The deep politics of land value in African cities

Land is a notoriously challenging issue in African cities. Dysfunctional, slow and exploitative land administration systems, rapid speculation on rising land values, skewed ownership patterns that reflect colonial and postcolonial processes of elite capture and grabbing are among some of the issues plaguing the urban land domain. A wide range of policies have been circulated and tested to address issues related to urban land, from titling programs that have sought to maximise ‘dead capital’ stored in informally occupied land (De Soto 2000), to property taxation reforms that aim bolster infrastructure investment and disincentivise unproductive land use, to community enumeration and mapping tools (Acheampong et al, 2022; Berrisford and Cirolia 2018; Goodfellow 2017; Mitlin 2018). At the same time, however, much of the attention to the politics of land in Africa has focused on rural land, its meanings and political currency and the ways in which it features in broader political ideologies, especially in post-colonial and post-liberation states. In this paper we apply a ‘deep politics’ lens to urban land in Africa, with particular attention to the ways in which land value is constructed discursively and materially through political relationhips and concepts. The question of land value is crucial in urban Africa, not just because of the potential it holds to be captured for urgent urban infrastructure and service investment, but because of the ways in which it is entwined with political settlements in which the creation and extractive of land value often play a central role. In the context of an often heavy dependence on international donors and foreign technical assistance, as well as colonial legacies, the political ideologies through which land reform is viewed are often rooted in norms of private property ownership derived from other contexts, as well as planning paradigms that are ill-suited to the kinds of land use that dominate rapidly-urbanising African cities. In this paper we therefore strip back some of the ‘paradigmatic ideas’ associated with donor-sponsored land reform, and examine the vernacular politics of land at different scales within African cities: at the level of elite politics but also everyday negotiation, speculation and future imaginaries about the role and significance of urban land. We examine how ideas about urban land and its value draw on concepts that have evolved historically in specific city contexts, as well as exploring how these intersect with ideas brought in (and funding from) elsewhere. Our paper therefore speaks to the questions of ‘What role does conceptual history play in contemporary understandings of key questions in land policy?’, ‘What political concepts are of importance to the framing of key questions in contemporary land policy and why?’ and ‘How are the meanings of concepts core to key questions in contemporary land policy evolving and to what effect?’. It draws on a 6-comparative study funded by the African Cities Research Consortium.