Potentiality of the Informal City

“The city is the conjunction of seemingly endless possibilities of remaking…precarious structures such as roads, often flooded and potholed, areas often inaccessible, torn shacks, fragile businesses, hawkers, tailors, and artisans amassed in provisional locations and dispersed. Even in their supposedly depleted conditions, all are openings onto somewhere, textures that punctuate and sheer.”

AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City yet to Come, 2004

The African informal city is a place in the making. Across diverse transactions, modes of organisation, and territorial arrangements residents can find a foothold in their city, no matter how precarious that may be. To think about potentiality offers a radical way of seeing the inhabitant’s life in the informal city, instead of this condition as chaotic, informal and dangerous, it becomes clear this place can only ever be transitional, disparate and uncertain. This section will reveal tactical abilities to describe notions coupled to potentiality: the provisional, heterogeneous and unpredictable as exemplified in the context of informal settlement Mathare in Nairobi. The city generates a tension between how people move, produce things, sustain livelihoods, find space and make networks; an urban reality represented so succinctly in ‘the street.’

The play of aspirations for Mathare residents is to change their circumstances and to ‘get out.’ This does not necessarily imply outward mobility or inhabitants physically departing from the informal city, but the transformation of their current condition. This notion, then, of ‘getting out’ points to the possibilities that already exist in the exaggerated style of the street. It is a place of convergence, where people are passing, and from wh...

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... material and physical provisioning. De Boeck states that for those who live in tune with the world and rhythms of the Malebo Pool are offered a livelihood.

In the long run, a specific situation can improve, not necessarily through engagement or appropriation of a place specifically as no urban structure can be liberating but is fundamentally ambivalent. Here, potentiality is through active engagements with economies and practices that might harness the street as an instrument for emancipation, opening up, closing down, diverting, circumventing and enabling incremental change. In a sense, people become agile and highly mobile without actually going anywhere at all. The street offers a viable platform for residents to generate gradual transformation of the informal city, even if the constant threat of eviction proposes some kind of fateful, exclusionary change.