What’s a City? Reflections on Kenya’s City of Thorns
This lab is dedicated to the study of urbanization in Africa and the basic idea that there is something we call “the city.”
But when you scratch the surface, the idea of “the city” isn’t all that self-evident. As anyone who pays attention to various national Censuses (Censi?) can tell you, definitions of “urban” vary widely. And definitions of “city”, “municipality”, “town” and “village” (to grab the most common urban-like monikers) are also widely varied as they are set by national or in the case of the US state-level laws.
I googled “city” and got Barcelona courtesy of Abercrombie and Kent at http://www.abercrombiekent.co.uk/spain/images/HERO-Barcelona-City-Break-Europe.jpg. I work with a lot of Barcelonans here at UVA so I thought they’d appreciate the shout out.
If you go to the dictionary (first resort for many professors for assignments), the Oxford Dictionary (ok, I chose this one purposely) has city as:
A large town
Any town created by a charter and usually containing a cathedral (love it, your mosque does not apply!)
A municipal center incorporated by the state or province
In contrast Wikipedia adds a temporal aspect: “a large and permanent settlement.”
Temporality is interesting in the East African context because we have had long term displaced persons who have lived in agglomerations that might be considered—under any other system—as urban, but no government is willing to designate them as permanent. Most recently, internally displaced persons—evicted in the ethnic clashes following the 2007 election—have lived in camps throughout Kenya. Somalis displaced by civil war arrived in northern Kenya in the early 1990s; generations of them have grown up there. And before that Rwandans lived throughout western Uganda in camps that long predated the Genocide in 1994.
Relative to this definition, I’m thinking, of course, of the refugee camp in northern Kenya, Dadaab, which is the subject of a recent book, City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence. An image of the layout and extent of the camp is captured in an aerial by Daneil Hayduk below.
Source: http://danielhayduk.blogspot.com/2014/10/what-lovely-sky.html. Daniel Hayduk’s blog covers development from many angles, including wide angle.
By conventional measures—density, existence of markets and production activities, street network and transportation, schools, marriages and death, crime even—this looks like it should be a “city.” But what do the residents lack? Recognition and citizenship, amongst others. The Government of Kenya vowed to send all the refugees home, but that is proving pretty hard to do. The BBC has a really informative (and short) video on this rather forgotten camp and the story of one Somali family. Go to: http://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-38650026/my-life-in-the-worlds-largest-refugee-camp)
