CURB Summer term webinars 1: Controlling the capital city: Understanding strategies for the pursuit of urban dominance

As optimism about the ‘third wave’ of democratisation has waned in the face of renewed authoritarianism around the world, analyses of authoritarian dominance remain focused primarily on the national scale. We argue however that cities, and especially capital cities, play crucial roles in the production of dominance and the politics of maintaining it, as well as being sites of popular resistance. Capital cities are important because they symbolize political sovereignty, are home to political elites, drive economic growth, and often house a large percentage of the urban population. However, the varying ways in which governing elites deploy their resources and strategies in the urban arena in pursuit of dominance remain underexplored. Striving for urban dominance can produce novel policy initiatives and major investments in infrastructure, job creation and service provision – but also a ramping up of repression, surveillance, and intensifying violence against political opposition.

In our conceptual framing for a multi-country comparative study spanning Africa and Asia, we suggest that strategies for urban dominance can be analysed in accordance with two overlapping modalities: interventions that are generative by design (their primary intention is to create some new form of support); and those that are repressive by design (their primary aim is to destroy or inhibit some form of opposition). We also present a typology of strategies for dominance that cut across these spheres of intervention, including co-optation, legitimising discourses, legal manoeuvres, coercive distribution and violent coercion. Drawing on our six case study cities of Addis Ababa, Colombo, Dhaka, Harare, Kampala and Lusaka, this paper highlights some of our project’s cross-cutting comparative findings with respect to efforts by dominant coalitions to control the capital, and why these vary by context.

Tom Goodfellow is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. His research concerns the comparative political economy of urban development in Africa, with particular interests in the politics of urban informality, urban conflict and violence, land value capture, urban infrastructure and housing. He has conducted research in Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania. He is co-author of Cities and Development (Routledge 2016), a Trustee of the IJURR Foundation and sits on the Editorial Board of African Affairs.

David Jackman is a Departmental Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Oxford. His research examines the political economy of crime and violence in South Asia, with a focus on Bangladesh.

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