Exploring the rationalization, functional integration and socio-spatial implications of Zimbabwe’s New Capital City (NCC)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of new master-planned cities is a popular approach to decongest major metropolitan areas in different African countries, including Zimbabwe. This paper is an exploratory analysis of Zimbabwe’s New Capital City (NCC), being created roughly 20 kilometers outside Harare. Specifically, the paper analyzes the design of the NCC, the principles underpinning its production, the different rationalities used by policymakers for its legitimation, as well as the socioeconomic and spatial implications. Based on review of secondary literature, plans, and interviews with city planners and other professionals, the paper finds that the creation of Zimbabwe’s NCC represents urban boosterism, an active promotion of a city through development of large-scale urban development schemes and creating a new image for the city. The production of the new city is also underpinned by neoliberal motivations and imported ideas of urban planning which disregard the local planning urban context, where poverty and informality are prevalent. The creation of new master-planned cities must therefore strive to address these contemporary urban challenges rather than exacerbating them. The paper contributes to scholarly debate on the production of new master-planned cities in Africa and the Global South more broadly.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".