The Translocal Geography of Lodging in Urban Zimbabwe

This book will argue that lodging is a hugely ignored, largely invisible but critical sector of housing provision and economic contributor of burgeoning African cities. It further connects the rural and the urban, challenging traditional definitions of locationally-bound communities. Lodgers create micro, local and translocal communities and the lodging system offers livelihood strategies. Rather than engage in the dominant portrayal of rural-urban as binary, dichotomous space, we maintain that lodging represents and supports the translocal community and relational networks of the extended family as it seeks to maximize access to resources.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Secondary Cities, Lodging Spatiality and Translocality.- Chapter 2 Urban Development, African Housing and the Spatiality of Lodging in Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe.- Chapter 3 Gweru: A Key Zimbabwean Secondary City.- Chapter 4 Rooms to Rent: Lodging, Spatiality and Environment.- Chapter 5 Lodging Household Dynamics and Livelihoods.- Chapter 6 The Owners: Landlords and Landladies.- Chapter 7 Lifetime Migrations. City Rooms, Translocal Networks and Rural Bases.- Chapter 8 Place, Space and Locale: Lodging Pathways within Gweru.- Chapter 9 Lodging and Community.

Miriam Grant is a professor Emeritus (Geography) in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies, and Graduate Dean Emeritus, UBC Okanagan. A social urban Geographer who obtained her PhD from Queen’s University, she was a faculty member in Geography at the University of Calgary for twenty years. There she also held the positions of Associate Dean, Graduate Studies and Associate Dean, Research (Faculty of Social Sciences, which became the Faculty of Arts). She then moved to UBCO to become Vice Provost and Dean, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (2011-2018).

Arja Vainio-Mattila began her career as a researcher at the University of Helsinki, completing her PhD in Geography at the University of Turku, Finland.  Dr. Vainio-Mattila has held the positions of Director of the Centre for Global Studies at Huron University College, Dean of School of Arts and Social Sciences at Cape Breton University, and  Provost, Vice-President Academic and Research at Nipissing University. She is currently the Provost, Vice-President Academic at Brock University.