A tale of two Harare(s): Contested narratives of world class city ideals and everyday urbanism in an informalizing city
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it