Modalities of Space Production within Kenya's Rapidly Transforming Cities. Cases from Voi and Kisumu

Abstract

This PhD research focuses on the social production of urban space within two rapidly transforming secondary cities of Kenya—Voi and Kisumu. The aim is to examine the conditions under which urban space is produced and used in contemporary Voi and Kisumu, vis-à-vis the current realities and exigencies of urban transformation dynamics within the two cities. The study assesses the institutional capacity and practices of both the ‘official’ and ‘popular’ agents involved in the production of urban space, and examines how their respective knowledges, demands, practices and views on space are unrolled and integrated in (re)producing various urban spatialities. Using the perspective of social constructionism, the study conceptualizes urban space not as a fixed objective entity but as a ‘social construction’ that is highly contingent upon a series of events, experiences, practices and power geometries that shape the relations between various social groups and institutional logics in the city. The PhD research leverages on the Lefebvrian concepts of the production of space and the right to the city to provide a critical reading of how marginalized groups employ various forms of social innovation and insurgent urbanism to appropriate and defend crucial spaces of livelihoods, shelter and urban services. Besides providing a framework for a critical understanding of contested spatial productions within rapidly transforming cities of the Global South, the analytical tools employed in this PhD research could facilitate a better framing of urban dynamics and contribute to policy solutions that are more attentive to the complex African urban experience. This is not to say that the conceptual and theoretical insights are limited only to Africa. On the contrary, the conceptual framework employed here is critically reflexive of the power relations between different groups, and seeks to imagine the possibilities of learning between different contexts in ways that differ from historical patterns of urban knowledge production and sharing. The aim therefore is to foster learning between different (geographical) contexts that might eventually help pluralize the production of urban knowledge across the North-South divide.