Linking translocality and inclusive urbanisation

Abstract

The presentation will depart from the concept of inclusive urbanisation and discuss its possible theoretical and methodological linkages to translocality, based on a recently collected set of data from small towns in Tanzania and Uganda.

Development policy (as espoused by UN agencies, and gradually the cities themselves) has become more concerned with social and economic inclusion. Indeed, “the urban goal” (Goal 11) of the Sustainable Development Goals explicitly acknowledges inclusivity. While inclusive urbanisation and inclusive urban development are increasingly being promoted in development discourse, the academic literature related to these concepts is thin. Although a scholarly debate around inclusive urbanisation is emerging, the conceptualisation and empirical understanding of this process needs to be contextualised to current and future urbanisation trends in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular to the lower level of the urban hierarchy.

The limited opportunities outside agriculture, both in cities and elsewhere, suggest that the linkages to agriculture will continue to be important to livelihoods and economies of small urban centres in particular. The role of agriculture in livelihoods and in broader processes of economic growth centred on these towns, is therefore likely to affect the inclusivity of urbanisation. Essentially, small towns can be viewed as spatially, socially and economically embedded in surrounding rural areas. Existing studies document how livelihoods diversify and aspirations change as rural centres emerge into small towns, but they do not capture the distributional consequences of urbanisation processes per se, nor do they consider the inclusivity of urban development in existing small towns and how this is linked to translocality.

Using data from around 3800 households in fifteen lower level towns in Uganda and Tanzania, the paper will discuss how the concept of translocality can be understood from the perspective of inclusion and analyse the distributional consequences of engaging in translocal livelihoods and networks and how this varies based on gender, generation and migrant status.