complex security arrangements reveals insighs into how national citizens are produced and disciplined through the mobilization of public-private security".

We recommend that you read the entire article (external link) (Open Access) for a better understanding of the relations between citizenship and economic enclaves!

Originally published 26.09.18 written by Isabelle Hugøy

Urban Enclaving Futures will explore the future of the urban in the African cities of Maputo, Johannesburg and Accra - cities that will have contrasting histories and trajectories. However, being major cities and metropolitan areas means that there will be interesting connections between the urban and the rural which create new social orders.

"Africa is seen as spearheading a new urban future for humanity and across the globe. Therefore, exploring more in detail how processes of the urban unfolds within the African context is crucial," says project leader and Professor Bjørn Enge Bertelsen.

Enclaving as a cosmological creation

Funded by the Norwegian Research Council, the project seeks to transcend the mere mapping of general enclaving patterns, such as gated communities, private urbanism or private cities. 

"This project differs from others in that it takes the notion of enclaving - that is the unequal distribution of resources within an urban context - as its core. We see enclaving as a form of generative or agentive form of creation. This means that we also look at the desires and aspirations that are part of this emergent urban form. Perhaps you could say that we are looking at the cosmology of enclaving," he explains. 

Moving towards the urban

Starting in rural areas of the medium-sized town of Chimoio in 1998, Bertelsen has over the course of 20 years of fieldwork in Mozambique, become more interested in exploring urban relations between the state and the people, between built environments and cosmologies, and between notions of justice and citizenship. This has eventually led him to explore the nature of the urban in different African contexts.

"The idea of the project came about through an intense collaboration with two good colleagues, Jason Sumich and Morten Nielsen. Jason is now a core researcher of the project, and Morten is a long-time collaborator who is heading a twin project (external link) of us," he contends.

Celebrating two decades in Mozambique

The year 2018 means 20 years have passed since Bertelsen embarked upon his first fieldwork in Mozambique. Since then, he has returned multiple times for fieldwork, collaborative work with Mozambican researchers and for workshops and conferences. In contemplating how this has shaped him as a researcher and a person, he says that:

"Anthropologically, it has shaped me in fundamental ways. It has made me re-think the nature of politics, state and cosmologies. It has made me aware of - to a much larger extent than it would have if I had done fieldwork elsewhere - the generative dimensions of human beings and what they are capable of in terms of creating their own realities."

He concludes that "for me, as for most of my colleagues, it is hard to distinguish between where the anthropologist starts and where the private person begins."