Wagemakers, Makangu Diki and De Herdt make urban agriculture a diagnostic of political authority in Kinshasa. Their study of the Mokali market-gardening site follows conflicts between vegetable growers, customary leaders and state actors as residential expansion places agricultural land under pressure. The iconic concept is governance as an ongoing, plural process in which the state is only one normative field among several. Customary authority, cooperative structures, legal ambiguity and everyday power relations interact to determine who can use, claim or sell land. Methodologically, fifteen months of field research and conflict-centred qualitative inquiry reveal governance through practice rather than formal institutional charts. The broader bridge is to legal pluralism and urban political ecology. Agricultural land is simultaneously food infrastructure, livelihood, public territory and speculative resource, and its persistence depends on unstable negotiations among overlapping regimes of legitimacy.
URBANISM MEETS ART