Grasping the unknowable: coming to grips with African urbanisms

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to make a case for why a much more differentiated and complex theoretical approach to contemporary African urbanism is required. It builds on an important body of work that has emerged over the course of the past two decades that seeks to explicate and theorise the specificity of everyday practices of ordinary Africans as they endeavour to stitch together livelihoods, aspirations, socialities, aesthetics and space amidst conditions of widespread poverty and deprivation. However, this body of work on ordinary urbanism seeks to make a break with the reductionist tendencies in African urban studies to derive observation and explanation from a materialist reading of difficult living conditions, to foreground instead other ways of understanding the density and spatiality of urban becomings. The essay starts with some orienting information about the dynamics and trajectories of urbanisation in Africa in order to underscore how much we still do not know, and to caution against simplistic extrapolations that we need to ‘manage’ a so‐called disastrous tendency. In the section that follows the contextualisation, I switch registers and draw out some of the scholarly perspectives and debates on how we can create an account of African urbanisms with an eye on some of the limitations of this relatively new literature. Thereafter I use this convenient binary to enter into some reflections on what the methodological and philosophical implications might be of trying to come to terms with the elusive essence of African cities. This account is used to then spell out a research agenda that in part informs the overall project of the African Centre for Cities on African urbanisms.

Keywords:

• African urbanism
• differential urbanisation
• postcolonialism
• affect
• deal‐making

Acknowledgements

This paper is a version of an inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Cape Town on 26 August 2009. I have opted to keep the inaugural lecture tone and style in the reworking of it for this special issue of Social Dynamics. I want to thank the reviewers for their feedback and Kim Gurney and Karen Press for editorial support.

Notes

1. ‘Autoconstruction’ is a term deployed by James Holston (1991), building on the work of anthropologist, Geert Banck (1986), to capture the rich aesthetic sensibilities that go into the incessant process of building and adapting informal houses on the peripheries of Brazil cities.

2. This rate is slower than those of earlier periods: the average growth rate during 1965–1975 was 4.65% and between 1985–1990, 4.16%, and this is slowing to 3.1% between 2005–2010 (UN‐HABITAT and ADB 2008, p. ix).

3. It is important to heed Satterthwaite’s (2007) caution that urban projections that go too far into the future, e.g. 2030, must be treated with great circumspection because the underlying data sets for many developing countries remain extremely problematic.

4. One illustration of this comes from a survey conducted by the United Nations (2008): In 2007, 74% of African governments were concerned that their countries were becoming too urban too quickly and 78% had active policies to reduce migration to urban agglomerations.

5. This is drawn from a sample of eleven sub‐Saharan African countries for which data were available.

6. It is important to bear in mind the differences between economic, household and public infrastructures. Economic infrastructure refers broadly to connectivity infrastructures such as roads, ports, airports, stations and other transportation or information and communication network systems. Household infrastructures include water, sanitation, energy, waste removal and, in some countries like South Africa, the physical house and the land it is located on which are provided free to the poor. Public infrastructures refer to public good resources and spaces such as streets, pavements, squares, parks, community halls, libraries, markets (which can also be an economic infrastructure, of course), and so on. Typically, powerful classes and interest groups who drive the economy have a disproportionate say in which kinds of infrastructures will be prioritised, and where exactly. The consequence of these dynamics is a deepening of urban poverty, cemented by inequality, laying the foundation for long‐term uneven development. This argument is explored at greater length in Pieterse (2008) and Parnell, Pieterse and Watson (2009).

7. In Long’s (2001, p. 241) conceptualisation, ‘lifeworld’ refers to a ‘“lived‐in” and largely “taken‐for‐granted” social world centring on particular individuals. Such worlds should not be viewed as “cultural backcloths” that frame how individuals act, but instead as a product of an individual’s own constant self‐assembling and re‐evaluating of relationships and experiences. Lifeworlds embrace actions, interactions and meanings, and are identified with specific socio‐geographical spaces and life histories.’

8. For an insightful overview of how these social erosions have unfolded and shaped contemporary African politics and economics, see Chabal (2009).

9. For an elaboration on phronesis through case study research, see Flyvbjerg (2001, 2004).

10. These readings and conclusions also come through in the arresting work of anthropologists Filip de Boeck and Marie‐Françoise Plissart (2004) on Kinshasa, Dominique Malaquais (2006) on Douala, and Suzanne Scheld (2007) on Dakar.

11. For a jargon‐free introduction to these theories, see Byrne (2001).

12. See the special issue on urban informality in Habitat Debate, Volume 13 (2), 2007.

13. On this point specifically, see Rakodi, (2002). I do not have space here to explore the counter‐arguments to a postcolonial epistemological stance, for example those advanced by Zeleza (2004). Drawing on a very US‐focused academic cultural milieu, he arrives at a very different understanding about what postcolonialism refers to compared to my own reading. I work with an approach that concurs with the readings offered by Sylvester (1999), Ahluwalia (2001) and Robinson (2006).

14. This statement is drawn from Wikipedia.

15. For example, Emeka Ogboh is working on how the daily rhythms of the city influence different activities taking place – this is explored through the recording of urban soundscapes, combined with photographic representation and an interactive web‐based archive. Julia Raynham’s intervention, ‘City Body Continent’, is a Pan‐African project, which captures on film a series of site‐specific urban interventions, created by collaborative teams comprising a choreographer and architect‐artist‐designer, in five Africa cities: Casablanca (Morocco), Nairobi (Kenya), Dakar (Senegal), Lagos (Nigeria) and Durban (South Africa).