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

Abstract

Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk McGregor, JoAnn and Chatiza, Kudzai (2020) Partisan citizenship and its discontents: precarious possession and political agency on Harare City's expanding margins. Citizenship Studies, 24 (1). pp. 17-39.

To leave or not to leave? An analysis of individual and neighbourhood characteristics shaping place attachment in Harare's selected informal settlements

“…The settlement is located 15 km to the east of Harare Central Business District (Figure 3). The residents of Epworth Ward 7 are commonly known as “magada” and were former tenants in other parts of Epworth and outsiders who bought plots illegally from the “originals” (McGregor and Chatiza 2020). In terms of housing conditions, the majority of the buildings in Epworth Ward 7 are classified as poor or very poor (Figure 4).…”

“…Hatcliffe Extension is located roughly 30 km from the centre of Harare on the northern boundary (Figure 5). The settlement was established in 1993 as a temporary holding camp for Churu farm evictees (McGregor and Chatiza 2020). The housing stock in Hatcliffe Extension is comprised of brick‐and‐mortar houses, wooden cabins, and polythene shacks.…”

Mugabe’s Urban Legacy: A Postcolonial Perspective on Urban Development in Harare, Zimbabwe

“…During his presidency, corruption became a norm to the detriment of development in Harare, as evident from stagnated infrastructure development over the past years (McGregor and Chatiza, 2020). Land corruption became rampant considering the role of land as an economic resource in Harare (Chiweshe, 2017).…”

“…It seems there is a lacuna concerning Mugabeism and urban development through the lens of a postcolonial theory. Most of the studies tend to focus on the politics of difference inherent in urban Zimbabwe due to the dominance of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) 1 (Chipenda, 2020;McGregor and Chatiza, 2020) while there seems to be a dearth of studies on how Mugabe's political ideologies, activities and strategies have shaped the form and function of urban spaces.…”

(Mis)Understanding Urban Africa: Toward A Research Agenda on the Political Impact of Urbanization

“…The categories of “urban” and “rural” are too often depicted as binary alternatives with nothing in between, yet a majority of the urban population growth that is projected will not occur in capital cities but instead in much smaller towns and peri-urban areas. While it is tempting to assume that peri-urban areas can simply be considered as “hybrid” locations that split the difference between urban and rural locales, recent research has demonstrated that they often feature a distinctive form of politics that echoes the politics of contestation so often seen to epitomize the city, but in a way that is particularly vulnerable to “clientelist subjection” (McGregor & Chatiza 2020). 2 The tendency to over-simplify the continent’s complex urban tapestry, and to assume that urbanization will drive progressive change, means that important questions remain about what it means to be urban and what kinds of new social and individual changes urbanization—and the emergence of peri-urban areas and vast urban corridors both within countries and across borders—will give rise to.…”