Urban Africa; Changing Contours of Survival in the City

THIS COMPILATION VOLUME explores how African urban dwellers have had to find not only effective ways of pursuing their livelihoods and other aspirations within cities but also ways of managing their interactions with often more powerful economic and political interests that seek to impose particular uses of urban space. Among the very different sociocultural contexts in Dakar, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Kisangani, Jos, Zaria, Cairo and Marrakesh, the research focuses on issues of urban change, the elaboration or disintegration of urban public life, and the sustaining of traditional modes of sociality through periods of economic and political crisis. The case studies explore the diverse ways Africans negotiate novel spatial practices, politico-economic processes and social relations that entangle place, identity and power in urban sites.

The critical emphasis is on what residents do in order to enlarge their space of operation or, conversely, to demarcate territories of habitation that are liveable, and where the negative impacts generated by the undermining of local livelihoods by global economic processes might be partially mediated. It seeks to valorise urban Africa’s own agency and constructive power. The volume is divided into two sections. The first part is concerned with rethinking and reactivating urban publics. Chapter 2 questions the extent to which and in what form the residents of the new satellite cities in Greater Cairo can represent their desire for new ways of life in the formation of these cities. It shows how the development of an effective public discourse can only take place in a process that is able to assimilate the heterogeneity of daily life encounters within a common framework of aspirations. Chapter 3 pictures the ritual of the feast organized annually in the older quarters of Cairo for the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, as a venue to which a multiplicity of aspirations are brought and can intersect with one another and realize “the desire for togetherness of the city”. Chapter 4, on the ruination of Kisangani, emphasizes the thin line that distinguishes a city’s strengths from its vulnerability, and that the process of adapting to the city involves a great deal of trial and error. The short incisive story of Addis Ababa described in Chapter 5 illustrates how a process of urbanization can defer the crystallization of economic, cultural and political activities in a defined centre. Chapter 6 explores the outlines of a possible relational model of urban politics in Cape Town capable of creating new forms of the public, and allowing all citizens to determine and affect the instruments of power and control that curtail their actions and that define the limits of what is possible and what is not.

The second part focuses on urban social practices. Chapter 7 stresses the temporal dimensions of urban life in Zaria. It shows how people use their time to modulate the turbulence associated with dense agglomeration and a disparate access to resources, and to structure actual and potential social encounters in a severe official regulatory context. The discussion on the history of social associations in the Nigerian city of Jos, in Chapter 8, questions the conventional wisdom on the role of associational life as an instrument for urban democratization. Chapter 9 examines women’s entrepreneurial groups in the Santhiaba quarter of Pikine, Senegal to contrast the normative political geographies through which the autonomy of specific groups of actors is valorised with the spaces configured by the local residents themselves. It shows how development inputs can change the character of a community. Finally, Chapter 10 deals with the challenge of formal and decentralized financing for housing in the case of the Operation 200,000 Houses in Marrakesh.