Contesting space in urban Malawi : a lefebvrian analysis

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Cities in Malawi continue to be sites and spaces of resistance, struggle and contest over urbanspaces. Since the introduction of colonial modernist planning with its adherence tosegregation through functional zoning, homogenisation, and fragmentation of urban areas,squatting and land invasions on urban land have remained one of the widespread struggles forspace in urban Malawi. Continued occurrence of squatting, land invasions, andencroachments on urban land reflect the inability of urban planning and its attendant landpolicies to provide land and housing to the majority of urban dwellers mainly the middleincome as well as the marginalised urban poor.Over the years, government efforts have not decisively addressed the issue of landcontestations in urban areas in spite of numerous reports of increasing cases of conflicts andcompeting claims over urban land in Malawi including land dispossessions, conflicts overland uses in urban and peri-urban areas and most significantly contestations manifested insquatting and land invasions on state land leading to growth of spontaneous settlements. Inurban areas, efforts to address these competitions have included relocation; titlingprogrammes, sites-and-services schemes, land reform programmes, and forced evictions, butstruggles such as squatting and land invasions persist. In urban Malawi, the question is: whyis urban planning, as it is conceived and acted upon (i.e. as mode of thought and spatialpractice), a creator and not a mediator of urban land conflicts?The study aimed to answer this question, by using Lefebvre's conceptual triad of socialproduction of space, to gain an in-depth understanding of how the contradictions betweenpeople's perceptions and daily life practices in relation to space, on one hand, and planner'sconceptions of space as informed by colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal perceptions ofspace, generate perpetual struggle for urban space in Malawi. The study also investigatedspatial strategies and tactics which urban residents employ to shape, produce and defendurban spaces from possible repossession by the state. Finally, the study explored livedexperiences and the multiple meanings that urban residents attach to spaces they inhabit andthese are used to contest imposition of space by state authorities while at the same time toproduce their own spaces.Mixed method approaches were used to gather geodata, quantitative and qualitative data inthe two neighbourhoods of Soche West (Blantyre city) and Area 49 (Lilongwe city) wherethere are on-going tensions over land between state authorities and urban residents. Primarysources of data included household surveys, focus group discussions, key informantinterviews, documentary sources, observations, and electronic and print media. In view of themagnitude of the data, three software were used namely, SPSS, ATLAS.ti, and ArcGIS 9.3TMGIS for quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data respectively. Content and discourse analysiswere also used to analyse government documents and newspapers.The research found that although planning thought and practice is dominated by importedmodernist conceptions of space, planning authorities in Malawi are unable to impose thisspace on urban residents. Specifically, the research identified a number of constraints faced byplanning authorities ranging from human and technical capacity, corruption, cumbersome andbureaucratic procedures, archaic, rigid and contradictory in laws and policies, complexity ofland rights, poor enforcement, political influence and emergence of democracy, incompletereclassification of rural authority into urban authority and shortage of financing mechanisms.In view of these state incapacities coupled with peoples's perception of the illegitimacy of thestate to control urban land, the study found that 'dobadobas' (that is middlemen, conmen andtricksters) have taken over to contest planning practices of the state by employing both violent and non-violent spatial tactics to appropriate, and defend their claim for urban spaces, therebygenerating conflicts between the state and users of space.Consistent with our argument regarding representations of spaces and representational spaces,the research found that in both Lilongwe and Blantyre cities, the multiple meanings attachedto spaces represent divergent but true lived experiences that involve different core values thatmay or may not be recognised by those residents who do not share them. Finally, planners,therefore, have to reconcile the contradictions between planners' visions and the experiencesof those who experience the city in their everyday life. By way of recommendation, planners,therefore, have to reconcile the contradictions between planners' visions and the experiencesof those who live in the city.Planners' emphasis on abstract spaces and their modernist images of order imply that viablealternative place-making processes are not well understood, partially because formaldiscourse in planning and place-making revolves around largely iterative representations ofspace and the persuasive capacities of one or another representation.Rather, this researcher recommends continued use of the conceptual triad to enableresearchers to become more fully aware of complexity in the human dimensions of spacebefore planning. In the same way, by focusing on the two neighbourhoods, the researcherrecommends that planning requires considerable time and effort and that it should priotise thehuman or the micro scale. Planning ought to bring on board the multiple meanings of space asdiscussed in the study as these are the multiple dimensions that planning has to grapple within its quest to organise and produce urban space. Since space is never empty as it alwaysembodies meaning, it is imperative to understand various meanings that people attach to thespaces they inhabit and their attachment to these spaces. In the study the fact that spacescarry multiple meanings encompassing exchange value, use value, emotional value, historicalvalue, and sacred values among others, has been explored.Continued advancement of colonial modernist conceptions of orderliness, segregation,functional zoning and commodification which are constructed largely, by dominant economicand political elites, provokes resistance by groups who defend and seek to reconstruct livedspace. Also, in view of the incapacity of the state to impose its conceptions of urban spacethrough spatial practice of planning, urban residents continue to devise their own spatialstrategies and tactics violent and nonviolent, to shape their own space. In conclusion, thepaper stresses that spaces are not exclusively shaped or moulded by planners and planningpractices of the state only, but also by spatial practices of everyday life albeit clandestine andunofficial. In this regard, in Malawi, cities including the post-colonial city of Lilongwe shouldnot be understood as being shaped by planners' space only but also the changing experiencesof the city and everyday life and ambiguities of the users of urban space. Thus plans anddocuments as conceived spaces should not be understood as the only mechanism to shape andorganise urban space but also the changing experiences of the city and everyday life andambiguities of the users of urban space.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University