Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City

by AbdouMaliq Simone (Editor), Abdelghani Abouhani (Editor)

Amidst emergent cultural formations in Dakar, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Kisangani, Jos, Zaria, Cairo, and Marakesh, this collection focuses on diverse ways Africans negotiate novel spatial practices, political economic processes, and social relations that entangle place, identity and power in urban sites. While historically familiar patterns linking the country and city remain, these sedimentations are reworked through the incessant remaking of virtual, real, and moral economies where African agency animates diverse urban formations. African cities are made meaningful through the geographically uneven dynamics of globalization that articulate with locally specific histories, cultural practices, and political contingencies.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[S.]

No offense but I picked this one because Simone. And indeed the introduction has not only framed the contributions but is a valuable part of this collective publication. I have however just skipped through the rest of the contributions. I was a bit surprised to not find any contribution by Abouhani as he is editor of this copy too.
if you already read to Simone you'd know he was and is still all about decolonizing urban planning but also a keen interest in ephemeral and invisible urban practices.

This a quote I'm keeping from his introduction:

"Cities are the places where Africans have been most intensely engaged in the conflicts precipitated by their own convictions, their political and economic practices and their heterogeneous, often contradictory, representations of outside worlds. Cities are also places where Africans' own struggles and deliberations about present and future ways of living are most rigidly structured by the constantly changing demands of external powers."