Necrospatial containment and slow violence in Harare’s informal settlements

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of necrospatial containment (NSC) to illuminate the conditions shaping everyday life in Hopley and Hatcliffe Extension, Harare’s largest informal settlements. Building on Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics and Nixon’s (2011) theory of slow violence, I develop necrospatial containment as an analytical framework structured around four interrelated pillars: (i) geographies of spatial constriction, (ii) infrastructure as deathscape, (iii) perpetual threat of erasure, and (iv) toxic ecologies. Collectively, these pillars reveal how urban governance, infrastructural abandonment, and everyday struggles intersect to produce spaces of prolonged disposability. I then empirically ground necrospatial containment using evidence from focus group discussions and institutional discourses, demonstrating how informal settlement residents are confined in precarious conditions that limit mobility, constrain opportunities, and normalize risk. The paper contributes to critical urban studies by advancing a conceptual vocabulary that frames informality as a spatialized mode of governance that structures who gets to live and under what conditions. The findings underscore the urgent need for policy interventions that recognize informal settlements as legitimate urban spaces requiring investment, rights, and infrastructural justice.

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