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Andrew ByerleySenior Lecturer, Docent

Teaching

I teach in the following thematic areas: Urban Geography, Urban Planning in the Global South, Urban Political Ecology, Urban theory, method. I am the Department of Human Geography's head teacher for the Global Development Program (Global Utvecklingsprogrammet) based at the Department of Anthropology, Stockholm University.

Research

Research interests: colonial and post-colonial urban planning (with an empirical focus on Uganda and Namibia); challenges for planning in the Global South; Urban informality; public space; governmentality.

 

Main funded research projects:

2016-2019 What places? What ageing(s)? Ageing-in-place in contemporary African urbanities: the cases of Namibia and Uganda. Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (P15-0140:1). Head of project Prof. Catharina Nord, Blekinge Tekniska Högskolan 2011-2015: Research Project: Urban imaginaries and socio-economic exclusion. (Funded by Sida-SAREC SWE-2011-195). The project's research group comprised: Ilda Lindell (head of project), Andrew Byerley, Onyanta Ajonge, all from Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University Post-doctoral project: From Hostels to Homes: Re-framing order in Walvis Bay (Sida: SWE-2006-482) ended 2012-02-28). Doctoral research project: Becoming Jinja: The production of space and making of place in an African industrial town (2005). In 2006 I was awarded a Wallander Stipendium (W-2006-0014:1) based on the doctoral thesis.

 

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • New City Visions and the Politics of Redevelopment in Dar es Salaam

    2016. Ilda Lindell, Jennifer Norström, Andrew Byerley.

    Report

    In the midst of widespread urban deprivation, African governments increasingly give priority to large-scale ultra-modern urban projects, intended to increase national income and propel their urban settlements onto the global stage of ‘world-class’ cities. However, such projects are often in tension with the realities of local residents. This study explores one such initiative, a redevelopment project, the Kigamboni New City, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It discusses the vision, intentions and rationales behind the project, as well as the tensions that the plans gave rise to, as residents in the area were to be resettled or displaced to make way for the New City. It shows that the urban vision underlying the New City project took shape without taking the different realities and desires of the local residents of Kigamboni into consideration. The study discusses how residents perceived and acted upon the redevelopment plans. A local organization claiming to represent the people of Kigamboni was mainly concerned with issues of compensation and the particular interests of landholders, and seemed to marginalize women and the concerns of tenants. The difficulties surrounding implementation of the futuristic plans finally brought them to a standstill, leaving the remaining residents in a state of uncertainty about the future. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with urban planners and local residents, as well as analysis of urban plans and other relevant documents.

    Read more about New City Visions and the Politics of Redevelopment in Dar es Salaam

  • Vad är ett bra parkliv?

    2012. Andrew Byerley, Jonas Bylund. Geografiska Notiser 70 (1), 17-24

    Article

    Stockholm Parklife investigates alcohol consumption in urban parks and how the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is drawn. Focus is mainly on how norms, regulation and policy create different claims on and conflicts in public spaces. Conflict around rowdy drinking behaviour in urban parks often generates proposals on alcohol free zones whose effects are not yet clear. The paper propose following this controversy over the fate of public space as an issue around which a public can form and participate in local (formal) politics. The project centers around the Stockholm inner-city parks Drakensbergsparken, Tantolunden, and Skinnarviksparken.

    Read more about Vad är ett bra parkliv?

  • Ambivalent Inheritance

    2011. Andrew Byerley. Journal of Eastern African Studies 5 (3), 482-504

    Article

    Abstract. Jinja Town in Uganda, selected as one of five centres of growth in the post-WWII era of colonial developmentism, is perennially represented in the Ugandan media as the quintessential industrial town gone off-track. This is particularly evident for the case of the African housing estates built in Jinja in the 1950s where the dominant everyday rhythm is no longer dictated by the factory siren or the monthly wage but instead is a landscape scored by multiple rhythms. By conceptually positioning these estates as inherited machines – ones still loaded with a profusion of signs and objects from the era of the modern industrial ‘refrain’ – this paper seeks both to illustrate the colonial planning rationality and to examine contemporary processes of vernacular urbanism and contestations surrounding ‘re-occupations’ of the post-colonial city. It is argued that we need to seriously question any a priori invocation of a generic ‘form’ of vernacular urbanism that is (or is not) to be prioritized over or ‘mixed’ with a Western planning cycle. Instead, the case study shows how historical and place specificities complicate the notion that the logics of place making can be unproblematically abstracted from.

    Read more about Ambivalent Inheritance

  • Stockholm Parklife

    2011. Andrew Byerley, Jonas Bylund.

    Report

    Stockholm Parklife investigates alcohol consumption in urban parks and how the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is drawn. Focus is mainly on how norms, regulation and policy create different claims on and conflicts in public spaces. Conflict around rowdy drinking behaviour in urban parks often generates proposals on alcohol free zones whose effects are not yet clear. The paper propose following this controversy over the fate of public space as an issue around which a public can form and participate in local (formal) politics. The project centers around the Stockholm inner-city parks Drakensbergsparken, Tantolunden, and Skinnarviksparken.

    Read more about Stockholm Parklife

  • Mind the Gap! Seeking Stability Beyond the ‘Tribal’ Threshold in Late-Colonial Uganda. The Role of Urban Housing Policy, 1945-1960.

    2009. Andrew Byerley. African Studies 68 (3), 429-464

    Article

    Abstract

    The momentum towards a ‘developmentalist’ paradigm of colonial rule in the post-WWII Uganda Protectorate elevated the ‘Native Question’ to a new critical level. The twin imperatives of welfare and industrialisation threatened to make the ‘tribal’ categories that had erstwhile been used to ‘locate’ colonial subjects untenable and to force a crossing of the detribalisation threshold. In the context of African urban housing policy and housing provision during the period 1945-1960, the author deploys Foucault’s notions of sovereign, anatomo- and bio-power to examine the changing modalities of power deployed by the colonial state in managing a controlled transition across the tribal threshold. From sovereign technologies of power in the pre-WWII era designed to extract labour power from Africans while conserving their tribal loyalty; thence to the introduction of technologies to regenerate the still tribal African body (1945-1953); then to technologies designed to cross the tribal threshold and norm and form ‘loyal’ modern subjects (1954-1960). The article investigates and argues for the vital but always evolving role of public African urban housing both as instructional spaces for these power investments and also as spatial ‘sorting devices’ or relay points in a wider architecture for canalising movement, separating populations, and guiding loyalties. A detailed case study of Walukuba African Housing Estate in Jinja Town is used to ground this analysis as well as to examine the ‘limits’ to colonial technologies of power.

    Read more about Mind the Gap! Seeking Stability Beyond the ‘Tribal’ Threshold in Late-Colonial Uganda. The Role of Urban Housing Policy, 1945-1960.

  • Governing urban informality

    2019. Ilda Lindell, Christine Ampaire, Andrew Byerley. IDPR. International Development Planning Review 41 (1), 63-84

    Article

    This article addresses evolving ways of governing urban informality that increasingly draw upon the management of space. Drawing inspiration from governmentality studies, the article examines contemporary governmental strategies of spatial enclosure and expulsion deployed upon street vendors in Kampala, in the context of an ambitious urban transformation agenda and a recentralisation of political authority. The article uncovers the complex configuration of actors involved in the realisation and contestation of such spatial strategies, the messy political interactions and the multiple lines of tension they generate, thus questioning simplistic conceptual oppositions and coherent categories. The contradictory agency of the vendors comes to light, encompassing both resistance and active participation in their own enclosure. The state, far from operating as a cohesive repressive force, emerges as deeply divided around the fate of street vendors, suggesting that ways of governing informality play a central role in struggles for power among state actors. The article also explores the outcomes of dominant spatial strategies of governance in Kampala, both in terms of the effects on the targeted population and of the limits of these strategies for the intended transformation of the city.

    Read more about Governing urban informality

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