Landscapes of Hoping – Urban Expansion and Emerging Futures in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Introduction:
Hope is much discussed as a future-oriented effect emerging from uncertain living conditions. While this conceptualization illuminates the role that hope plays in shaping life trajectories, hope itself remains largely unaddressed. In this paper, we approach hope ethnographically as practice through the lens of material-semiotics. We draw on fieldwork in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where hoping turns out to be co-constitutive of peri-urban life and landscape. We challenge person-centered understandings of hope in order to bring materiality back in two ways: first, hoping in its various modes and forms is always situated in particular settings, thus, its enactment has to be reflected; and second, hoping ‘‘takes place’’, it is co-constitutive of the transformation of urban life. Additionally, we consider the temporality of hoping and highlight how hoping persists through urban space. We conclude that a more profound and thoroughly materialized understanding of hoping’s generative and stabilizing potential may strengthen the role of anthropology in current research on socio-ecological transformations.
An anthropology of hope and hoping:
‘‘Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis’’ offers a starting point for such an endeavour. By presenting a panoramic approach, looking ‘‘at the discursive and met discursive range of ‘hope’’’, Crapanzano opens up a broad range of theoretical thinking regarding the notion of hope. On a conceptual level, some scholars have attempted to either distinguish and demarcate boundaries between hope and related, but not entirely identical concepts such as expectation, optimism, and desire (to name just a few), or differentiate ‘‘modes of hoping’’.
Others have approached hope by providing minimal definitions and qualifying characteristics shared by distinct modes of hoping. While we drew on these works when the notion of hope first emerged from our field and entered subsequent discussions – ultimately an anthropology of hoping is itself a truly material-semiotic endeavour – we pursue a slightly different objective in this paper. Instead of pinning hope down or trying to develop an exhaustive framework in order to make it graspable, material-semiotics teaches us that the reality of an object is always fluid. Thus, material-semiotics urges us to ask where hope comes from and what it does, to leave the quest for essences behind in favour of analytical sensitivities towards continuous enactments.
Urban expansion and the promise of lotissement:
According to the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects for the period from 1990–2014, four of the ten fastest urbanizing countries were in Africa, with Burkina Faso being one of them. Since its designation as the capital of the former French colony Haute Volta in 1947, Ouagadougou has been, and still is a paradigmatic case of rapid urban growth. The latest official census for Ouagadougou stems from 2006 when the total population of the city came to 1.475 million people but projections from the United Nations estimated that the population would grow to 2.741 million people in 2015, reach 3.695 million in 2020 and 5.854 million by 2030.
While these numbers are uncertain, there is no doubt that population increase caused by high urban birth rates and rural-to-urban migration will continue to challenge politics and people alike in terms of securing the supply of basic services, that is, water and energy, housing, education, security, food and health care. With the exception of some large construction projects most of the spatial expansion of Ouagadougou can be described in terms of ‘‘peripheral urbanization’’, that is, the making of a city by its dwellers. The differentiation between authority-led planning and building on the one hand, and auto construction on the other hand is also captured by the French terms4 used by the people of Ouagadougou. Loti, refers to the plotted and parcelled part of the city, while non-loti denotes the apparently unstructured ‘‘city yet to come’’ where authorized planning and basic supply infrastructures are largely absent.
Ouagadougou’s landscape of hoping:
Building and re-building houses, selling and re-selling of plots, (self-)connecting to the water and electricity mains where technically possible and tolerated, establishing neighborhood networks for waste disposal and setting up businesses – are all connected by their future orientation as well as their socio-material composition. Together these practices contribute to the transformation of the landscape and drive a fragile process of urbanization that is neither entirely random nor determined in any linear fashion. The practices we analyze are as much anchored in the material environment as they contribute to shaping and changing it.
Conclusion:
Throughout this paper we have advocated the concept of hoping as practice through the lens of material-semiotics in order to contribute and further develop recent anthropological efforts to make hope ethnographically graspable. Starting from this analytical background and drawing on our fieldwork in Ouagadougou we have argued for a re-consideration of the material dimension of hoping. This material dimension is not only crucial to an understanding of how hoping emerges. Simultaneously, hoping is performative; it has effects on the very surroundings from which it emerges. In Ouagadougou, hoping ‘‘takes place’’, it does not only (re)orient and shape life trajectories, but it is co-constitutive of the shaping and changing of the urban landscape.
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