ZEF Public Lecture: Overcoming the theory-development dualism through a life-world approach to planning: Empirical insights from peri-urban Maputo
December 5, 2024 | 13:30 h - 14:30 h
We'd like to invite you to our upcoming Public Lecture!
Topic: Overcoming the theory-development dualism through a life-world approach to planning: Empirical insights from peri-urban Maputo
Speaker: Dr. des. Axel Prestes Dürrnagel (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau)
How to join
The lecture will be held in hybrid mode (zoom and in-person at ZEF).
You can join us in-person at ZEF, ground floor, Conference Room, Genscherallee 3, 53113 Bonn,
or online via Zoom: https://uni-bonn.zoom-x.de/j/63626108108?pwd=byMzsHX3mMAHA4D8yHYuR5b7ui9th1.1
Abstract
Cities in sub-Saharan Africa are growing at an unprecedented rate, leading to the enormous expansion of settlements and the emergence of new categories of peri- urban spaces and places where urban and rural features are inextricably intertwined. The example of the Mozambican capital, Maputo, shows that the persistence of peri-urban spaces and the distinctiveness of peri-urban life-worlds has not received the necessary scholarly attention with contemporary planning approaches deeply entrenched in the dualism of theory and development. It points to the contradictions that arise when analysing cities in the Global South with concepts developed based on cities in the Global North, foregrounding their deficiencies and degrading them as laboratories for development intervention, while lacking the formation of urban theory outside Eurocentric perspectives. The implications for Maputo's peri-urban population are far-reaching. The implementation of individual land titling programmes promote the commodification of space and the individualisation of collective life, while the developmentalist vision of a homogenous physical order leads to the socio-spatial alienation of residents and large-scale displacement. This paper responds to the call to build an urban theory based on the everyday reality of people living in the ordinary city. In the tradition of Alfred Schütz, it proposes a phenomenological life-world approach to planning apt to overcome the dualism, building on place-based research and life-world analytical ethnography with eight months of field research between 2019 and 2021. Reconstructing life-world experiences sheds light on everyday life’s spatial, temporal, and social dimensions in peri-urban Maputo. It reveals the constitutive dimensions of peri-urbanity consisting of locality, self-sufficient practice, and community as the entry points for planning that reconciles the antagonistic relationships between the reality of the people and the reality of the state.
Axel PrestesDürrnagel is a postdoc in the Research Group Human Geography at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU). With a background in urban and social geography, his research and teaching interests focus on human-environment interactions, (peri-)urban governance, land use conflicts, and socio-spatial displacement processes from the perspectives of life-world phenomenology and political ecology. His regional focus is on South America (especially Brazil and the Amazon), Southern Africa (especially Mozambique), and Southern Germany, with extensive fieldwork experience using qualitative ethnographic and participatory methods. In his doctorate with the Chair of Social and Population Geography at the University of Bayreuth, he studied peri-urban life-worlds and conflict dynamics at the rural-urban interface of Maputo, Mozambique. In his current involvement with the project PRODIGY (BMBF), he investigates the social dynamics of tipping points in the Southwestern Amazon.
