Conjuring geographies: creating ‘usable space’ in urban Africa

Over the past two decades, new high-end real estate developments have increasingly shaped Africa’s urbanscapes. Scholars have generally criticized such projects, arguing that they do little to serve the needs of the broader population. In accounting for the investment in high-end real estate, the existing literature has focused on the domestic incentives that shape their development, the desires of local elites and bureaucracies, and international capital’s search for new markets following the 2008 financial crisis. Interviews with investors suggest an alternative explanation: situated understandings of risk. Drawing on extended interviews with largely South African investors in urban real estate development and management in Africa, this article investigates how perceptions of risk, and the attempts to control it, shape investment. Faced with what they viewed as highly risky investment terrains, investors tried to recreate the financial environments they were familiar with through de-risking practices that sought to enclave projects from the geographies in which they were located. The result was investment in high-end real estate that was thought to be more controllable, calculable and, most of all, profitable. Enclaving is not just a growing characteristic of African urbanscapes; it is an underlying logic of the formal financial practices that produce them.