The Spatial Planning of Informal Transportation

This dissertation explored the ways private-sector transport operators in African cities make individual and collective decisions on the change and expansion of transport networks, based on a comparison of Lilongwe, Kampala and Nairobi. This network geography underpins crucial accessibility questions, including the equity, affordability and usefulness of mass transportation services available to different people across the space of cities. Governance of informal transport remains disjointed, and planning processes within the sector itself are rarely engaged with. Informal transport is often described as flexible, reactive, demand responsive, niche-filling, and in-tune with passenger needs. This paper proposes expanded definitions of flexibility in the operations of informal transport networks and presents a theoretical framing for understanding the growth and change in the locations of routes and terminals.Using surveys and interviews in four African cities, this dissertation argues that spatial planning is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but that different forms of internal organization, the role and power of workers, and the geographic scope and level of organization in the industry affect the planning practices of operators and the ways and locations to which they expand their services. Where there is little route-level organization, independent vehicles have difficulty creating services to new destinations. Where route-level organizations take the initiative and invest capital to start new services, whether vehicle owners or frontline workers such as drivers and conductors are more involved leads to different levels of dialogue with communities and different willingness to tolerate internal conflict, creating different types of transport networks and different mobility patterns. These studies further argue that individually competing vehicles encounter coordination failures that limit their incentives for searching out niche services. Meanwhile, in cities with localized, route-based associations, organizations of multiple vehicles are able to take on the initiative and riskof developing new service locations and responding to passenger demand. This is done through a complex, gradual process that includes temporary subsidies to drivers and operators, testing and measuring potential demand, and advertising the new route. The key mechanism is in competition not between individual drivers, who manage internal competition carefully with a variety of mechanisms to distribute income opportunities fairly, but between firms and associations over territorial coverage. This not only opens potential for engaging transport associations in planning and policymaking, but also reveals limitations to the coverage and equity of access offered by existing networks and incentive structures Finally, this dissertation considers the effectiveness of services from the passenger and resident point of view. Mobility across urban space circumscribes urban residents’ opportunities and experiences, and a mixed-methods study explores im/mobilities in Lilongwe, Malawi, a mid-sized African capital city, focusing on mobility options, barriers and frictions. We particularly consider latent demand, or missed travel and unreachable destinations, and the physical, mental and emotional experiences of travel. A sense of constraint and limited agency emerges strongly from urban residents, in which expensive, difficult and ineffective travel is linked to a dually conceptualized immobility. This is experienced both as curtailed physical movement, and as a deprivation of agency, sapping choice, opportunity, and time. The constant tradeoffs, calculations and sacrifices required daily to navigate the city drive a layered sense of exclusion, frustration, and disempowerment for urban residents. There are significant gaps and inaccessibility both across the city, and within different neighborhoods, and also a high cost to the travel which can be conducted, in terms of money, time, fear and physical pain. All transport options in Lilongwe are privately provided, “informal” systems, and this study considers the effects and limitation of for-profit, market services in shaping the urban daily experience in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Advisor: Chatman, Daniel G