Place resists: grounding African urban order in an age of global change

Abstract

Emerging studies of African urbanity are reappraising city‐making practices and theories in ‘the global South’. Grounding alternative claims to ‘cityness’, the dynamics of informality hold a key to local cultures of transformation. In our age of global change this insight is crucial to grasping future urban demands. What debate about such cities calls for is an interpretive model able to orient circumstantial judgments in often discordant situations. Emphasising the anchoring role of place, the research argues for a research analytic more faithful to everyday events than ‘Northern’ paradigms of urban order. Concepts of order underpin profound questions of orientation: how do African city dwellers make sense of their expectations? What role does the city play in decision‐making? Being true to how life is experienced on the ground implies comprehending its challenges, but interpretation must go beyond simply identifying with the disadvantaged. The plurality of claims to the city creates conflicts that typically obscure deeper issues. Understanding rooted in the mundane order would disclose a concrete metabolism able to mediate rivalry between urban discourses. Instead of a consensus version of what makes a city civic, the proposed analytic follows ideas in planning theory and social processes to address everyday diversity head on.

Keywords:

• African cities
• urbanism
• phenomenology
• informal
• architecture

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgment is due to the Royal Institute of British Architects, which supported the production of this paper through its Research Trust Award programme, and to the African Centre for Cities, which convened and hosted the African Urbanism initiative.

Notes

1. ‘World city’ rankings are produced by organisations including Mercer, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Monocle magazine.

2. Richard Lehan (1998) describes how postmodern literature frequently thematises urban alienation as conspiracy. Film noir is recalled in much recent science fiction, but now in a manner both less sophisticated and more slippery; in examples such as the Matrix series the very fabric of the city embodies a grand deception.

3. The project referenced here is the African Urbanism initiative, convened by the African Centre for Cities, Cape Town. See http://africancentreforcities.net/

4. Eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern makes a similar point in relation to her somewhat grand claims for her discipline by drawing an analogy between one’s discipline and one’s name. Many people have the same name, yet for each of us our name is ours: it owns us and we own it. Strathern argues that her identity as an anthropologist is, like a name, not a limit to encountering the world but a way of practising within it. (See Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 4 (2), 125–135, for abridged notes of the public event at which Strathern made this point: Professor Marilyn Strathern in conversation with Professor Ludmilla Jordanova in the series Conversations at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, at Cambridge University), 2005.)

5. See Carole Rakodi on the ‘questionable… concepts of order underlying attempts to institutionalise particular forms of physical and political order’ (2002, p. 45).

6. Examples include genre‐crossing films such as U‐Carmen eKhayelitsha, District 9 and Slumdog Millionaire; Craig Fraser’s coffee table book Shack Chic (2002); bestseller novel Saffron Skies by Lesley Lokko (2006); and mainstream magazines such as the Icon ‘Africa’ special issue (June 2010).

7. Welcome to Lagos, a three‐part documentary screened on BBC2 in the UK, 15–29 April 2010 (Searle 2010).