Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article develops the concept of "urban frontier" to explore conflicts over state regularisation of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe's capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of "lawless" urban frontiers and "illegal" territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa's rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars' tendency to neglect central party-state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare's highly politicised city-edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularisation provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one-sizefits-all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa's expanding cities.

Small Towns and Land Reform in Zimbabwe

“…Much of the literature on urban settings in Zimbabwe focuses on cities and large towns (e.g. Mbiba 2017 ; Potts and Mutambirwa 1990 ), emphasising inter alia the role of urban informality (Kamete 2020 ), the importance of party politics (McGregor and Chatiza 2019 ; Muchadenyika 2015 ), the imposition of planning regulations (Vambe 2008 ) and the livelihoods of workers (Mupedziswa and Gumbo 2001 ). Many of these themes apply to small towns, but in different ways because of the close connections with the agricultural hinterland.…”

Partisan citizenship and its discontents: precarious possession and political agency on Harare City’s expanding margins

“…The existence of substantial settlements controlled directly by the ruling party, rather than by state institutions is something that needs explanation in a country notorious for the strength of its modernist urban planning tradition and well institutionalised bureaucracies (Rakodi 1995;Chatiza 2010;Mbiba 2017a;Potts 2011). Their scale is very significant, as they easily comprise 500,000 people in a city with an official population of 2.1 million in 2012 (McGregor and Chatiza 2019;Mbiba 2017a). The fact that the ruling party controls all these new geographically dispersed settlements on the city edge renders existing frameworks focussed on 'twilight' authorities unhelpful in this context, because they hinge on state absence, localised influences and a fragmented landscape of chiefs, gangs or individual 'big men' (Lund 2006;Buur 2005;Hansen and Stepputat 2005).…”

“…Kamete (2012) argued that the Operation was motivated by the excesses of modernist planning and 'punishment' for urban opposition voters, while others stressed continuities in cultural attitudes among officials and the middle classes that urban citizenship should be contingent on being 'earned' through work, property and rate-paying (Dorman 2016;Fontein 2009). But thereafter state policy and practice shifted towards accommodating rather than expelling the urban poor, through resettlement schemes, land reform and peri-urban occupations, as well as distribution to cooperatives charged with building and servicing (McGregor and Chatiza 2019;Mpofu 2011;Chirisa et al 2011;Muchadenyika 2015;Muchadenyika and Williams 2017).…”

Control the Capital: Cities and Political Dominance

“…Our concern, however, is with the more directly political acts of ruling coalitions at the national level that appear intended to bolster their position in major cities. Recent literature has touched on various aspects of urban authoritarian control (LeBas 2013;Resnick 2014b;Goodfellow 2014;Jackman 2018a;McGregor and Chatiza 2019), but without making the systematic study of urban political interventions by dominant regimes the overarching rationale for research. It is this that we attempt in this research project and this conceptual framing paper.…”