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But here visibility refers to the ways in which vari- ous places and people within the city can actually visualize a government at work in the day-to-day operations of the city.

At the outset, this may mean identifying new ways to use existing municipal assets and thus build new categories for urban transactions that work. Municipalities conven- tionally attempt to recoup lost value due to various inefficiencies by either subcontracting the management of assets to private firms or selling off those assets outright. In other words, municipal assets are recategorized as commodities priced according to prevailing market value, and then supplemented by other considerations as public interest.

But this approach is often a limited way to think about resources that municipalities control or have access to. The question is how existing resources can attain wider and more diverse use and in ways that also diversify potential revenue streams and costs.

Such a process would build on the existing ways in which African urban residents use different networks — categorized in different ways, from family members, affiliates, patrons, clients, co-workers, and so forth — to access resources.

These resources are, in turn, distributed in quantities that acquire particular value through the flexible use of categories that point to different kinds of social relationships and responsibilities. In this fashion, limited resources can be judiciously dis- tributed by pluralizing the kinds of actors and obligations involved.

Municipal institutions always have to figure out what things cost, as well assess the value of the materials they have to work with. Thus, a critical aspect of municipal govern- ance is to flexibly take the infrastructure, services, and other assets it nominally controls and make sure that their different uses come into play and that the different costed values of those different uses can be set in relationship to one another.

For example, municipal space — buildings, thoroughfares, schools, clinics, and markets — could be flexibly cate- gorized for multiple uses, each with its own fee structures. The question is how munici- palities can use their ownership of assets and spaces to build up more viable urban markets through the use of local practices, social technologies, and information. The relative, if not unproblematic, success of Babatunde Fashola in Lagos and Simon Compaore in Ougadougou lies in the way in which a plurality of actual and poten- tial users of municipal assets is taken into account as opening up new platforms of invest- ment.

In Lagos, the ability of the state government to extrapolate from how different places and resources of the city are actually used as the basis for projecting requirements for new infrastructure and services has been an important asset in putting together a framework for investment. Importantly, exploring new ways of managing existing infra- structure and building new infrastructure becomes a way by which different institutional actors actively explore new kinds of relationships with each other.

Beyond frameworks that specify key principles, such as no tolerance of corruption and transparency in all phases of project development, there are no fixed formulas for the evolution of these relationships.

Lagos State indeed wants to remove infrastructural management from its balance sheets, but is using this objective to experiment with a wide range of possible contractual relationships. Investment options range from equity participation, various leasing options, boards of trade, concessions, and tenancy maintenance. Here, social and economic policy agendas inter- sect — where local economic development is predicated on expanding opportunities for appropriate training and where training itself is conceived as access to innovative work.

While rapid expansion of like initiatives may produce many mistakes and unanticipated outcomes, it is far better to attempt too much than relying on a status quo that is often overly cautious, jealous of its privileges, and threatened by innovation. Part of the rationale of indicators may be to curtail the tendency of public institu- tions to invent their own legitimacy or efficacy.

But, in the very process of trying to make explicit, through a system of indicators, that which these institutions do, a sense of inven- tion is largely maintained. Even when scientific criteria can be stabilized around the statis- tical robustness of a particular indicator, this does not obviate the need for interpretive flexibility among competing points of view, particularly in terms of what the municipal government actually does and the materials it actually works with. This process of trying to make explicit what is and can be done, then, points to various possibilities where city governments have unanticipated room for manoeuvre.

The process of governance contains within it large degrees of uncertainty that can be mobilized in potentially creative ways Bolay , Duit and Galaz The infrastructure of cities Despite the proficiencies African urban residents have demonstrated over time and in the face of numerous disadvantages, residents are clearly not able to make maximum use of their capacities.

Here the story is well-known: high rates of residency in densely populated environments lacking a wide range of facilities; infrastructure and services which require labour-intensive maintenance activities; and too many residents vulnerable to health prob- lems and a concomitant loss of livelihood. Insufficient investment in energy, transporta- tion, telecommunications, and financial regulation and support inflate transaction costs and thus sap the value of local production.

Inefficient systems of revenue management short-circuit needed provisioning and investment. The list goes on to produce a reality in which residents for the most part spend their time compensating for insecure, provisional livelihoods and social conditions rather than building new possibilities for work, education, social welfare, and leisure for the future.

On average, less than 0. Among the poorest 60 per cent of the population, infrastructure coverage is less than 10 per cent. Nevertheless, the steps that the majority of African urban residents take to maximize access to opportunities, income, networks, ideas, capacities, and the world at large constitute an important basis on which more sustained and systematic urban devel- opment could take place.

Given this situation, the ways in which everyday urban practices question the intel- ligibility of how wealth is redistributed and security ensured need to be considered. Afri- can infrastructural needs are enormous. The shortfall in electrical power generation means that existing economic capacity is underutilized.

Proven skills that could be dedicated to long-range development and growth are tied up in adapting to sporadic conditions and hedging against unforeseen cir- cumstances. In large part, inadequate access to power is a matter of infrastructural deficit.

Yet, significant improvements could be registered by more efficient management of revenues and budgets. Subsidy structures that smooth consumption costs remain largely captured by more wealthy consumers, which in turn forces low-income residents into more infor- mal high-rate vending networks Water and Sanitation Program Facilitating broader access to utility networks, where even the anticipated cost increase for household budgets would not exceed current expenditures, could increase overall revenue and permit subsidization of connection costs, which are often prohibitive for low-income households.

Constant mismatches between funding streams and infrastructure development cre- ate revenue shortfalls, as high-cost loans and credits are deployed in projects with limited long-term financial yield. Project screening often does not include systematic assessment of anticipated returns, nor does it sequence and synchronize investment streams to maxi- mize synergies and minimize bottlenecks. Existing management practices seem to foreclose a seemingly easy expansion of a revenue base and contribute to overall high energy costs, thus reducing capital investment for improving generation capacity Nilsson and Nya- changa Local dissatisfaction across the region with service levels and costs has increasingly evolved into widespread grassroots discussion about how revenue is used and managed in cities, with increasingly critical points of view regarding the parochialism of decision- making and resource use becoming more prevalent Gutierrez While residents have long depended on highly localized authorities and distribution systems to ensure their wel- fare, they are also increasingly demanding a wider municipal perspective that embodies a more substantial relationship for them to the city as a whole Owuor and Foeken Responsibility for managing infrastructural inputs will, of course, largely fall to na- tional governments, which in the end retain the right to sovereignty and thus the man- agement of the ways and means in which their territories are dedicated to specific func- tions.

Nevertheless, a region-wide urban development perspective might chart potential frameworks of articulation and achieve support for sub-regionally deliberated reticulation systems. It might also give concrete effect to potential conjunctions of nationally planned and implemented infrastructures, filling in the interstices with various feeder systems and connectors.

A large portion of available investments will be directed towards the extraction and transport of natural resources viewed as essential for economies elsewhere. This is an inevi- table implication of bilateral accords, which will be pursued regardless of overarching re- gional interests. Truncated systems and disarticulation will persist as a result. Here, cities become mechanisms for anchoring such intersections — giving new importance to a wide range of secondary cities and border towns that straddle the divide between the usual coastal metropolitan regions and inland, often inaccessible, resource-rich areas ECOWAS As urban infrastructure investment in Africa encompasses new circuitries of capital, commodity, and knowledge flows, there are critical questions about the relationship be- tween how infrastructure gets built and how it gets run.

These concerns are particularly critical as the global economic downturn persists. Thus, for example, China through the China African Development Fund, China Exim , wants to maximize the long-term capacities of infrastructure to expand trade circuits across sectors, manage accumulating African assets, promote domestic capital formation, and coordinate interactions among discrete economic spaces, policy frameworks, and produc- tion systems.

Instead of simply re-dividing up territories in terms of competing conces- sions, spheres of influence, and sectors, China, India, and Gulf states are looking at how synergies can be generated from their investment projects — synergies usually associated with notions of the central city. As various kinds of finance, actors, networks, interests, commodities, and produc- tion plants attempt to come together, what kinds of relationships actually emerge?

Can these relationships better link a particular city in its entirety to the larger world? Or do they simply compensate for greater precariousness elsewhere in the urban system by jack- ing up production values in highly circumscribed, well-managed, and guarded sub- territories of the city?

Do they put together centres that refer only to themselves and to those centres in other cities, which they increasingly mirror in appearance and function? What are the relationships between various national, municipal, and regional government departments in terms of apportioning fiscal and political responsibilities, and how do these different departments forge relationships with the financiers, managers, consultants, and technical experts involved in linking money to infrastructure to transport to public rela- tions, and so forth?

To what extent are the long-term, more informal networks of entre- preneurs and brokers that have been relied on in the past to negotiate barriers posed by inefficient national regulatory frameworks and other externalities marginalized or renewed in this process?

Their connections to national territo- ries and global economies make them more than nominal centres of administration OECD While many national economies may be overly tied to extraction and primary production — short-circuiting the conventional industrial underpinnings of ur- ban growth —sufficient spin-offs have occurred to partly compensate for this. Urbanization in certain sub-regions certainly is propelling new forms of regionaliza- tion and the gradual integration of national populations into regional domains, and is marking out widening corridors that expedite new economic synergies.

As such, conceptu- alizing city futures always has to exceed what takes place within given municipal bounda- ries. This is particularly the case for African cities, since they will not be major production centres for the conceivable future. Consequently, they must push the ways in which they can be materially and politically implicated in territories far beyond themselves.

The basis for this extension will most likely rely on sharpening inter-city complementarities — par- laying differential networks, geographical positions, and historical advantages into new scales of investment in infrastructure, social welfare, and economic capacity World Bank Cities facilitate generosity and greed, collaboration and individual parasit- ism.

They are arenas in which individuals can feel they are living in the midst of a larger world, with all the possibilities of consumption available, as if the hard realities experi- enced by the majority of urban residents simply do not matter, simply are millions of miles away. Of course, to remain within this imaginary of a well-elaborated urban world when one lives in cities sometimes on the verge of collapse necessitates all kinds of short- cuts and corruption.

The ways in which these practices have become normalized for so long can lessen the desire of many to do more than toil to meet their everyday needs. Such pursuits have continued for decades, despite the awareness most residents have that the bulk of these efforts will prove futile. They are futile — not through any fault of the residents — but because political interests have been narrowly drawn, resources have been insufficient, and because the attitudes and policies that informed colonization and racism have not changed all that much.

At the same time, urban residents have demonstrated a remarkable inventiveness in making cities into something that, despite the prevailing conditions and odds, could work for them, could support a wide range of aspirations beyond putting food on the table. Families and households have internalized the obligation to demonstrate their capacity to do the right thing according to the globalized norms of modernity.

So, often the problems of urban development arise not so much from the lack of capacity as from the persistence of a certain ambivalence about the city remade; an im- plicit worry that the city remade too much according to modern ways is a city inhabitants will no longer recognize, even if it is in most respects welcomed.

Unless the real politics of urban life deals with such ambivalence and accords formal recognition to the ways in which cities have actually been experienced and built, urban development will probably be full of stops and starts and messy twists for a long time to come.

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German Technical Cooperation ed. Gervais-Lambony, Philippe, , Territoires citadins: 4 villes africaines. Paris: Karthala, pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ports- mouth: Heinemann. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. Infrastructure Consortium for Africa, , Annual Report Iveson, Kurt, , Publics and the City. Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell. Pouwels eds , The history of Islam in Africa. Katumanga, Musambayi with Lionel Cliffe, , Nairobi — a city besieged: The impact of armed violence on poverty and development.

Keith, Michael, , After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural cities and the future of racism. London and New York: Routledge. Discussion Paper No. Leiden: Brill. Langer, Arnim, Abdul M. Escaping the 'paycheck-to-paycheck' lifestyle. In The News. Earlier, Lahore High Court had rejected pleas of Jamshed Iqbal Cheema against the rejection of his nomination papers for NA by-elections The two-member bench of the high court announced the verdict.

By-elections PTI. Alamgir Welfare Trust - A beacon of hope amidst coronavirus pandemic. EFU Life launches 'Humrahi' season 2 with unique message of future planning. Recent articles. Technologically advanced machines. Guaranteed delivery dates. Worldwide shipping. We specialize in constructing extremely customized tools or metal forms, called dies, that are used to cut, shape, and form raw materials.

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