Senegal has a long tradition of the collective management of public space via community
cleaning. Since the explosion of the popular ecology movement Set Setal (meaning clean and
be clean in Wolof) in the early 1990s, “set” or hygienic aesthetics have been central to the
construction and control of urban space and deployed to include ...
Senegal has a long tradition of the collective management of public space via community
cleaning. Since the explosion of the popular ecology movement Set Setal (meaning clean and
be clean in Wolof) in the early 1990s, “set” or hygienic aesthetics have been central to the
construction and control of urban space and deployed to include and enfold but also expel
citizens. In January 2020 the Senegalese President Macky Sall called on the population to join
him in “Cleaning Days”, bypassing “set” practices. Cleaning Day was met with a response
ranging from indifference to anger and open conflict. In this article I use Cleaning Day as lens
to analyse the production and reception of set aesthetics in a time of “emergence”. Focusing
on the power of subaltern practice to resist the encroachment of a state in search of meaningful
symbols, I challenge the idea that contemporary urban aesthetics is geared towards the
creation of a perceived continuity of interests organised around an aspiration to a global urban
standard.