Going to the Wild?
Extended Urbanisation and the Production of a “Wilderness” Frontier in the Mara-Serengeti
Raquel Jerobon
The project 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 capital extraction through tourism and land enclosure. Critically, the research interrogates “wilderness” as a colonial invention.
It puts the theses of planetary urbanisation to task by confronting it with histories of land and practices of living and being of people in places often considered as peripheral. The study challenges the orientation of planetary urbanisation, by placing the Maasai savannas of East Africa as a centre, where life unfolds from. What might be revealed in refusing the peripheralisation of this territory by colonial ontologies, by processes that render the space wild and current government programs that place development as a choreographer of the future? What can we read if we confront processes that are quick to make 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, of possibilities of worlds existing and created. Worldmaking is an important concept here because it places people-often marginalised/peripheralised-as central to the story. It takes seriously the everyday practices of living, 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.
