Academic literature on the topic 'City planning – Zambia'

AbstractLusaka is a city originally designed and built for European residents, to meet European needs and comforts. In the colonial period the African residents were either domestic servants living within European households’ compounds or were other contracted wage-labourers who were confined to the areas of south-western Lusaka specifically allocated to them. Europeans preferred male domestic help; women and children living at close quarters were thought to be potentially disruptive and were therefore discouraged from moving into the towns. A gender division between town and country was created; so too were cultural assumptions about gender, housing and employment, assumptions still widely held today.Pressure to find waged employment in Zambia has increased, and as a result the population of Lusaka is growing rapidly and shelter is in increasingly short supply. The article argues that domestic employment is still the largest single segment of the urban wage-labouring population. The historically constructed cultural assumptions about gender and housing have led to differential access to housing for men and women. Now that more and more women are seeking waged employment, the article uses their relation to domestic employment as an instance through which to explore the wider position of women in Zambia, and to initiate, it is hoped, some gender awareness in Zambian housing policy.

AbstractMany cities in developing countries are experiencing urbanization characterised by the continu-ous proliferation of informal settlements. In the City of Lusaka over 70 percent of residents live in informal settlements. The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of how inclusive land administration is in the City of Lusaka using the perspective of good governance principles. The sample comprised 10 key informants purposively selected from government institutions/ civil society organisations and 60 respondents conveniently drawn from informal settlements. The findings were analysed thematically and using descriptive statistics. The findings show that there is need to create policies and legislation that assists in developing viable, liveable and inclusive townships. Most indicators of the five good governance principles recorded negative responses of at least 60 per cent. Formal urban land development arrangements in the city have not been able to cope with the demands of the majority of urban residents. The study suggests that land and housing policies be revised to serve a broader purpose beyond the provision of shelter in order to suit the dynamic and contemporary needs of specific societies. Further re-search is needed on tenure responsive land use planning in order to understand existing commu-nity dynamics (economic and social support networks) and implement practical changes for tackling informality if Zambian cities and communities are to be sustainable and resilient.

This study used 268 household and 13 key informant interviews to get the views of Livingstone city residents on economic, environmental and sociocultural effects of tourism on local households and the city. Results show very few economic benefits at household level with residents perceiving big tourism-related businesses, the state and its officials to be the main beneficiaries. Although tourists were commended for helping vulnerable residents, they were blamed for contributing to prostitution and diseases by local residents; and were targeted for petty thefts by unemployed youths. Sociocultural effects of tourism are significant for residents but are routinely ignored or glossed over by tourism development practitioners. Tourism had resulted in a general improvement in the city environs. It is concluded that tourism development projects must target increased benefits for residents to increase benevolent attitudes from them towards tourism in their city, and to ensure a more sustainable variant of tourism is achieved in the tourist capital.

The topic of urban agriculture has, for a significant period of time, been recognized as a key facet of urban survival in the cities in the South. While it normally forms part of multilivelihood strategies and its overall significance is the subject of some debate, it nonetheless is an important feature of both urban landscapes and urban survival. This paper examines the current status quo of urban agriculture in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Structural adjustment and downscaling of the key copper mining sector seems to have forced more people into various informal survival strategies, including urban agriculture. Despite the apparent growing significance of urban agriculture, as illustrated by significant recent vegetation clearances around the city, official policy remains ambivalent and it has not been adequately supported or catered for in urban planning. While it remains officially illegal, controls are seldom enforced and urban farmers persist with what is a key household survival strategy under trying circumstances.

ABSTRACTSub-Saharan Africa is the fastest urbanising region of the world. This demographic transformation has occurred in concert with two other trends in the region, nascent democratisation and stalled decentralisation. Using the case of Lusaka, Zambia, this study argues that in the context of multi-party competition and limited fiscal decentralisation, the challenges posed by rapid urbanisation are exacerbated for the urban poor living in cities controlled by opposition parties. Semi-structured interviews conducted with local political actors are combined with a survey of 200 informal sector workers in Lusaka. This data reveals the tactics employed by the central government to weaken the popularity of the opposition in Lusaka and shows that from the viewpoint of the urban poor, such tactics ultimately prove counterproductive. The presence of similar dynamics in other African cities has important implications for aid modalities, such as budget support, that are currently used by international donors to fund development projects, including those in the urban sector.

How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city contexts.

The is a strong belief that FDI offers possibilities towards a development that has eluded developing countries for decades. It has become a predominant feature in development policy. The influence towards this orientation to development emanates from geopolitical dynamisms that have revolutionized global production systems at the hands of globalization. Innovations in urban economic development strategies concentrate on integrating local economies into the global market through the provision of infrastructure as the operative of global capital inflows. It is argued, however, that to exploit the full benefits of FDI, not only should the country attract the appropriate kind of investment, but its investment policy should be consistent in its interaction and engagements with the overall country's development policy regimes. Appropriateness in this argument entails that, with infrastructure identified as the primary requirement for attracting FDI, it is not only a question of being able to link the provision of infrastructure to attract investment but understanding the social-technical nature of infrastructure and its overall spatial manifestation as a function of urban form and structure. It is the spatial character underlying urban production systems, which development strategies such as FDI need to appropriately understand because it is at that interface were FDI-economic growth argument translate into economic development. Using a formulated conceptual framework based on Socio-Technical Systems (STS) theorization, the study assessed the spatial impacts of the FDI on infrastructure in the City of Lusaka in Zambia. It identified key institutions at the fulcrum of investment promotion and spatial development planning with a focus on planning and provision of network infrastructure. It also reviewed the main policies and legislation driving the FDI-led development agenda. The findings point out that national government priorities at significantly focused on the provision of infrastructure, however, on a very selective and narrow perspective. Infrastructure provision priority is in what is termed as 'economic infrastructure' argued to be the missing element in attracting FDI. What was also discovered, which in a way explains how infrastructure provision is narrowly considered, is a fragmented institutional framework resulting from inadequate legislation. The inadequacies lack of recognition of the spatial embeddedness of investment in the legislation resulting in disconnection between investment strategies formulation and spatial development planning. The overarching conclusion from the study is that to actualize the benefits of FDI substantially, the framework of regimes at the core of advancing the development goal driven by infrastructure, needs to understand the socio-technical nature of network infrastructure. A purely economic consideration of infrastructure as was discovered in the study, significantly limits FDI's contributive value to development.

AbstractThis chapter explores opportunities provided by strategic urban planning to mainstream climate risk considerations into the development decisions of city governments. It does so by describing the ways in which the climate-related information co-produced within the Future Resilience of African Cities and Lands (FRACTAL) project was integrated into the preparation of the Lusaka City Council Strategic Plan 2017–21. The chapter concludes by presenting four lessons emerging from the efforts at integrating climate information into the strategic planning process in Lusaka, Zambia: Lesson (1) Trust and relationships are key to sharing data and information needed to build a compelling case for managing climate risks; Lesson (2) Enable a variety of stakeholders to engage with climate information; Lesson (3) There needs to be an enabling legal, policy and financing framework; Lesson (4) Prepare to meet resistance; skilled intermediaries and city exchange visits help.