Building and Contesting post-war Housing in Dakar

After the Second World War, European welfare planning was transposed to the African colonies. With regard to housing this meant a true turning point in urban policy. For the first time the colonial state massively invested in the housing of the African urban dwellers. However, the segregationist underground and elite‐focus of the housing schemes at the same time reinforced fundamental inequities in the African city, thereby furthering colonial goals. The promotion of African emancipation was thus accompanied by a strong ‘social engineering’. Yet, Africans were no passive victims of development schemes. In this paper we will take a close look at the housing schemes of the Société Immobilière du Cap Vert (SICAP) in Dakar (Senegal) between 1951 and 1960 (independence). Notwithstanding the significant housing shortages in Dakar, archival records show that a substantial amount of the SICAP houses remained vacant after completion. Apart from too high rents, the main reason was that the SICAP-houses seemed to be designed with the average West-European middle-class family in mind. As a consequence, most houses proved too small and little adjusted to the extended African family, which is well reflected in the many alterations the SICAP houses underwent right from their completion until today. Moreover, the SICAP housing schemes, and in particular their segregationist and elitist underground, caused strong African opposition. Many Africans opposed to the more than 80.000 forced evictions, known in the colonial jargon as ‘déguerpissements’, that were caused by the implementation of the schemes. The result was a fierce battle over land between the government and the inhabitants of Dakar. In particular the Lebou-population demanded adequate compensation for its land in case of expropriation, even if they did not possess any official land title, with equal rewards for Africans and Europeans. Due various forms of active and passive protest of the inhabitants the implementation of the SICAP housing schemes regularly came to a standstill and the government often found itself in ‘a complete impasse’. The study of these different forms of agency and resistance in Dakar is important as it shows that, although colonial rule was strict and compelling, it was possible to escape from it to some degree

Imagined disease and racial segregation: multiple dreams of open space in Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam

It is strange to encounter an open space in the middle of Tanzania’s congested capital, Dar es Salaam. Similarly, one might wonder why there exists a golf course and a zoo besieged by traffic jams in the bustling city centre of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The key to understanding the intriguing anomalies in the urban geographies of these capital cities lies in tracing back their histories. After the First World War colonial governments in British Dar es Salaam (1924) and Belgian Kinshasa (1931) dreamed of implementing a physical separation between Africans and Europeans. Although the British indirect rule/association, in fact provided an excellent basis to legitimate racial segregation, the British in Dar es Salaam just like the Belgians in Kinshasa, who applied a policy that was greatly inspired by both British and French rule, but was nonetheless overtly racial, felt forced to legitimate racial segregation with a sanitary discourse. In both colonies similar explanations underpinned the sanitary discourse, such as the statement that a physical distance would prevent malaria mosquitos flying over from the African quarter to the European quarter, or that it would prevent the contamination by germ-ridden rats ‘as these are less likely to move from area to area over an open space’ – all explanations which were far from scientifically proven, and were even broadly contested by empirical observations. This shared use of a sanitation discourse thus shows the controversial character of the planned intervention, but also suggests a certain transnational exchange with regard to the implementation of racial segregation in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, a remarkable similarity exists in the place-naming of the separation zones between Africans and Europeans in both capitals: the ‘Neutral Zone’ in British Dar es Salaam and the French equivalent ‘Zone Neutre’ in Belgian Kinshasa. With regard to the ‘neutral zones’ several archival records highlight both in Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa the powerful influence of British and South African sanitation experts (in South Africa already in the beginning of the 20th century a sanitary discourse was used as a pretext and legitimation of racial segregation, a phenomenon that has been called a ‘Sanitation Syndrome’ by Maynard W. Swanson), as well as a significant transnational dialogue between the colonial powers. Through influential manuals, international and above all inter-continental conferences such as the Conference of Principal Medical Officers and Senior Sanitary Officers in Lagos in 1912, the Inter-Colonial Conference on Yellow Fever in Dakar in 1928 and the Sanitary Conference of Chief Health Officers in Cape Town in 1932, these ‘all-purpose experts’ turned racial segregation, and in particular the implementation of ‘neutral zones’ in the urban fabric, into a legitimate sanitary measure, with considerable impact on town planning. Moreover, under the influence of the discipline of Tropical Medicine racial segregation also evolved from a temporary solution in the battle against infectious diseases, to a permanent prevention measure. Therefore, even though epidemics are foremost medical phenomena, in the colonial context they clearly also functioned as political constructions and ideological instruments. This was clearly the case in Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa where imagined diseases formed the basis for racial segregation, as both cities, in contrast to for instance Dakar in 1914, never even faced an outbreak of infectious disease. Although the ‘neutral zones’ became only partly implemented, today they form one of the rare open spaces in the congested city centres of Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa. Only now they seem to fulfil their legitimising sanitation objectives by operating as a lung for the congested city. However, the ‘neutral zones’ still mark a segregation in the urban fabric (albeit more socio-economic than racial nowadays) and are highly inaccessible to most citizens. Moreover, today these rare open spaces stand under high real estate pressures to develop the sites for high-standard commercial and housing purposes. Considering the enormous lack of open space in city centres of Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa, as well as the segregation these open spaces still embody, many more valuable projects could be imagined to turn these open spaces both into sites of encounter and healthy environments accessible to all urban dwellers

The peri-urban fringe of Kinshasa as an in-between space

All over the world, but especially in the Global South, cities expand at a high pace with as a result an ever moving urban frontier and ever growing peri-urban zones. These dispersed peri-urban zones, only in part clustered around one or more historical cores, seem to have a life of their own. While being an integral part of the urbanization process, they cannot be understood in traditional urban terms, they seem to exist in-between the rural and urban, the dense and non-dense, the horizontal and vertical. The illegibility of these sprawling peri-urban landscapes is often related to the failure to read the (production) of these urban landscapes. However, it seems important to understand the peri-urban condition as in many cities in the Global South, for instance Kinshasa (the capital of the DRCongo), the majority of the people live in these kind of settlement patterns and not in the historical core, which is often limited to the former European town. In cities as Kinshasa, the old geographical distinctions between centre and periphery or town and countryside seem to have collapsed, if they ever existed, with the historic/colonial centre becoming gradually peripheric to the periphery. New hierarchies are at play, while old ones are not swept away completely, altogether forming a layered palimpseste (Corboz, 2001). In this paper we will take a dive in Kinshasa’s peri-urban palimpseste in order to understand the underlying mechanisms and dynamics of its spatial production in the post-independence years. While several planning schemes have been drawn in the framework of a French cooperation programme to steer the peri-urban urban development of Kinshasa after independence, none of them has been implemented. In the absence of any urban planning from above, the urbanization process of the city has been primarily directed by the massive appropriation of space by the urban dwellers. This paper aims at highlighting the underlying parallel system of land tenure that guided the urbanization of Kinshasa’s peri-urban fringe

Wonen in Diversiteit. Inclusieve woonvormen voor nieuwkomers

In deze tentoonstelling grijpen we de asielcrisis aan om het bredere woningvraagstuk in de stad te herdenken. In plaats van de asielcrisis als een verliesverhaal voor de stad te beschouwen, gaan we op zoek naar innovatieve woonvormen die uitnodigen tot wonen in diversiteit en zo de stad een nieuwe impuls geven. Vandaag zien we immers dat migranten vaak geïsoleerd leven van de samenleving waarin ze terecht zijn gekomen, zowel tijdens als na hun asielprocedure. Als een collectief van architecten met een sociale missie geloven we in de kracht van architectuur om maatschappelijke vraagstukken open te trekken en te verbeelden. Bij gebrek aan opdrachtgeverschap voor de architectuur van migratie, nemen we in deze tentoonstelling de rol van opdrachtgever even op. We schrijven ons eigen programma en gaan op zoek naar nieuwe recepten die wonen in diversiteit mogelijk maken. Via ontwerpend onderzoek en geïnspireerd door waardevolle initiatieven van middenveldorganisaties in binnen- en buitenland, onderzoeken we hoe we een permanente en flexibele structuur voor tijdelijke woonvormen kunnen ontwikkelen. Door deze innovatieve woonvormen te injecteren met ruimtes voor werken en ontmoeten, worden ze belangrijke hefbomen voor integratie. Tegelijkertijd kunnen ze uitgroeien tot ruimtes die een nieuwe collectiviteit mogelijk maken. Zo ontstaat een win-winsituatie voor zowel de nieuwkomer als voor de stad. Het HEIM-collectief wil niet alleen nieuwe vormen van samenwonen in diversiteit op de agenda zetten van beleidsmakers en architecten. HEIM staat mee aan de wieg van twee woonprojecten die de ideeën in de praktijk brengen. Daarnaast werkt het collectief samen met middenveldorganisaties aan een compleet ontwikkelingsmodel. De architecturale uitwerking van het nieuwe wonen in diversiteit is immers slechts een schakel in een bredere keten die de uitvoering ervan mogelijk moet maken

The invisible African churches of Ghent: between precarious occupation and dynamic appropriation of the built environment

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A tale of two twin houses : Mirjana Lozanovska, Migrant Housing. Architecture, Dwelling, Migration, London, New York, NY: Routledge, 2019 (Routledge Research in Architecture)

Central to Mirjana Lozanovska’s latest book Migrant Housing. Architecture, Dwelling, Migration (2019) is the question whether we can consider the migrant house as a distinct category within architectural historiography. This is of course a rhetorical question, as the book in an unparalleled way points out how migrants’ sociocultural inscriptions and contributions were hitherto completely lacking in the historiography of the architecture of housing. In her book, Lozanovska focuses on postwar m..