‘Negotiated planning’: Diverse trajectories of implementation in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare

This paper unpacks how plans are implemented in three African cities: Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Harare.
Three planning implementation instruments form the basis of the comparison across cities. These instruments
aim to give effect to plans and include development regulation, infrastructure investment, and
land allocation. In contrast to reading African planning efforts as a catalogue of failures, this analysis
allows us to see the many actors and complex alliances and dissonances which play out through
implementation. Here we propose the concept of ‘negotiated planning’ as a useful conceptual tool. We
argue that the concept is useful for: its departure from normative assumptions about good or proper
planning; unpacking the everyday nature of implementation; grounding and contextualising practices;
and depathologizing the African city.
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND