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Reaching the Larger World: New Forms of Social Collaboration in Pikine, Senegal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

AbdouMaliq Simone
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Abstract

Actors in fluid African urban environments try to make collaborative social action work, collective responsibility enforceable, and instruments of power effective and legitimate. These efforts give rise to an uneasy tension between the adoption of normative discourses concerning urban management and governance, the ways in which urban residents attempt to adapt to a vast range of new opportunities and crises, and the role of the city as a place of experimentation. Given this tension, what are diverse groups of African urban residents doing to make cities habitable and to use cities as a means of enlarging the spatial parameters in which they operate? Focusing on the site of one of urban Africa's major governance restructuring projects, Pikine, Senegal, the article discusses a particular instance of translocal economic collaboration among three discrete groups of women. Whereas the major intervention, the City Project, sought to promote greater co-ordination among the localities making up Pikine, ‘real’ co-ordination, as exemplified by these women's collaboration, may be taking place in unanticipated and relatively invisible ways. Through examining some of the intricate difficulties actors often face in operating at translocal levels, ‘small leaps’ across scale are sometimes significant accomplishments and potentially important precursors to new extended forms of economic collaboration.

Résumé

Les acteurs des mouvances urbaines africaines tentent de faire fonctionner l'action sociale collaborative, de rendre applicable la responsabilité collective et de rendre effectifs et légitimes les instruments du pouvoir. Ces efforts créent une tension entre l'adoption de discours normatifs concernant la gestion et la gouvernance urbaines, la façon dont les résidents urbains tentent de s'adapter à un large éventail d'opportunités et de crises nouvelles, et le rôle de la ville en tant que lieu d'expérimentation. Face à cette tension, que font les groupes de résidents urbains africains pour rendre les villes vivables et pour faire des villes un moyen d'élargir les paramètres spatiaux dans lesquels ils évoluent? En se concentrant sur Pikine, au Sénégal, site d'un des principaux programmes de restructuration de la gestion des affaires publiques en Afrique urbaine, l'article examine un cas spécifique de collaboration économique translocale au sein de trois groupes de femmes distincts. Alors que l'intervention principale, intitulée City Project, cherchait à promouvoir une plus grande coordination entre les localités qui composent Pikine, la coordination «réelle», telle qu'exemplifiée par la collaboration de ces femmes, peut se faire de façon inattendue et relativement invisible. A travers l'examen de certaines difficultés complexes auxquelles sont souvent confrontés les acteurs dans le cadre de leurs activités translocales, l'article suggère que des «petits sauts» d'échelle constituent parfois des accomplissements significatifs et des précurseurs potentiellement importants de nouvelles formes étendues de collaboration économique.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 73 , Issue 2 , May 2003 , pp. 226 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2003

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