Prof. Milica Topalovic | Architektur und Territorialplanung

Going to the Wild? Extended Urbanisation and the Production of a ‘Wilderness’ Frontier in the Mara-Serengeti

In this research, I seek to question and upset the dominant narrative in the planetary thesis of urbanisation. I seek to challenge the colonial roots and thinking contained therein. I do this by arguing that histories of the land and the everyday lives of people matter in centring them amid processes that continuously externalise and peripheralise them. I start with land, following Ngugi’s assertion that land is the material reality of being and connects pasts, presents, and futures. I posit a way of reading territories assumed to be ‘wild’ and rarely seen as connected to urbanisation processes, starting from material and spatial practices and pursuing worldmaking to unearth possibilities of being in the world.

It investigates the transformation of the Mara-Serengeti region in East Africa by questioning the production of ‘wilderness’ amidst processes of urbanisation, nature conservation and tourism. Historically inhabited by the Maasai community, the region has undergone significant territorial reconfigurations due to colonial legacies, post-independence land reforms, and contemporary development agendas. The study critically examines how conservation landscapes, framed as ‘pristine wilderness,’ are socially constructed and commodified, enabling the extraction of capital through tourism and land enclosure. Critically, the research interrogates ‘wilderness’ as a colonial invention.

It puts the theses of planetary urbanisation to the test by confronting it with histories of land and the practices of living and being of people in places often considered peripheral. The study challenges the orientation of planetary urbanisation by placing the Maasai savannas of East Africa as a centre, where life unfolds. What might be revealed in refusing the peripheralisation of this territory by colonial ontologies, by processes that render the space wild and by current government programs that place development as a choreographer of the future? What can we read when we confront processes that are quick in making peripheries of people’s worlds? What might be gained from starting from these people’s worlds?

To do this, the research begins from the territory, land histories and people’s everyday lives. It uses worldmaking as an important conceptual and theoretical framework to interrupt the planetary image of urbanisation. This concept is mobilised as a practice of everydayness, of multiplicity, and of possibilities for worlds to exist and be created. Worldmaking is an important concept here because it places people-often marginalised/peripheralised-as central to the story. It takes the everyday practices of living seriously, being, co-option, relationality or even resistance in the insistence of seeing the planetary.

The research is grounded in political ecology and urban theory, challenging binaries of nature/culture and urban/rural. It explores how nature conservation practices reproduce colonial logics and racial hierarchies, while simultaneously serving as sites of socio-ecological contestation and worldmaking. Working across scales—from regional territorial shifts to localised frictions—the research aims to reveal the contradictions inherent in the production of ‘wilderness’ frontiers. It interrogates how conservation and urbanisation intersect, how land and livelihoods are reconfigured, and how communities engage in differential urbanisation. Ultimately, the research seeks to foreground everyday voices and practices, reading them as world-making and proposing a counter-narrative to dominant conservation, urbanisation and development discourses.