Enclaving: Patterns of global futures in three African cities

'Enclaving' is the unequal distribution of urban resources in separated spaces across cities. In Africa, enclaving means new forms of urban spatial and social differentiation, such as gated communities or private cities. Such differentiation often entails atomization or fragmentation of the city and is, generally, approached as only a problem for urban development and planning. This project has challenged such understandings by seeking a holistic understanding of enclaving, including why enclaving takes place, why enclaving is often desired by urbanites and how enclaving is experienced. In exploring enclaving more broadly, we recognize that actors co-produce and engage urban space. Based on fieldwork in Accra, Johannesburg and Maputo we have analyzed enclaving as a globally emerging cultural orientation which create new social forms. By comparing enclaving in these cities, the project has therefore contributed to finding solutions to two key challenges of African urban development, namely housing and inequality. Questions that has guided the research include: 1) How does enclaving work through housing practices? 2) How does enclaving shape inequality in relation to gendered entrepreneurship, household dynamics, and sexual and intimate practices? 3) How does ideas of enclaving influence how people see themselves as members of urban societies? By exploring enclaving as an increasingly important urban phenomenon, we have produced research that is relevant also to development policies regarding inequality and urban development. The project is a collaboration between the project owner University of Bergen and University of Johannesburg, University of Ghana, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane/Kaleidoscopio (Mozambique) and the University of Essex.

The two main objectives of the project were: 1) The project will explore the ways in which enclaving in African cities may be argued to be prefiguring and spearheading trends more generally and thereby contribute to re-centre the importance of African experiences, developments and perspectives for urban futures. 2) The project will provide research results and information highly relevant to urban planning, policy development and poverty-reducing programmes in national as well as international contexts. Both these objectives have been reached and, in some instances, overfulfilled. A few comments on objective 1: Although slowed down and adapted by the COVID pandemic -- an event which greatly inhibited especially Africa-based project partners -- the project has carried through all main activities, including the undertaking of fieldwork in the locations specified, the carrying out of workshops and conferences in Africa (and beyond), the active engagement of African HEIs (including additional institutions to those already part of the project) and, crucially, providing specific inputs to discussions on and in Africa regarding the experience of and experiments with enclaving (see result report for further details). A few comments on objective 2: The project has consistently communicated its results and focus in contexts relevant to discussions on urban trajectories, urban developments and the challenge and potential rupturing influence of enclaving. Beyond the impressive number of publications the project has generated (see elsewhere), this has included a) a high number in presentations in both academic and non-academic settings, b) discussions and presentations for stakeholders and policymakers within both academia and beyond--sometimes as an integral part of field research, c) the support of a number of younger researchers in Mozambique, South Africa and Ghana that will go on to work on and with urban issues, d) the development of policy briefs on Accra, Maputo and Johannesburg (to be completed February 2025), e) the communication of the research beyond Accra, Maputo and Johannesburg, including to the urban policy unit at Tongji University in Shanghai, China, to the Centre for African Cities in Cape Town, South Africa and to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Senegal, Dakar. In sum and as developed in more detail below, both objectives have been met and the project has had a number of effects -- both for project participants, wider society in national, regional and global contexts and for various academic debates as well as stakeholders (broadly defined).

Enclaving is the unequal distribution of urban resources based on the production of separated spaces. In Africa this is producing radically new forms of urban spatial and social differentiation. Analyses of urban inequality approach enclaving as a process of spatial segregation and social atomization. Often based on technocratic or macroeconomic approaches, these understandings frame enclaving as a problem, preventing an empirically grounded, holistic comprehension of the phenomenon. What is missed in such accounts is an understanding of enclaving as an agentive, creative, subversive, and aspirational process. In this project we therefore approach enclaving as a generative and transformative cultural orientation by which social actors engage with and co-produce the urban order. Our project aims to rectify this conceptual gap. Through ethnographic fieldwork in three African metropoles, Accra, Johannesburg and Maputo we will explore enclaving as a globally emerging cultural orientation that works as a key driver for the reordering of the urban fabric, one that it is generative of new forms of sociality that need to be understood in their local context. This approach is necessary to comprehend novel forms of urbanization and to find solutions for two key challenges of contemporary urban development in Africa, namely housing and the management of inequality. Our research is driven by three underlying questions: 1) How does enclaving work through housing practices of various scales? 2) How does enclaving shape social understandings and the managing of urban inequality in terms of gendered entrepreneurship, household dynamics or sexual and intimate practices? 3) How does enclaving inform the way people reimagine themselves as members of urban societies? Through in-depth exploration of enclaving as an increasingly hegemonic urban form, we hope to produce research that is relevant to development policies regarding inequality and urban developments