A tale of two Harare(s): Contested narratives of world class city ideals and everyday urbanism in an informalizing city
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harare's pursuit of a “world-class city” vision has intensified debates about whose interests shape urban development in rapidly informalizing contexts. While city planners and policymakers envision a modern, orderly, and globally competitive metropolis, the lived realities of street traders for instance reveal a city shaped by improvisation, exclusion, and everyday survival. This study critically examines the contested narratives surrounding Harare's urban transformation by juxtaposing top-down world-class city ideals with bottom-up practices of everyday urbanism. Drawing on interviews with street traders and policymakers, the research demonstrates how elite-driven visions marginalize informal actors through authoritarian spatial governance. Yet, these actors actively negotiate urban space, challenging and reworking official imaginaries. Rather than portraying Harare's transformation as a one-sided imposition, the paper frames the city as a co-produced urban space—where state-led aspirations and informal practices collide, intersect, and reshape one another. The study contributes to rethinking urban modernity in African cities, advocating for more inclusive and contextually grounded approaches to city-making in the Global South.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".