Palestra Sedas Nunes 2026 | “Transcalar urban development politics – thinking states and stateness from African contexts”, por Jennifer Robinson (University College London)

Sob o título “Transcalar urban development politics – thinking states and stateness from African contexts”, Jennifer Robinson parte de contextos africanos para repensar as relações entre desenvolvimento urbano, Estado e poder, e para interrogar conceitos centrais das ciências sociais. A palestra será seguida de uma conversa com Idalina Baptista (Universidade de Oxford e investigadora visitante no ICS em 2026–2027), com moderação de Simone Tulumello. A sessão decorrerá em inglês.

É um momento de encontro entre diferentes áreas, experiências e gerações do ICS. Convido, por isso, todas e todos a juntarem-se a nós: investigadoras e investigadores, pessoal técnico, administrativo e de gestão de ciência, estudantes e colegas visitantes. Contamos convosco também na receção que se segue.

Agradeço a Simone Tulumello, Olivia Bina e Pedro Figueiredo Neto o trabalho dedicado à organização desta palestra, e a Alice Ramos e Leonor Rosas a participação na sessão de boas-vindas. Um agradecimento também às equipas da Pós-Graduação e da Comunicação, bem como a todas as pessoas que contribuem para a preparação e realização deste encontro.

Para quem quiser continuar o debate com Jennifer Robinson, o grupo de leitura do Urban Transitions Hub organiza uma sessão especial no dia 14 de outubro, quarta-feira, às 11h00, na Sala 1, dedicada à leitura e discussão de dois artigos sobre financeirização e produção urbana na África Subsariana. A sessão está aberta a todas as pessoas interessadas, que podem contactar Simone Tulumello ou Fabio Bertoni para receber os textos.

ABSTRACT

Moving beyond city-centrism, analysis of urbanisation could begin anywhere on the planet to reflect the geographical scope of extended urbanisation and the emergence of new kinds of urban territories. Allied with a broader call for comparative urbanism to reflect the diversity of urban experiences globally, there is a need to rethink some of the core elements of urban political theory. The foundational analytical framings of urban politics were firmly grounded in the US context, with a municipal-centric approach and a relatively narrow range of transnational processes – circulating or “footloose” capital, and neoliberalising policy circuits.

This paper presents a theoretical framing of urban politics for an era in which, for many urban(ising) places, there are a diversity of transnational processes shaping outcomes, including developmental and sovereign investments alongside diverse forms of private capital, and in which politics is distinctively transcalar. Powerful transnational actors, entangled with various circuits of influence and flows of money are drawn together to shape urban(ising) territories alongside national governments which centre their role in urban development. Embedded institutions, communities and individuals have their own interests, imaginations and concerns, often also forged in relationship to all kinds of translocal networks and power relations.

Methodologically, new grounds are needed for developing insights on urban politics – this paper argues that tracing transcalar territorial networks emergent through large-scale urban development projects opens up possibilities to generate insights from any urban(ising) territory. In order to probe these dynamics, this paper starts in African urban contexts which have long experienced urban politics in a transcalar form, with urban development strongly influenced by centralised governments, international development policy, extraverted political relationships and a wide range of global policy and investment flows which require a more than capital-centric perspective.

Urban politics also involves a diversity of actors which resonate with experiences of other urban regions, including extensive self-organisation, collective self-provisioning, bottom-up economic development, and overlapping sources of authority and governance. African scholarship particularly provides a valuable starting point for initiating conversations about the role of central government as a major actor in urban development politics. More broadly it has much to contribute for theorising the nature of states, and distinguishing between stateness and not-state interests in development politics. The paper draws on a comparative collaborative research project (Accra, Lilongwe, Dar es Salaam).

Keywords: comparative urbanism, extended urbanisation, urban development politics, transcalar territorial networks, stateness