The spatial impact of Covid 19- Unpacking the future of informal settlements in Windhoek (Part 1)

Fig 1. Independence Avenue street view

Abstract

This paper is an intervention in the implications of the Covid-19 virus which arrived in most African cities a few weeks ago. To combat it, taking lessons from leaders around the world, African leaders began to prepare their countries for the pandemic. In Senegal, public gatherings were banned, including religious ones. Libya closed its airspace. South Africa declared a 21-day-long lockdown and closed half of its borders. Namibia prohibited all open markets, including informal trading activities and banned all international flights. Historically, epidemics have acted as catalysts in transforming how diseases are handled, especially in urban areas.

This paper seeks to understand the current global challenges of urban planning and design thinking that have different levels of legitimacy, specifically in relation to four categories- densification, maintenance of the city, food security and informality. Previously, most architects, planners and urbanists did not have to deal with a pandemic in managing the complexities of cities. To fully grasp the spatial impacts of Covid- 19 on informal settlements, this paper analyses Eveline Street in Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia. It seeks to understand the way in which we view and interact with the everyday places in the city, while recognising that the language between the formal and informal city is parallel. Informed by Achille Mbembe’s notion that cities are predominantly made up of cultural economies- ideas, images, and people, not only money, skills and knowledge.

As such, how will these cultural economies be sustained post Covid-19? What is the current state of public spaces in informal settlements in Windhoek? And how will Covid-19 impact city design in the future? In an attempt to find new affirming ways to define the city, the four categories are addressed to inform urban planning and city design in a post Covid world.

Keywords: Informality, Cultural economies, Covid-19, Eveline Street, Katutura, Windhoek 

Introduction

Windhoek is a robust African city, situated in the centre of Namibia. At first glance it may seem like not much is happening there. It is an apartheid city, which follows the same development and patterns of South African cities (Harber, 2018). A more resonant echo of this city in the essays of Maya Angelou’s writing of her narrative of African cities : Each person brings to the city talents, energies, vigour, youth and terrible yearning to be accepted. In the yearning, hope and the city are inextricably combined (Angelou, 1991). Like any city, Windhoek is made up of two cities: On the one hand a city of the privileged and on the other hand there sprawls the immense city of the deprived and dispossessed (Watson, 2005). But all these people rich or poor, have brought with them other languages, cultures, religions, skills, multiplying the human realities of the city. The city is coloured by memory, colonial wounds and the beauty of the race. In it the flood of economic migrants from the rest of Africa: Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe continues unabated, bringing with it a weight of the needs whose consequences are similarly incalculable (Angelou, 1991).

But in the everyday life the character of Windhoek is far more complex. Anyone who doubts this should visit the city centre of Windhoek: The taxi rank by Wernhill Park, Independence Avenue, which is similar to Long Street but less dense, the Parliament Gardens -these points stake out where various populations of Windhoek mix together. They are there in transit-only passing through.

On the outskirts of the city remains the township where vibrancy is rife in places such as Soweto Market, Single Quarters and Eveline Street in Goreangab, Katutura. In the 1960’s following protests and forced removals, people were forced to move to Katutura from the old location (Harber, 2018). Its name literally translates to, ‘the place where we do not want to settle’ since black people were forced to settle there. In these domains, dancing, listening to music, drinking and eating is a common practice. This gives rise to the township leisure economy, similar to Achille Mbembe’s notion of cultural economies (Nutall,Mbembe, 2008) which mostly operate from the comfort of the home, and includes a large range of activities- from bars, night clubs, restaurants, hair salons, car washes, casinos and spaza shops. These are crucial lifelines for the city. Typically, leisure economies are associated with cities in the global North, where an upwardly mobile, creative class has created demand for leisure activities (Tonkin, 2017). High streets lined with bars, cafés and restaurants become leisure destinations, and have been associated with the regeneration of inner cities, stimulating the erosion of old patterns of spatial exclusion (Tonkin, 2017). The way in which Eveline Street is managed is similar to this approach.

Fig 2. Spatial layout of Goreangab township, Windhoek

However, the growth and development of informal settlements in Windhoek has been the main problem associated with the expansion of Windhoek, where informal settlements are home to 30-40% of its residents (Ishimael, 2016). These settlements continue expanding further into the mountains, to the North and the Northeast of Windhoek because of rural-urban migration (Integrated Land Management Unit, n.d.; University of Science and technology, 2018). While Eveline Street has been rezoned by the City of Windhoek in 2006 from residential to commercial to enable bars to trade legitimately and begin formalising, those in other informal settlements without formalised practices have been viewed as leading to a range of social ills, and have been faced with restrictive policies and legislation. Essentially, informal activities are not thought to have the same potential for economic, social or spatial transformation as inner-city leisure economies, despite their contribution to the making of the city.

Similarly, Surico (2020) suggests that one of the inequalities Covid-19 highlighted is space. This is correct as cities are now thinking of reconfiguring the street, by opening it up and expanding the width of sidewalks for people instead of traffic. In essence, coming up with creative solutions to address spatial inequalities in society. While, many cities have been faced with socio-spatial inequalities in the form of discrimination against outsiders, undermining the role that space has in providing a sense of home for many (Rigon, 2020).Covid-19 has shown that we desperately need to rethink the aspect of the divided spatial city in Windhoek, especially since public space will change rapidly in the near future. For this reason, I will first define the concept of space, according to Henri Lefebvre’s definition and use this to unpack the spatial qualities of Eveline Street. Secondly, I will dig deeper into the four concepts at the core of this paper: densification, maintenance of the city, food security and informality.

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List of figures

Fig 1. Shaimemanya, T. (2020) Independence avenue street view.(Sketch) City center, Windhoek

Fig 2. Shaimemanya, T. (2020) Spatial layout of Goreangab township, Windhoek (Sketch) Goreangab area, Windhoek.

Fig 3-5. Emergent City. (2016) Exploring business development and street life in Eveline street.(Map and images) Available at: https://emergentcity.co.za/index4.html