Evicted from Émergence: Infrastructures, displacements and sacrifice in North-Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
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Abstract:
In 2011 the Ivorian government of President Ouattara started redeveloping urban spaces and infrastructures in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) as a means of achieving development and l'émergence or economic emergence. These developmental urban policies often involved sweeping evictions, forced displacement and the demolition of homes and popular infrastructures, commonly referred to in Abidjan as déguerpissements. This PhD thesis concerns the politics and impact of some of the biggest infrastructure projects in Ivorian history which signify the promise of infrastructure and émergence: the Fourth Bridge Construction Project (FBCP) and the Metro Construction Project (MCP). The main research questions guiding this PhD thesis pertain to the experiences of inhabitants in terms of forced displacement and destruction in relation to these two large infrastructure projects. Based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in North-Abidjan in the period between 2019 and 2022, the thesis analyzes the experiences of infrastructure and displacement in a couple of key impacted neighborhoods, by focusing on the tensions inherent in developmental policies; between the spectacular side and the promise of émergence, and its necropolitical foundation of sacrifice and ruination. Throughout the thesis, the experiences and narratives of collaborator Sékou Sylla, displaced resident and president of an Ivorian NGO, serve as the thread connecting the different chapters and forms of displacement. The PhD thesis argues how evictions and developmental policies are experienced as relational processes involving multiple displacements, through which residents are made disposable. This way of looking at urban processes in Abidjan accounts better for the tension in the experience of eviction as a dramatic event and moment, and the experience of eviction as a displacing process of socio-material unraveling and ruination. The kind of urban subject or citizen that is produced under such neoliberal policies and processes in Abidjan is a "sacrificial" one, only partially included through its disposability and displaceability. The PhD thesis discusses how residents tried to overcome such marginalizing political relations and negotiate their political belonging through different performances and practices, ultimately revealing not resistance but their aspirations to be recognized properly for their sacrifices, and be included in l'émergence and developmental visions of the future, world-class Abidjan.