The divisive nature of neoliberal urban renewal in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

This chapter analyses the extent to which neoliberal urban development, in particular slum redevelopment in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, has the potential to support or undermine strong urban social struggles for the ‘right to the city’. Slum redevelopment in Burkina Faso is a widespread and large-scale phenomenon which affects a large number of residents. Large-scale slum redevelopment was introduced by the revolutionary government of Thomas Sankara in 1984 as a decisive attempt to ??? a more equal redistribution of resources and access to facilities, while giving urban development in the country a more modern face. When the Sankara regime was overthrown in 1987, slum redevelopment continued to employ the modernist tabula rasa approach, but gradually lost its egalitarian principles, thereby severely affecting the livelihoods of slum dwellers in a negative way. Although Harsch (2009) recognizes slum redevelopment as one of the driving forces for urban protest in Burkina Faso, only 25 of the 207 urban mobilizations he found between 1995-2007 were related to it. Since well over 100 000 parcels have been created in Ouagadougou alone , this is a very low number. We argue that the divisive nature of the redevelopment projects, affecting different groups of residents differently in various stages of the process, is an important factor in explaining why only few large-scale ‘right-to-the-city’ mobilizations have developed so far.edition: 1ststatus: publishe