Abstract
All too often, policymakers and urban theorists use state weakness to explain persistent urban poverty, inequality, and conflict. Embedded in this approach is a Manichean cognitive frame that constructs African cities and urban spaces in binaries: as well-managed versus mismanaged, as formal versus informal, legal or illegal, or governed versus ungoverned. The resultant analyses suggest that the crises facing many African cities lie with state failures and governments’ inability to provide services, manage diversity, and enforce the law across Africa’s fast growing and fluid cities. If a weak or failed state is the basis of the urban crisis, it stands to reason that a strong state is the cornerstone of good governance, order, effective regulation, and the amelioration of poor socioeconomic conditions.
Ungoverned spaces are not merely areas lacking in governance; rather, they are spaces where territorial state control has been voluntarily or involuntarily ceded to or shared with actors other than legally recognized sovereign authorities.
—Clunan and Trinkunas, 2010, 275
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© 2013 Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
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Kihato, C.W. (2013). The Notice: Rethinking Urban Governance in the Age of Mobility. In: Migrant Women of Johannesburg. Africa Connects. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299970_2
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