Making infrastructures, plans, and subjects : a political ethnography of urban transformation in Antananarivo, Madagascar

This thesis explores the contemporary politics of urban development in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. It takes the spatial transformation of the city since President Rajoelina’s coup in 2009 as a lens to understand how power and authority are reproduced and experienced in Madagascar. Based on eight months of fieldwork in the Greater Antananarivo, the research investigates how planning and infrastructure projects have been exploited by political and economic elites to sustain their power, wealth, and legitimacy, and how these projects have shaped the subjectivities of urban residents. Drawing on a political ethnographic understanding of politics, it pays attention to both the material practices and symbolic repertoires that are mobilized in the production and contestation of authority through urban space. The thesis offers a detailed account of Antananarivo’s urban transformation while embedding it in national and global dynamics, arguing for the importance of situating urban transformation in Africa at the intersection of global development agendas and capitalist investments, national and municipal struggles over rents and legitimacy, neighbourhood struggles over belonging and citizenship, and individual experiences of politics. The thesis is composed of three research articles, each approaching Antananarivo’s transformation from a different perspective. Article 1 explores how large-scale infrastructure projects are mobilized by the presidency to consolidate and legitimize power. It argues that this is done, first, through a mode of governing by exception which reshapes state organizations and centralizes rent-seeking opportunities and, second, through a process of territorialization which combines global policy discourses and symbolic references to national history to transform spatial and political imaginaries of the state. Article 2 moves the focus to political and economic elites’ role in urban development and examines the institutional dynamics that drive land-use changes and domestic land investments in the Greater Antananarivo. It shows how the conversion of agricultural land into urban land was formalized through detailed planning, arguing that abiding to the law is paradoxically crucial to elites’ political survival in a competitive, unstable, and authoritarian political system. Finally, article 3 explores how infrastructure-centric approaches to urban resilience shape the political subjectivities of the urban poor through a study of a World Bank’s project in marginalized neighbourhoods. It argues that such approaches lead to the formation of ambivalent political subjectivities as, for target residents, infrastructure provision is a matter of survival while representing an insufficient and opportunistic acknowledgment of their citizenship. Empirically, the thesis contributes to academic debates on the role played by capital cities and their resources in processes of state-building in Africa with the case of Madagascar, which is virtually absent from Anglophone urban studies. It also offers a new perspective on Malagasy politics through an urban focus. Conceptually, the thesis contributes to understandings of urban institutional dynamics and subject formation in authoritarian contexts. Overall, the thesis reaffirms the need for multi-scalar and interdisciplinary approaches to urban change that connect individual subjectivities to broader structural relations of power and for sustained attention to the intertwining of city- and state-making processes in Africa.