Urban renewal in Ibadan, Nigeria: World class but essentially Yoruba

Abstract

Urban renewal is central to 'world-class' city aspirations on the African continent: demolitions and evictions exemplify the power of the state to restructure urban space, prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity. The ubiquity of world-class city-making has been taken by urban studies scholars as evidence of African leaders' converging on a unitary aspirational urban imaginary. This article contends that the concept of world class should instead be understood as a key terrain on which African governments' distinctive and diverse ideational ambitions are expressed. In Oyo State, southwest Nigeria, vernacular political traditions-in this case Yoruba cultural nationalism centred on the ideas of Obafemi Awolowo-were deployed by the state governor to legitimize urban renewal. Drawing on the Yoruba notion that elitism can be 'generalized', the cultivation of globalized urban forms was not only a project of becoming ever more homogenously 'international' but a historically grounded aspiration to become ever more essentially Yoruba. Thus, beyond commonalities across the discourses used to legitimize neoliberal urban development-world class, international and global-these universal sounding imaginaries may at the same time express much more particularistic political projects.