Urban Africa Changing Contours of Survival in the City

by Simone, Abdou Maliq; Abouhani, Abdelghani

• ISBN13: 9781842775936
• ISBN10: 1842775936
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-20
• Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Abdou Maliq M. Simone presently holds joint academic appointments at New School University and the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand.

Abdelghani Abouhani teaches at the Institut National d'Amenagement et d'urbanism in Rabat, Morocco.

Table of Contents

Tables and figure	vii
Acknowledgements	viii
Abbreviations and acronyms	ix
1 Introduction: urban processes and change	1	(28)
ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE
one Making urban politics
2 Urban policies in Cairo: from speeches on new cities to the adjustment practices of ordinary city dwellers	29	(39)
BÉNÉDICTE FLORIN
3 Feasts: panoramas in town - the spaces and times of the moulids of Cairo	68	(28)
ANNA MADOEUF
4 Kisangani: a city at its lowest ebb	96	(24)
JEAN OMASOMBO
5 The city centre: a shifting concept in the history of Addis Ababa	120	(18)
BAHRU ZEWDE
6 At the limits of possibility: working notes on a relational model of urban politics	138	(39)
EDGAR PIETERSE
two Urban practices
7 Life in a high-density urban area: Anguwar Mai Gwado in Zaria	177	(29)
MOHAMMED-BELLO YUNUSA
8 Ethnicity and the dynamics of city politics: the case of Jos	206	(29)
VICTOR A.O. ADETULA
9 Urban development and urban informalities: Pikine, Senegal	235	(26)
MOHAMADOU ABDOUL
10 Formal and decentralized financing of housing: Operation 200,000 Houses, Marrakesh	261	(34)
MOHAMED GHERIS
Contributors	295	(3)
Index	298