Urban Land Grabs in Africa?

Africa is rapidly urbanizing. New dynamics of investments and mobilities ensure expansive urbanization, transforming the continent’s urban land and built environment. These effects also impact future prospects for sustainable living conditions for African urban dwellers. This issue of Built Environment has collected articles that observe these effects, in order to explore whether these are indeed leading to ‘urban land grabs’, which take place in new forms of commodification and speculation of land and properties. We recognize that the trend of commodification and speculation is likely to intensify, as the new modernization agenda is propagated in the name of pursuing urban sustainability and resilience, corresponding to the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, inclusive urban development is also debated in these international agendas, as ordinary citizens increasingly confront livelihood and land-use changes, spatial alteration and social segregation, or physical displacement. In this context, we know little about how African urban dwellers’ experiences could be understood and used to envision genuinely sustainable and inclusive urban development. In this editorial, we give an overview of various emerging urban land investments and how they are experienced by urban dwellers. As shown in all the articles of this issue, we argue that the far-reaching impact of increased investments and mobilities, leading to commodification and land speculation as well as the urban dwellers’ agency to navigate the impact, deserve more attention in discussions on sustainable and inclusive urban development in Africa.

In recent years, African urbanization has re-emerged on both academic and policy agendas. Within the framework of the urban transition and the global urban turn, the question arises: how can African cities provide sustainable living environments for the rapidly increasing urban population? This concern is reflected in a gradual shift from a primarily rural-focused development model towards an urban development paradigm with a renewed dominance of urban policy agendas (Parnell, 2016). Indeed, not only are African national governments investing time and money in the urban realm, but also the international agenda is currently focused on ‘making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe resilient and sustainable’ as expressed in Sustainable Development Goal number 11 (Sheppard et al., 2015; UN-Habitat, 2016). In order to meet this goal, increased foreign investment in housing, network infrastructure, and economic development are expected to flow into cities in coming years (Zoomers et al., 2017). In addition, as van Noorloos et al. (2018) indicate, the New Urban Agenda and its call for new and ‘well planned’ urban solutions, further accelerates investments in urbanization globally, investments which could range from the international donor money to private capital. In this context, African cities are promoted as the new frontier for the global capital inflows (Watson, 2013; Myers, 2015; Fält, 2016; van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018).

Parallel to these debates is the question of whether there is something particular about the African urbanism (Parnell and Pieterse, 2015). Following postcolonial theories, there is a recent call in urban studies to theorize urbanism from the South (Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Robinson and Roy, 2016; Leitner and Sheppard, 2016; Watson, 2009). Scholars argue that African cities should be taken more seriously in their own right and that they should influence more strongly the theory of urbanism, given their many particularities, e.g. the relative importance of urban informality, the decoupling of economic growth and urbanization, the particularities of the peri-urban fringe and rural-urban connections, and state fragility (Parnell and Pieterse, 2014; Robinson and Roy, 2016). In addition, the African urbanism is highly diverse as the dynamics of each African city and town are different (Potts, 2012).

In these debates on African urbanism, the question of land is generally mentioned in the side-lines. Although discussions on gentrification, displacement, urban renewal and infrastructure development centre on social, physical, and economic change in urban environments, the land question, which is at the very basis of these transformations in the built environment of African cities, is rarely fully explored or taken as a central point of analysis. As Steel et al. suggest: ‘discussions over urban land easily conflate with debates over new urban reconfigurations and gentrifications processes, or what is often referred to as the urban transition’ (Steel et al., 2017). Even within the new land-based financing models (see Berrisford et al., 2018; Bonn, 2015; Blanco et al., 2016), which are promoted by the New Urban Agenda, land governance and land-based transformations are not necessarily at the core of the discussion. However, due to the intensification of global attention on, and capital inflows into, African cities, various international and national, public and private actors are mobilized to claim urban land, which calls for more attention to the issue of the possible ‘urban land grabs’ (Steel et al., 2017).

In this issue of Built Environment, we aim to address questions such as: how do increased pressure on and competing claims over land shape urbanization processes in Africa? Are the urban land grabs real? Are they just plans or do these plans actually have impact on the ground? If so, how does this work, in particular in the midst of the international call for sustainable and inclusive development? Who is involved in the process and how do different actors claim their rights to a decent urban living and their right to the city? Whose needs, expectations and ambitions are taken into account in current urban land policies and how do they (re)inforce patterns of inclusion and exclusion?

Originally prepared for the African Centre for Cities (ACC) International Urban Conference, which took place in Cape Town in early 2018, the articles in this issue contribute to answering these questions by drawing on recent empirical studies in a variety of African urban contexts. Together, they give an overview of emerging urban land investments and their impacts on urban dwellers who are increasingly confronting livelihood and land-use changes, spatial alteration and social segregation, or physical displacement.

Before introducing the six articles in this issue, we introduce the debate surrounding urban land and African urbanism in order to give a concise review of current debates and provide a framework for the articles.

The Urban Turn in the Land Grab Debate

Stemming from the global food, energy and financial crises during the later 2000s, the media hype around the ‘global land rush’ peaked in the early 2010s. Since then, scholars have been constantly debating the impact of large-scale land acquisitions on development processes in the Global South. These discussions shaped the debates on ‘land grabs’, focus on the role of foreign investors buying or leasing large pieces of land overseas in general, and in the Global South in particular (Cotula et al., 2009; Deininger and Byerlee, 2011; Holmes, 2014; Wolford et al., 2013; Borras and Franco, 2013; Kaag and Zoomers, 2014; Zoomers, 2010). More precisely, domestic as well as transnational companies, governments and individuals – driven by changing commodity prices – make competing claims over land in order to find new horizons for the production of food and biofuels. Therefore, initially, the debates centred on the rural context, looking into the impacts of agribusinesses, mining, as well as natural resource management and conservation, on smallholders’ livelihoods (Zoomers and Otsuki, 2017).

Recently, the fact that the land grabs also take place in a context of rapid urbanization is beginning to be noticed. According to Zoomers at al. (2017, p. 245):

the global land rush … is partly a consequence of increasing urban demand and the restructuring of value chains… Moreover, cities themselves act as major ‘land grabbers’, as they expand due to population growth, the spread of middle class lifestyles and suburbanisation, speculation, and new city development.

Scholars have also noted that the close intertwinement between rural and urban land acquisitions makes it important to look at both processes as two sides of the same coin and to further analyse them from an integrated perspective (Zoomers et al., 2017, van Noorloos et al., 2018). And, in both rural and urban contexts, the same concern of inclusive land governance must be shared in order to support the basic rights of vulnerable groups who tend to be most negatively affected by the process. There is always an underlying exclusionary element of land grabbing in different settings (Mbiba, 2017), and it is vital to look at particularities and commonalities.

Nonetheless, Steel et al. (2017) argue that, in the context of urbanization, land acquisitions take a slightly different form than in a rural context. They put emphasis on some crucial differences:

1. In urban cases, there is no unilineal transfer of local control over land towards more powerful outsiders. Urban land acquisitions involve a variety of actors and as a result the role of public policies in allowing or enhancing land-use change cannot be ignored.
2. In terms of scale, urban land grabs might be less immense. Although there are some significant differences across the regions, in general urban land acquisitions take place on a smaller scale and are more fragmented, gradual and dispersed across the city and therefore are less visible (but not necessarily less radical) than in most rural examples.
3. Issues related to land tenure in cities are always directly related to the question of housing and other basic infrastructure and, hence, indirectly to livelihoods.

Discussions on urban land generally conflate with debates over new urban reconfigurations and gentrification processes (see also Shin et al., 2016). However, we argue that it is important to pay attention to a variety of land acquisition patterns and their effects on urban dwellers and their livelihoods in an urban context. As the empirical cases in this issue show, it can be further discussed whether we should label the dynamics of dispossession and repossession of urban land and their consequences as land grabs or not. At least, we hope that thinking about urban land grabs offers an opportunity to analyse further the mixture of driving forces and effects that are taking place in the Global South in general and African cities in particular. This also helps us to find ways to envisage sustainable and inclusive urban development.

African Cities as the New Investment Frontier – and the Frontier of Land Grabs?

Urban land grabs are arguably taking place most intensely in expanding African cities. Underpinned by the era of ‘neo-liberal urbanization’ (Sheppard et al., 2015), private investments are increasingly directed towards the African continent, as it is considered to be a new frontier for foreign and domestic investments (Bhan, 2014; De Boeck, 2014; Côté-Roy and Moser, 2018; Fält, 2016; Grant, 2015; Murray, 2015a, 2015b; Watson, 2013). Accordingly, more traditional donors shape the public and private partnerships to accelerate the frontier expansion (Shannon, this issue). The frontier is materialized in different ways: (1) an extension of infrastructure networks (Otsuki, this issue); (2) the construction of entirely new cities built up from scratch in the outskirts of existing cities; (3) in the restructuring of existing city centres (van Noorloos, Avianto and Opiyo, this issue; Fält, this issue).

At the same time, the investments do not only take place in the form of new city and infrastructure development programmes. Smaller-scale land investments are often made by city dwellers themselves (Stacey, this issue), and transnational migrants trigger land commodification, land-use changes and an increase in land prices (Kaag and Steel, this issue). It should be acknowledged that a messy variety of actors are involved, including local rentier classes, returning migrants and remittance senders, and all kinds of local groups seeking opportunities from new investments.

Investments – large and small – could have a wide variety of impacts on urban dwellers in African cities where a majority is often labelled as informal settlers. How to turn the phenomenon of land grabs into more inclusive development has been a pressing question (Otsuki et al., 2017). In particular, even among the critical scholars, investments in cities and their infrastructure are considered to be highly necessary in African cities (Parnell & Pieterse, 2014; Watson, 2009). Therefore, there is a fine line between ‘grab’ and ‘development’ (van Noorloos et al., 2018), and exclusion and inclusion in the African context. In other words, whether the expansion of the investment frontier in African cities automatically leads to dispossession or ‘urban land grabs’ is debatable.

Experiences of Investments: Article Summaries

The articles in this issue examine the relationship between grab and development by looking into different types of land investments in the built environment of African cities across the continent: Nairobi (Kenya), Beira and Maputo (Mozambique), Accra (Ghana), Dakar (Senegal), and Khartoum (Sudan). The authors take the investments in master plans, new city development, infrastructure and peri-urban development as a starting point of analysis and discuss how the investments are experienced by urban dwellers and influence their living environment. The discussions point to multiple facets of the recent urban land grab debate and the role of land in African urbanization in general.

First, when we focus on investments in urban land, we notice how little is actually known about the politics of investments. The article by Shannon: ‘African urban development in a post-aid era’ looks into Dutch international cooperation that builds its public–private partnership in Africa on the ideal of a ‘retroliberal’ approach. It specifically examines increasing justification for the donor to take business-oriented approaches to collaborate with the city government of Beira in Mozambique. It highlights how the new master plan, which was proposed under the banner of increasing urban resilience in the face of flooding, leads to renewed territorial control of the city and aspirations by international donors and foreign businesses. The article calls for more attention to be paid to donor politics, as African urban development is inevitably enmeshed in global geopolitics as much as national and municipal power struggles.

The next two articles critically examine the ways in which new master-planning actually unfolds in African metropolitan cities. First, the article by van Noorloos, Avianto and Opiyo shows what happens to land when a large-scale new city building project is announced. It draws on an example of one of the most iconic planned new cities in Africa known as Konza Techno City in the peri-urban area of Nairobi in Kenya. While there is currently not much more than a fence that has been put up around the planned city, real life effects are clearly visible. On one hand, land tenure insecurity is experienced by surrounding villages as a buffer zone has been established to prevent ‘informality’. On the other hand, people are seeking opportunities or speculating on future profit. The case illustrates that a plan for a new city can trigger various types of dispossession and patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Therefore, it affirms that it is not easy to draw the line between ‘grab’ and ‘development’ or to assign clear ‘culprits’ that cause dispossession for others: spatial differences and temporal changes make for a constantly shifting landscape of actual and potential impacts.

The article by Fält draws our attention to the governance aspect of such a master-planned new city. Drawing on the case of Appolonia City, which has been built on the outskirts of the Ghanaian capital Accra on an assumption that it would absorb a growing urban population in the greater Accra region, the article asks how a new city built with largely private investments can be governed in an inclusive way. By investigating what happens to the land belonging to traditional chieftaincy and how private firms build and manage the city, the article argues that it is becoming another gated enclave for new middle-upper classes. This is not only because of the profit-seeking involvement of private parties and traditional authorities, but also due to the workings of the state apparatus, which strives to make the new private city governable. Given the trend of private urban planning across Africa, this rethinking of private-public relations through the lens of ‘governmentality’ will be useful in analysing wider African urban developments.

If we characterize these new master-planned cities as an embodiment of new investments, the paper that follows: ‘You can have it for God’ by Stacey moves away from the central idea that urban land access and control are driven by urban policies, planning and foreign investments. The paper shows that the de facto absence of formal regulatory powers in Ghana’s biggest informal settlement, Old Fadama in Accra, opens space for more informal and micro-level land-based developments and investments. In the settlement, local people are investing in mosque building by giving away parts of their land and other material resources. The article illustrates how residents of this informal settlement are active agents in attaching meaning to their lived-in place and establishing relations of property and land outside the reach of the government or private investors. It reminds us that the ways in which urban dwellers obtain access and control over urban land, especially in informal settlements with little state and formal business presence, are profoundly socially as well as morally embedded, and they create local rights of citizenship together with informal relations of property.

The implications of these informal land deals for urban transformation are further analysed in the article by Kaag and Steel. The article focuses on the roles played by transnational migrants who are increasingly targeted as buyers of land in their home cities. Drawing on cases in the peri-urban fringes of Khartoum, Sudan and Dakar, Senegal, the article shows how transnational migrants – or the African diaspora more specifically – make claims to urban land in particular ways, generating new processes of speculation, rise of land values, and socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion. Addressing whether these transnational migrants can be considered as contributing to urban ‘land grabs’ or not, the article argues that these often-overlooked actors that drive ‘land rush’ should at least be part of the analysis. It is not only mega-projects and official business investments that bring about urban transformation. Rather, individuals that form political and economic networks perhaps have larger lasting impacts on urban land, and they can exclude others that do not have connections to these networks.

Lastly, the paper by Otsuki: ‘Who is in “the public”?’ explores the direct consequences of various investments that lead to exclusion or inclusion of vulnerable people by examining the relationships between physical infrastructure, displacement and resettlement. It pays particular attention to the notions of ‘development’ and ‘the public’. Infrastructure as ‘public works’ often justifies the displacement of people for the sake of the wider population’s ‘development’, and we call this incident a typical case of land grab. However, infrastructure can benefit displaced people if it includes them in the ‘public’ that participates in their own ‘development’, especially in the form of ensuring a sound resettlement experience. By discussing how this reconstitution of the public can be envisioned and practised, the article examines experiences of development-induced displacement and resettlement in Mozambique. It concludes that it is important to clarify conceptually what ‘development’ actually means to whom, and that more attention should be paid to the everyday practices of the displaced people to rebuild or obtain their infrastructure.

Moving Forward: the African Urban Land Question

The variety of experiences revealed in this issue call for more scholarly attention to the transformations of African urban spaces and what these changes mean for more vulnerable groups and their ‘development’. As new investments and master plans continually emerge, it is vital to share our observations and analyses, form cross-fertilization, and engage with other professionals – including urban planners, policy-makers and development workers – in order to deepen our understanding of what sustainable and inclusive urban development actually means. The conceptualization of ‘urban land grabs’ provides a framework to interpret ongoing experiences. More specifically, we propose three concrete topics for further research and collaboration.

First, it is important to recognize that even when investments are in the planning stage, they trigger dynamics that cannot be ignored. For example, delays in the development of envisioned first-class urban areas in the peri-urban fringes of Khartoum result in a continuous flow of land transactions between locals and transnational migrants (Kaag and Steel, this issue). This has triggered illegal sand extraction, making the planned area less suitable for the intended residential development. Such unplanned consequences in turn affect the investment projects as much as the local living conditions. Yet, as discussions on ‘world city making’ (Roy and Ong, 2011) have shown, image building and city branding create expectations of a promising urban future, and this is key to making people believe in increased land values and convincing them to invest in land, irrespective of the question of whether real profits will be realized (van Noorloos et al., 2018). This is how new master plans are continually proposed, leading to new commodification and speculation (Shannon, this issue; van Noorloos, Avianto and Opiyo, this issue; Fält, this issue). We need to monitor closely what effects are generated when these master plans and other urban developments are announced, long before they materialize.

Second, many of the current investment projects seem exclusionary. As Watson (2013, p. 15) indicates, ‘a widening and deepening of inequality is inevitable’ when various competing claims to land heighten the pressure on that land. This is primarily because investment projects often target well-located land, leading to demolition of informal settlements and displacing a large number of urban poor. As Otsuki (this issue) has shown, displacement happens when people are considered to be ‘in the way’ of someone else’s (usually more privileged people’s) future ‘development’. Even when a relatively ‘inclusive’ international donor is involved, the retroliberal policies have resulted in dispossession of the poor from their land and livelihoods as in Beira, Mozambique (Shannon, this issue), leaving many marks of speculative urbanism in African cities (Goldman 2011). As many African cities are facing such displacement and dispossession of the poor, it is of vital importance to look into the long-term processes of how these exclusionary processes are experienced on the ground on the fringes of investments (van Noorloos, Avianto and Opiyo, this issue).

Last but not least, we must not lose sight of the human agency of urban dwellers in African cities. While we tend to pay attention to large scale, governmental and master-planned projects that are of an exclusionary nature, poor and marginalized people continually invest in their own development. This is clearly visible in informal settlements where people ‘grab’ their own land to demonstrate their social and moral obligation, as shown in Stacey’s article (this issue). They are not only being dispossessed but have the potential to repossess their land and opportunity by investing in or negotiating infrastructure for their own development (Otsuki, this issue). We need to pay closer attention to their strategies and plans for the future of urban settlements, which develop in relation to, but often independently from, the official regulatory and planned framework. In this sense, the role of the diaspora (Kaag and Steel, this issue) and traditional authority (Fält, this issue) are also important since they show us workings of alternative power dynamics in African cities.

We hope that this special issue opens the door to further exploration of these topics and others. At least, we wish to bring more recognition of the dynamics of investment that take place in African cities as central to understanding and countering exclusionary urban development.

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Planning Abu Dhabi

Alamira Reem Bani Hashim

07 Nov 2018

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Abu Dhabi’s urban development path contrasts sharply with its exuberant neighbour, Dubai. As Alamira Reem puts it, Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates since 1971, ‘has been quietly devising its own plans … to manifest its role and stature as a capital city’.

As a native Abu Dhabian and urban planner and researcher, who has studied emirate’s development for more than a decade, is uniquely placed to write its urban history. Following the introduction and description of Abu Dhabi’s early modern history, she focuses on three distinct periods dating from the discovery of oil in 1960, and coinciding with periods in power of the three rulers since then: Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan (1960–1966), Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (1966–2004), and Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan (2004–). Based on archival research, key interviews and spatial mapping, she analyses the different approaches of each ruler to development; investigates the role of planning consultants, architects, developers, construction companies and government agencies; examines the emergence of comprehensive development plans and the policies underlying them; and assesses the effects of these many and varied influences on Abu Dhabi’s development. She concludes that, while much still needs to be done, Abu Dhabi’s progress towards becoming a global, sustainable city provides lessons for cities elsewhere.

Alamira Reem Bani Hashim has a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. The first Emirati woman to be awarded a PhD in Planning, she is a professional planner and researcher.

Meet the editors

Tali Hatuka, an architect and urban planner, is the Head (and founder) of the Laboratory of Contemporary Urban Design (LCUD), in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University. Her work focuses primarily on two main fields of research: the urban realm and society (public space, conflicts and dissent); and urban development and city design (housing, landscape design, and industrial areas). She has worked as an architect and a planner on a planning project related urban development and city design, funded by Israeli municipalities and ministries. 

Cristina Mattiucci is an architect and Adjunct Professor in Territorial Planning at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. Her research focus is landscape in its multiple meanings, with a predilection for its feature of inhabited territory and public space as it emerges in contemporary urbanization processes.

The Instrumentalization of Landscapes in Contemporary Cities

“Landscape is a medium found in all cultures” - W.T.J., Mitchell, 2002

The Instrumentalization of Landscape: The Paradigmatic, the Urban, and the Personal Levels

1. The Paradigmatic Perspective focuses on the ideology of greening the city. Federico Ferrari’s paper, Reactionary Landscape: the Discourse of Naturalism as a Grand Narrative, argues that we live in the era that is marked by the presence of the term landscape in all discourses and disciplines. The most hegemonic ideas and representations are those associated with nature and whose tools are often marketing strategies of ‘greenwashing’ including rooftop gardens, vertical forests, plant walls. By deepening the ideology behind that and focusing on some processes, Ferrari interrogates the cultural meaning of this phenomenon.

   ​Addressing this grand narrative of landscape and nature in the city, with a focus on materiality and design, Tali Hatuka explores contemporary trends in landscape design. In her paper, The Generic Design of Urban Parks, she presents some of the dominant design features in the development of urban landscape. Addressing varied examples, she argues that the design of open spaces in the city is based on a pragmatic approach that further contributes to the consumption of public spaces. The paper ends with a discussion of alternative approaches and the role of complex, dynamic public spaces in our cities.

2. The Urban and Regional Perspective focuses on the way landscape projects are changing and modifying life in cities and regions. The first more conceptual paper, Branded Landscapes vs Reform of Ordinary Landscapes: An Insight from Italy, by Arturo Lanzani and Cristiana Mattioli focuses on the way landscapes have become a central component in the economic improvement and in the valorization of heritage, as well as in planning strategies. The key argument is that landscape heritage sites have become a branding tool for cultural economy. This dynamic may be seen in the context of cultural heritage policies that aim to preserve heritage from aggression and destruction, but at the same time are responsible for a new process of stereotyping and ‘showcasing’ protected heritage sites. The paper ends by proposing strategies to overcome the threats of ill-conceived and misdirected, glossy, and/or overbearing initiatives, policies and projects related to natural and designed landscape sites and projects.
   ​Complementing these ideas, Cristina Mattiucci, in her paper, Landscape as a Founding Element of the Contemporary Urban, discusses how landscape transformations redefine the features of territories in collective imaginaries, making the landscape emerge as a strategic element in planning policies. The paper investigates an artificial basin landscape project, tracking the changes in the perception of the area by those who permanently and temporarily inhabit it. Mattiucci argues that understanding the cultural, economic, and political meanings of the landscape strongly influences territorial marketing strategies and individual living choices. In her conclusions she suggests that interpretation of the landscape in the contemporary city must go beyond addressing forms and functions, and address the cultural and political perspectives that contribute to its transformation. 
3. The Personal and Local level refers to initiatives and practices associated with greening cities. Addressing the phenomenon of community gardens and the discourse evolved around it, One Landscape Multiple Meanings: Revisiting Contemporary Discourses on Urban Community Gardens, by Efrat Eizenberg, maps the different ways in which scholars conceptualize the formation of, and care for, urban community gardens. It shows how these gardens are perceived both as spaces with the potential to cultivate new ideas about cooperative relations and sustainable urbanism, and as a form of a neoliberal ‘greenwashing’ development strategy. Eizenberg’s perspective takes into account the broad, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of community gardens and offers a complex reading of what kind of landscape is produced by them.
   Greening not only affects community perceptions but also the way individuals envisage their living space and conduct their day-to-day activities. Lise Bourdeau-Lepage in her paper Nature and Well-Being in the French City: Desire and Homo Qualitus, argues that individuals have become aware of the essential role played by nature, in particular in terms of their well-being. They have rediscovered the benefits of nature and seek to make the most of it. Exploring the practices of individuals in the French society, she shows how people, policy-makers and economic actors are developing an ecological conscience, and how plants and vegetation are occupying an ever more important place in cities. In her conclusion she underlines the way in which the desire for nature and the willingness to preserve the environment exposed the environment itself to a real risk of the instrumentalization of nature.
   Linking both the level of the community and the individual, the last paper in the issue by Alessia de Biase, Carolina Mudan Marelli, and Ornella Zaza reminds us that we must view contemporary landscape ideas and practices in a historical perspective. In their paper, From Collective Urban Gardens to Individual Micro-Landscapes, they show that the politicization of urban nature is unavoidable. By exploring the evolution and the cultivation of landscape in the city of Paris, they explain the shift that has taken place in the public policy approach with regard to urban nature. As they argue, the individual (citizen) is becoming a dominant actor in the management of nature in the city, a role that is further enhanced by the use of digital platforms and applications that support it.

From the Fragmented to Systematic: Future Landscape Interventions in Cities 

Branded Landscapes in Contemporary Cities

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

To what extent have we commodified landscapes and nature? How has this commodification influenced life in the city, including urban processes? Where do efforts to reclaim space within the city for nature fit in the power dynamics within cities? The papers in this issue present three perspectives on this instrumentalization of landscape and nature in cities: the paradigmatic, the urban and regional, and the local/personal.

Tali Hatuka, Cristina Mattiucci

05 Oct 2018

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• The Instrumentalization of Landscape in Contemporary Cities
  TALI HATUKA and CRISTINA MATTIUCCI
• Reactionary Landscape: The Discourse of Naturalism as a Grand Narrative
  FEDERICO FERRARI
• Beyond Pragmatism: Challenging the Generic Design of Public Parks in the Contemporary City
  TALI HATUKA
• Branded Landscapes vs Reform of Ordinary Landscapes: An Insight from Italy
  ARTURO LANZANI and CRISTIANA MATTIOLI
• Landscape as a Founding Element of the Contemporary Urban
  CRISTINA MATTIUCCI
• One Landscape Multiple Meanings: Revisiting Contemporary Discourses on Urban Community Gardens
  EFRAT EIZENBERG
• Nature and Well-Being in the French City: Desire and Homo Qualitus
  LISE BOURDEAU-LEPAGE
• From Collective Urban Gardens to Individual​ Micro-Landscapes
  ALESSIA DE BIASE, CAROLINA MUDAN MARELLI, and ORNELLA ZAZA
• Publication Reviews

Cognition and the City: An Introduction

As the title indicates, this special issue brings together two disciplinary domains: cognition as studied mainly in cognitive science, and cities as studied in disciplines such as urban studies, urban geography, architecture and the like. The first, cognitive science – The Mind’s New Science (Gardner, 1987) – is a very young discipline. It emerged in the mid 1950s out of a rebellion against the doctrine of behaviourism that dominated the behavioural sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. The second, the study of cities, is rather old with roots in antiquity in the writings of first-century BC Roman architect Vitruvius and Palladio in the renaissance. The first’s main focus of interest is the world inside the brain, while the second deals with the world outside. The first attempts to be associated with the natural sciences, while the second is part of what Herbert Simon (1969 [1996]) has termed The Sciences of the Artificial. And yet, the two are interrelated. Several cognitive science’s streams, namely, Gibson’s (1979) ecological approach, embodied cognition (Varela et al., 1994), the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998) suggest that the mind extends into the external environment. In Nobel laurate E. Kandel’s (2012, p. 284) words on the visual system:

Thus, we live in two worlds at once, and our ongoing visual experience is a dialogue between the two: the outside world that enters through the fovea and is elaborated in a bottom-up manner, and the internal world of the brain’s perceptual, cognitive and emotional models that influences information from the fovea in a top-down manner.

In parallel, in the domain of cities, several streams turned their attention to the internal world. In 1960, architect Kevin Lynch published his The Image of the City with the aim of finding what it is in the external world, that is in the city, that makes it legible and imageable. About a decade later urban geographers developed the notion of mental maps (Gould and White, 1974) in an attempt to provide the positivist location theories, that then dominated human geography and urban studies, a more realistic perspective on human behaviour in the environment and specifically in cities. Their basic suggestion was that a person’s location in space has an influence on his/her spatial perception and as a consequence on location decisions. Then, students of mental maps in conjunction with those of Lynch’s Image incorporated psychologist Eduard Tolman’s (1948) seminal paper ‘Cognitive maps in rats and men’, and made the three notions – mental maps, images and cognitive maps – the foundations for behavioural geography. Since the 1990s, with the growing influence of cognitive science and in conjunction with GIS, behavioural geography gradually turned into cognitive geography (Montello, 2018; Portugali, 2018).

Lynch’s main interest in the ‘image of the city’ was the city itself – its morphology and urban landscape. However, in the context of behavioural and cognitive geography the interest shifted from the city to behaviour in space and then to spatial cognition. The city itself became just a passive environment by means of, and within which, behaviour and cognition can be studied; very much in line with the role of the external environment in cognitive science in general. In the latter, the focus of interest was and still is one-sidedly on the details of the inner world, even in the above noted ecological-embodied-extended mind approaches. ‘… to my knowledge’, writes Kelso (2016, p. 5) in a recent study of the emergence of agency in a human infant out of the interaction between the infant and a mobile in the environment, ‘not a single study has recorded the motion of the mobile, thereby obviating the possibility of obtaining any information about its relation to the baby’s movements’. Thus, despite Lynch’s image of the city and the fact that many, if not most, behavioural-cognitive geographical studies were associated with cities, the links between the ‘motion of the city’ and human cognition did not originate here; it originated in three other research fields whose main concern (similarly to Lynch’s) was the city itself: Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, Bill Hillier’s space syntax and, complexity theories of cities (CTC).

According to Alexander (1979, pp. 49–50), cities are products of a language of patterns – a ‘complex set of interacting rules … [reside] … in people’s heads and are responsible for the way the environment gets its structure’. Similar to Gestalt patterns and to Chomsky’s generative ‘internal language’, Alexander’s pattern language is innate to the human mind and thus prior to and beyond culturally related specific urban morphologies. However, it differs from Chomsky’s in that Alexander’s patterns are like ‘the semantic structure … which connects words together – such as “fire” being connected to “burn”, “red” to “passion”’ (Alexander interviewed by Grabow, 1983, p. 50).

Hillier’s focus is on ‘syntax’ – in the case of cities, the syntax of the urban space (Hillier, 2012, 1996; Hillier and Hanson, 1984). The pattern of street networks in cities, suggested Hillier, functions in a way similar to syntax in language. Similar to language in which the relationship between words in their ordering determines the meaning of a sentence, so in a city the relationship between streets in ordering determines the meaning of the urban landscape and as a consequence the behaviour of people in it.

Unlike Hillier’s and Alexander’s approaches to cities, which from the start were associated with cognition, CTC – Complexity Theories of Cities, started with no such association. This domain of studies emerged in the last three decades as an approach that applies the various theories of complexity to the study of cities, their planning and design (Batty, 2013; Portugali, 2011; Portugali et al., 2012; Portugali and Stolk, 2016). Studies in this domain demonstrate that like natural complex systems, cities too are complex self-organized and organizing systems that emerge bottom-up and exhibit phenomena of chaos, fractal structure and the like. The link between CTC and cognition follows, firstly, the fact that the mind/brain is regarded as the ultimate complex system. Secondly that, as elaborated by Portugali (2011), a deeper understanding of human behaviour in cities requires making links to cognitive science.

From the discussion above it follows that linking Cognition and the City – the aim of the present special theme issue – requires an integration between the research domains just surveyed. And indeed, the first paper by Portugali and Haken suggests such an integration. The other papers in this special issue shed light on several aspects of such an integration. Thus, the second paper by Penn, puts Cognition and the City in the wider time context of human evolution. Paper three by Blumenfeld-Lieberthal et al. explores the morphological properties that typify a city. The paper by Ishikawa that follows, the fourth in the list, explores Cognition and the City in terms of people–environment interrelations. The next paper by Omer exposes the links between ‘systematic distortions in cognitive maps’ and the morphological properties of their superordinate geographical context. The sixth paper by Bae and Montello is a case study illustrating the nature of a city’s perceptual boundaries, while the seventh paper, by Kondyli and Bhatt, discusses navigation in large-scale urban structures that are becoming more and more dominant in cities.

There is no need to say more here about the various papers and their points of view; the papers do this themselves in the most appropriate ways: they speak for themselves while their abstracts describe the essence of each paper. Instead I’ll close with reference to Kandel’s statement at the beginning of this introduction. Namely, that ‘we live in two worlds at once’, that our experience ‘is a dialogue between the two: the outside world … and the internal world…’. This dialogue, as is well recorded, has shaped humans’ cognitive evolution for thousands of years. For most of this time, the outside world was in fact, Nature and the elements of which it is composed: animals trees, stars and all the rest. This is not the case anymore: in a world where more than half of the population live in cities, for most newborns the first things that they see when they open their eyes are not trees, birds or stars, but rather buildings, cars, machines and other artificial elements that make a City. And yet, in the domain of cognition, the City of the ‘Cognition and the City’ dyad has so far been discussed mainly implicitly and as a kind of by-product: as means to expose the ‘really interesting’ internal world of entities such as cognitive maps, images, spatial perception and the like. In parallel, in the study of cities, where the main focus was traditionally on economics, society, culture and politics, the Cognition of the dyad entered the discussion for the most part as means to improve our understanding of urban agents’ decision-making. It seems that it is time for the Cognition and the City dyad to become an explicit domain of study for its own sake. This special issue is a modest step towards this aim.

References

• Alexander, C. (1979) The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Batty, M. (2013) The New Science of Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998) The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), pp. 7–19.
• Gardner, H. (1987) The Mind’s New Science. New York: Basic Books.
• Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.
• Gould P. and White R.R. (1974) Mental maps. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Grabow, S. (1983) Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture. London: Oriel Press.
• Hillier, B. (2012) The genetic code for cities: is it simpler than we think? in Portugali, J., Meyer, H., Stolk, E. and Tan, E. (eds.) Complexity Theories of Cities have Come of Age. Berlin: Springer.
• Hillier, B. (1996) Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hillier, B. and Hanson, J. (1984) The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kandel, E. (2012). The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House.
• Kelso, J.A.S. (2016) On the self-organizing origins of agency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(7), pp. 490–499.
• Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Montello, D. Ed. (2018) Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
• Portugali, J. (2011) Complexity, Cognition and the City. Berlin: Springer.
• Portugali, J. (2018) History and theoretical perspectives of behavioral and cognitive geography, in Montello, D. (ed.) Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 16–38.
• Portugali, J., Meyer H., Stolk, E. and Tan, E. (eds.) (2012) Complexity Theories of Cities have Come of Age. Berlin: Springer.
• Portugali, J. and Stolk, E. (eds.) (2016) Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design. Berlin: Springer.
• Simon, H.A. (1969 [1996]) The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Tolman, E.C. (1948) Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55, pp. 189–208.
• Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1994) The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

'Cognition and the City: An Introduction'

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

The contributors to this issue explore the integration of two disciplinary domains – cognition as studied mainly in cognitive science, and cities as studied in disciplines such as urban studies, urban geography and architecture.

Juval Portugali

16 Jul 2018

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Contents

• Cognition and the City: An Introduction
  JUVAL PORTUGALI
• Movement, Cognition and the City
  JUVAL PORTUGALI and HERMANN HAKEN
• The City is the Map: Exosomatic Memory, Shared Cognition and a Possible Mechanism to Account for Social Evolution
  ALAN PENN
• What Makes Us Think It’s a City?
  EFRAT BLUMENFELD-LIEBERTHAL, NIMROD SEROK, and ELYA L. MILNER
• People in the Environment and Environments Perceived by People: Cognitive-Behavioural Approaches to Spatial Cognition
  TORU ISHIKAWA
• How are Geographical Judgments and a Geographical Entity’s Shape Connected in Cognitive Mapping
  ITZHAK OMER
• Representations of an Urban Ethnic Neighbourhood: Residents’ Cognitive Boundaries of Koreatown, Los Angeles
  CRYSTAL JI-HYE BAE and DANIEL R. MONTELLO
• Rotational Locomotion in Large-Scale Environments: A Survey and Implications for Evidence-Based Design Practice
  VASILIKI KONDYLI and MEHUL BHATT
• Publication Reviews

Forthcoming issues include: Branded Landscapes in Contemporary Cities; Sharing Space: Sharing Practices and Shared Spaces in the City; Changing Patterns of Commuting to and in the City

Editorial: Inclusive Design: Towards Social Equity in the Built Environment

As this special issue of Built Environment on Inclusive Design was coming to fruition, an article in The Guardian posed the question ‘what would a truly disabled-accessible city look like?’ (Salman, 2018). The piece identified that globally by 2050, 940 million people with disabilities will live in cities (this equates to 15 per cent of all urban dwellers) resulting in the United Nations declaring that the inaccessibility of our built environment is a ‘major challenge’. Salman’s article also presented an economic value to poor access – in the UK this is estimated to be £212bn (known as the purple pound), with an accessible tourism market estimated at £12bn. The article then presented a series of cases from around the world to highlight how greater access to the built environment was being achieved through design. This included the ‘traditional’ focus of inclusive design in considering the needs of our ageing and disabled populations (with an emphasis on mobility and sight), as well as considerations for citizens (or city/sens – citizens of urban environments who experience sensory barriers) on the autistic spectrum.

While these innovations should be welcomed and celebrated, they also require a degree of careful consideration. The critical access theorist Aimi Hamraie has challenged many inclusive, universal and ‘design for all’ responses that have sought to include ‘everyone’ by asking ‘who counts as everyone and how designers can know?’ (Hamraie, 2017, p. 261). Given this perspective how might inclusive design further social equity in the built environment? All too often an inclusive approach can consider the needs of one group of users to the detriment of another. This has been most commonly adopted in the design of streets and public spaces in the generic use of textured, tactile or ‘blister’ paving as navigational direction for blind and vision impaired people. Yet for older people, people who use wheelchairs or scooters (Omerod et al 2014) or have artificial lower limbs (Bichard, 2015) this design intervention has created further barriers to accessing curb cuts (in itself a defining symbol of access to the built environment (Haimraie, 2017)). Often many of the interventions in the built environment that are considered ‘inclusive’ such as tactile paving, ramps, hearing loops, and even the accessible toilet should be considered more in line with design for ‘special needs’ (Hanson, 2002). Hence the inclusive design project for the built environment continues to be an urgent and ongoing priority that offers opportunities for innovation and collaboration but, more importantly, extends access beyond being merely a function of the built environment. Rather it is a crucial element that incorporates human diversity and potential within our natural environment.

Inclusive design within the UK initially focused on the needs of the ageing population (Coleman, 1994); this was then extended to include disabled people (Keates et al., 2000). More recently, wider social factors including economic exclusion have also come into the inclusive design framework, and this has included extending user participation from ‘extreme users’ (Coleman, 1994), user groups (Dong et al., 2005) to wider cross community participation (Bichard et al., 2018) to incorporate and develop design knowledge of functional access in more creative and innovative forms.

The contributors to this issue of Built Environment represent a series of researchers who are extending inclusive design knowledge, in teaching, practice and thinking. What this issue does not include is consideration of user engagement. Inclusive design has tended to assume that mere consultation will result in favourable design outcomes, but often this consultation itself requires careful consideration and creative engagement for both the users and the designers. Methods for engagement have become the focus of their own specific design discourses including participatory and co-design, and are context led. While offering a wide spectrum of creative engagement for users and designers, such narratives are worthy of their own publications and special editions, and therefore have not been included in this special edition.

Instead the papers presented here represent a series of wider considerations for readers of Built Environment (the users). The first paper by Scott, McLachlan and Brookfield lay the foundation of this issue where many built environment professional careers begin; training in architectural schools. Scott et al. describe three innovative projects from the architectural school that not only engage key levels of the education but also actively extend inclusive design engagement from the older user to the citizen. The first two cases identify how communication between designer and user are essential, requiring the designer to step back from the education bubble of design school rhetoric. Their third example illustrates how the regulation and design code that informs design for access, such as Building Regulations and British Standards, can be seen as tools for innovation – therefore meeting the legislative requirements and extending the design guidance whilst offering creative engagement for designers and innovative potential outcomes for users.

The second paper of this issue introduces the inclusive design paradox. Heylighen and Bianchin show how the uptake of inclusive design has been limited, and whilst some of this might be considered a lack of engagement of inclusive design within the education of built environment professionals (Scott et al.), there is also the consideration of wider conflicting issues and the influence of design on users. Heylighen and Bianchin present this as the paradox which focuses on a question of justice and which the authors navigate through the work of moral and political philosopher John Rawls to explore questions of justice in design and how the architects of the built environment might extend design for fairness. The authors present a series of specific design outcomes they consider as having challenged this paradox of inclusive design.

The third paper introduces ‘auraldiversity’ as a specific oversight within inclusive design of the built environment. Renel shows how design has focused on an auraltypical perspective. This can be extended within inclusive design to suggest that an element of ‘typical’ user-centred design has focused on specific disabilities. By introducing auraldiversity, Renel reveals the complexity and richness of hearing, and highlights that maybe this has been difficult to focus on within inclusive design research and that such diversity cannot be met by a single-issue response such as the hearing induction loop. Again, the focus on a specific aspect of human physical diversity can be extended to consider shared commonalities across spectrums and incorporated into a wider inclusive design investigation between disciplines. By introducing the reader to three aurally diverse participants, Renel highlights how negative and positive aspects of the built environment can impact their lives.

From a focus in a specific diversity, a specific element of the built environment is investigated in the fourth article in this issue. Ramster, Greed and Bichard present the challenge of toilet provision as essential for mobility in the built environment, but facing current challenges with regards to perceived legitimate access to provision. This case illustrates how, without wider consultation, design considerations regarded inclusive can become exclusive. This was manifested most recently in the emergence of gender neutral toilet provision: signage change rather than wider design consideration and possible innovation resulted in news headlines and controversy at the most basic of design intervention requirements of the built environment.

In their book Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, Aimi Hamraie challenged the origins of universal and inclusive design as the result of specific progressive legislation (such as the American with Disabilities Act) to reveal the politics and discourses that contribute to knowledge making of design and the specific bodies design responded to. The work has been described by leading inclusive design in the built environment theorist Rob Imrie as a major text that will reconstruct how ‘we think about access, disability and design’. In their essay for this issue Hamraie presents new research that extends the lens of inclusive considerations to explore wider discussions of health and wellness/wellbeing that pervade many city design projects, highlighting that certain design rhetorics that masquerade as sustainable (and by association inclusive) are essentially designing the exclusion of certain socio/economic populations. This is especially explored in the notion of making areas of cities ‘liveable’ that suggests these current spaces are unliveable, despite people living there. In line with the critical access approach outlined in their book, Hamraie shows, maybe somewhat uncomfortably for inclusive design practitioners, how the focus of this design approach has predominantly centred on making bodies more productive with no critical consideration of the wider neoliberal ideology that drives city redesign. Hamraie’s critical access studies can be considered an active companion to inclusive design.

The final paper in this issue focuses on one of the most horrific incidents of built environment design to have occurred in the UK. The fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017 resulted in the loss of seventy-one lives. Evans continues his previous work on the challenges of designing sustainably and inclusively to show how these design approaches continue to be mutually exclusive, in which due to government targets, sustainability and a buildings performance is often a higher priority than the requirements of the users of the building. Evans also shows that an inclusive approach – especially in the design of housing, does not necessarily mean the creation of new knowledge, but that a previous legacy of innovative inclusive design can be re-examined.

The papers in this issue aim to present wider considerations of inclusive design, for the practitioners, educators and theorists behind this specific people-centred engagement. They are not intended to be solutions to the problem, rather they reveal the complexity of inclusion that requires greater research and engagement with populations in recognition of the diversity of those who inhabit the built environment.

References

• Bichard, J. (2015) Extending Architectural Affordance; The Case of the Publicly Accessible Toilet. PhD Thesis, University College London. Available at: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1467131/2/Bichard%202014%20Res.pdf.
• Bichard, J., Alwani, R., Raby, E., West, J. and Spencer, J. (2018) Creating an inclusive architectural intervention as a research space to explore community wellbeing, in Langdon, P., Lazar, J., Heylighen, A. and Dong, H. (eds.) Breaking Down Barriers. New York: Springer.
• Dong, H., Clarkson, P.J., Cassim, J. and Keates, S. (2005) Critical user forums – an effective user research method for inclusive design. The Design Journal, 8(2), pp. 49–59.
• Coleman R. (1994) The case for inclusive design – an overview, in Proceedings of the 12th Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association. Mississauga, Ontario: Human Factors Association of Canada.
• Hamraie, A. (2017) Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 
• Hanson, J. (2002) The inclusive city: what active ageing might mean for urban design, in Maltby, T. (ed.) Active Ageing: Myth or Reality? Proceedings of the British Society of Gerontology 31st Annual Conference. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. 
• Keates, S., Clarkson, P. J., Harrison, L.A. and Robinson, P. (2000) Towards a practical inclusive design approach, in Thomas, J. (ed.) Proceeding of CUU’00: ACM Conference on Universal Usability. New York: ACM, pp. 45–52. 
• Omerod, M., Newton, R., MacLennan, H., Faruk, M., Thies, S., Kennedy, L., Howard, D. and Nester, C. (2014) Older people’s experiences of using tactile paving. Municipal Engineer, 168(1), pp. 3–10. 
• Salman, S. (2018) What would a truly disabled-accessible city look like? The Guardian, 14 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/feb/14/what-disability-accessibl....

Meet the editor

Jo-Anne Bichard is Senior Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. She is a design anthropologist whose research involves multi/inter-disciplinary collaboration and participatory engagement in the inclusive design process. Her primary research theme focuses on design for wellbeing in the built environment. With Gail Ramster, Jo-Anne is co-creator of The Great British Public Toilet Map and was runner up in the ESRC’s Outstanding Impact in Society award. Jo-Anne’s PhD ‘Extending Architectural Affordance; the case of the Publicly Accessible Toilet’ explored inclusive spatial, product and service design as crucial elements to afford access for users across abilities and age. She has published extensively on toilet design from an inclusive perspective.

Inclusive Design: Towards Social Equity in the Built Environment

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

The papers in this issue aim to present wider considerations of inclusive design, for the practitioners, educators and theorists behind this specific people-centred engagement.

Dr Jo-Anne Bichard

20 Apr 2018

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Contents

• Inclusive Design: Towards Social Equity in the Built Environment
  JO-ANNE BICHARD
• Inclusive Design and Pedagogy: An Outline of Three Innovations
  IAIN SCOTT, FIONA MCLACHLAN and KATHERINE BROOKFIELD
• Building Justice: How to Overcome the Inclusive Design Paradox?
  ANN HEYLIGHEN and MATTEO BIANCHIN
• ‘Auraldiversity’: Defining a Hearing-Centred Perspective to Socially Equitable Design of the Built Environment
  WILLIAM RENEL
• How Inclusion can Exclude: The Case of Public Toilet Provision for Women
  GAIL RAMSTER, CLARA GREED and JO-ANNE BICHARD
• Enlivened City: Inclusive Design, Biopolitics, and the Philosophy of Liveability
  AIMI HAMRAIE
• Inclusive and Sustainable Design in the Built Environment: Regulation or Human-Centred?
  GRAEME EVANS
• Publication Reviews