Keynote Address: Urban Expansion and the Role of Land Chiefs in Kinshasa, DRCongo

The international conference ‘Urban Property, Governance and Citizenship in the Global South’ was held on 23-26 June 2015 at the University of Copenhagen. It addressed the dynamic relationships between property, governance and citizenship, and their concrete manifestations in various mutually constitutive processes of property making, state making and citizen making. While such processes are unfolding everywhere, this conference investigated them specifically through the diverse and emerging urban spaces located across what is commonly, if problematically, defined as the global South. Research emanating from such empirical landscapes is increasingly at the forefront of expanding broader theoretical landscapes around notions of property, governance and citizenship, and of what constitutes the urban itself. Exploring the relationship between property, governance and citizenship entails, among others, questions concerning access to and ownership of things, structures, spaces, selves or others; questions related to power relations, differentiated agency and contested authority in terms of defining and enacting frameworks of value, validation and control over such concrete if also highly symbolic items; and questions associated with claims and practices of belonging and/or exclusion, modes of violence, and practices of resistance and reinvention. Conference Themes • Alternative Urban Citizenships: Changing Meanings and Practices • Governing Urban Infrastructures, Spaces, Bodies • Formalities and Informalities of Urban Planning, Living, Livelihoods • Delivering the City: Services, Sovereignty and Subjecthood • Urban Futures: Vision as Hope, Vision as Violence • Urban Frontiers: Small Towns and Urbanisation at/as Territorial Edges • Governing through Urban Dislocation, Relocation and Resettlement • Constructing Difference: Place, property, Identity • Urban Movements and Mobilizations: Sites of Politics, Expressions of Citizenship In addition to considering individual abstracts, the conference conveners welcome suggestions for possible panels. Keynote speakers Keynote speakers reflect the geographical, disciplinary and thematic diversity that the conference wishes to combine in productive conversation: Filip De Boeck, Professor, Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, University of Leuven, Belgium James Holston, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley, USA Catherine Neveu, Director of Research, IIAC-TRAM, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique-Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Sue Parnell, Professor, Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, University of Cape Town, South Africa Neferti Tadiar, Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA Oren Yiftachel, Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Development, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, IsraelBuilding upon recent ethnographic work with land chiefs in Kinshasa (2013-2015), this presentation explores some of the mechanisms of urban expansion and the various processes underlying the opening of new land in and around the city of Kinshasa, a city that continues to expand at high speed. As elsewhere across the continent, Kinshasa has become a major site for the realisation and implementation of neo-liberal urban expansion projects. Often conceived in the form of gated communities and satellite cities, these building projects redraw or harden the urban geographies of inclusion and exclusion in radical ways. And yet, they remain somehow also very marginal to the urban dynamics of everyday life and to equally powerful forms of urban expansion and place-making that find their startying point not so much in the logic of a global neo-liberal capitalism, but in processes connecting the city to the rural hinterland and its moral and political frameworks. This presentation analyses how, in order to access and open up new land in Kinshasa's peripheries, Kinois have to pass through Humbu and Teke 'ancestral' land chiefs who are often not even recognised by the city's administration, and whose activities therefore largely remain under the radar of the state. Nevertheless, they form a very real motor of Kinshasa's urban growth, redefining in the process what the city is.status: publishe