Language, Agency and Governance in three Housing Projects in Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, c. 1940s to 1970s

  • Our main interest pertains to how hierarchies and power relations became constructed in and through (post-)colonially planned housing projects.    

  • Our research focuses on employment-tied housing projects in three African settings: one located in Thika, one in Lubumbashi and one in Livingstone. 

Background

In the decades immediately before and after independence, an unprecedented demand for housing – a basic requirement in urban life – impelled governments into thinking about the provision, planning and building of houses. What used to be a question of welfare in late colonial thinking came to overlap with the sensitive issue of who should enjoy a legitimate existence in African cities and hubs of commercialisation and industrialisation and of how that existence would be imagined from various perspectives. Ever since then, housing has remained a pressing issue of urbanisation and a key theme of relevance in the history of colonial Africa and thereafter.

Worker housing represented the commonest built element in the colonial landscape and dominantly shaped cultural urban spaces. It refers to housing planned, designed and implemented by the state, municipalities and/ or employers and provided to a skilled and semi-skilled labour force in various settings of employment.

Objectives

Our overall objective is to examine how employment-tied housing served as a tool of empire (and later of independent African states) to project power and exercise domination over societies and to discipline colonial subjects (and later citizens) throughout the so-called ‘development era’ from the 1940s to the 1970s. We intend to explore employment-tied housing developments over time and space (more particularly its provision, planning and building) and we wish to shed light on the ‘why’ behind these changes. 

To achieve this we use three different (yet related) analytical layers: 

  •          Agency - actors involved
  •          Language usage - communication means applied
  •          Governance - rules, norms, decisions and actions forming power relations

Innovative aspects

Our project offers new insights to the international academic community through combining housing issues and government control in three atypical urban communities. No systematic and comparative attempt has been made so far to document in a long-term perspective how the implementation of housing for Africans worked. Moreover, we place our selected African cases within a broader discussion on housing and urban development and thus not only create a comparative, inter-African perspective between them, but go beyond Africa and relate them to their respective metropolises (Brussels and London). Overcoming the more conventional colonial/ post-colonial divide we intend to highlight underlying continuities and changes in employment-tied housing across two crucial periods, at times even point towards contemporary housing and urban developments.