The Just City in Zimbabwe

Towards a Just City 

Zimbabwe’s cities have always been a site of injustice for the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable due to both structural and social settings of urban spaces, policies, processes, and systems. The urban spaces created by traditional city design and planning often fail to recognize the complex and unequal relations between different groups of society with regard to social and economic status, gender dynamics, PWD, and minorities. The intersection of patriarchy and capitalism creates an urban character and spaces in which the right of marginalized groups to the city is a daily contest. This contest requires sustained conversations and actions that seek to transform the spaces and systems to create an equalized urban space where the interests of women, youth, informal traders, and other vulnerable groups are considered, their rights are upheld, their voices heard, and their bodies respected - a just city. At the back of increasing urban poverty, weak social protection systems, and constrained delivery of public goods, poor urban dwellers are faced with vulnerability. This widens inequality, perpetuates social injustice, and pushes vulnerable groups further to the margins of society. Social ills and injustices like harassment, including sexual harassment, also become prevalent in such social settings.

FES Zimbabwe supports the development of safe and equitable urban spaces that deliver public goods and cater to the needs and desires of all residents regardless of race, gender, ability, income, or social identity. We do this by promoting the development of just informal urban markets, an arena where public goods related to the informal sector are negotiated on a daily basis. Our work focuses on ensuring that street vendors participate democratically in local urban governance that delivers just, inclusive, and dignified public goods in the informal sector. We offer policy advisory for inclusive urban informal sector policy and planning, organize and strengthen informal traders’ representation, and support sustained informal sector dialogue platforms with different stakeholders, especially the city authorities. In this case, we partner with informal sector organizations, Urban Councils (Municipalities and towns), and Feminist Organisations.