Slum Dwellers, Bankers and Bureaucrats: A Historical Comparative Analysis of State Formation, Urbanization and the United Nations in East Africa

This dissertation explores the process by which UN-Habitat, the United Nations housing and urban development agency, changed the way it worked with governments to reduce poverty in East African cities. In the 1980s the focus of its assistance was the central government. By 2005 the organization engaged cities, social movements, and private industries. While it continued to serve government, UN-Habitat worked with the State through municipal, community and private actors. The author posits that the agency changed as the governments it served decentralized, democratized, and privatized. These policies required the State to cede power to cities, social movements and industry, so the agency helped governments engage new actors.;The dissertation subjects this claim to historical comparative analyses of state formation, urbanization, and UN-Habitat field operations. The author argues that the narrow economy and indirect rule left a troubling colonial legacy. Attempting redress, African States over-compensated. These actions weakened their ability to handle global crisis and negotiate structural adjustment. In the 1990s East Africa stabilized partially, yet remained dependent on cash crops and struggled with forms of political representation. In Kenya, European settlers triggered squatter rebellion prompting social engineering that produced class divisions, ethnic rivalries and heavy State control. Colonial agreements in Uganda privileged Kingdoms making for a weak nation-state. Devolution replaced dictatorship after years of unrest but recovery reinforced regional divisions and delayed pluralism. Tanzania exchanged a weak colonial economy with an ambitious but unviable socialist project. Adjustment stabilized the economy but at great social cost and without reform to the constitution or the ruling party.;In the comparative history of East African cities, the author finds that urbanization resulted from and contributed to the colonial economy but not indirect rule. Heterogeneity in the city and the labor requirements of industry prevented manipulation of tribal chiefs as happened in rural districts. Rapid urbanization, narrow economic growth, and weak urban governance after independence combined to create urban spaces dominated by informality. Slums reproduced the contradictions of national politics. The results in Nairobi were dense, commercialized slums that mirrored the nation's troubled ethnic history. Kampala, the seat of power for Baganda and colonial, cum-African State was a proxy for the war on Kingdoms. Sprawling, un-serviced Dar es Salaam reflected the anti-urban tenor of socialism, laisse faire city planning, yet an accommodating Swahili culture.;Analysis of UN-Habitat's Community Development Program, the Global Campaign for Secure Tenure and the Slum Upgrading Facility reveals the value and limits of working with the State through non-State actors. The author finds the problems the agency encountered relate directly to the history of East African nations, cities and slums. In its efforts to guide decentralization, democratization and privatization, the agency became embedded; its initiatives often serving as instruments of a reticent State. The author concludes by identifying ways to use reflexive sociology applied in this dissertation to strengthen the transformative role of the United Nations.