African Cities Reader 1: Pan-African Practices [electronic resource].

Chimurenga Magazine African Centre for Cities 2010

Open access content

Pick up any academic or popular publication that deals with urban life in Africa and be prepared to be overrun by caricature, hyperbole, stereotypes and moralistic hogwash. Urban Africans are either bravely en route to empowering themselves to attain sustainable livelihoods or the debased perpetrators of the most unimaginable acts of misanthropy. Explanations for these one-dimensional distortions vary from historical path dependency perspectives, to the vagaries of the peddlers of neoliberal globalisation agendas, or to the glorious agency of digni ed actors who persist with their backs straight, chin up despite the cruelties bestowed by governmental neglect and economic malice. Amidst these registers it is almost impossible to get any meaningful purchase on what is actually going on in the vibrant markets, streets, pavements, taxi ranks, hotel lobbies, drinking halls, clubs, bedrooms, rooftops, gardens, dump sites, beach fronts, river edges, cemeteries, garages, basements, and other liminal spaces of daily life and the imaginary. The African Cities Reader seeks to call this state of affairs to order. We are not interested in comprehensive explanations or answers. Instead, we are attracted to an aesthetic agenda that can capture something about the stylisation of thought and practice as it emerges from the complex indeterminacies of city-making, city-burning and city-dreaming. There is such an overproduction of thought, intention, agendas and relations in African cities that all discursive accounts that seek to capture this mobile intensity come up short. The African Cities Reader cannot solve this epistemic problem, but it can provide one forum where new voices and perspectives that respect this complexity can be served up. The result is exhilarating. What follows is a wide-ranging ensemble of genres, perspectives, and forms of representation that provide crucial glimpses onto how African identities and spatialities are being crafted at a moment when both urban the
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Architectural criticism
City planning

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Edgar Pieterse
Ntone Edjabe
Greer Valley
Karen Press
François Naudé
Chris Abani
Nuruddin Farah
Rustum Kozain
Filip de Boeck
Vyjayanthi Rao
Abdou Maliq Simone
Jean-Christophe Lanquetin
Jyoti Mistry
Akin Adesokan
Gabeba Baderoon
José Eduardo Agualusa
Allan Kolski Horwitz
James Yuma
Ashraf Jamal
Dominique Malaquais
Christian Hanussek
Salifou Lindou
Achal Prabhala
Valentine Cascarino
Annie Paul
Teju Cole
Fiona Moola
Vanessa Ulia Dantas e Sá
Hobbs/Neustetter
Ismail Farouk
Lesley Naa Norle Lokko
Jeremy Weate