Introduction: rogue urbanisms

Rogue intensities roam the streets of the ordinary.

There are all the lived, yet unassimilated, impacts of things, all the fragments of experience left hanging.

Everything left unframed by the stories of what makes a life pulses at the edges of things.

All the excesses and extra effects unwittingly propagated by plans and projects and routines of all kinds surge, experiment, and meander.

They pull things in their wake.

They incite truth claims, confusions, acceptance, endurance, tall tales, circuits of deadness and desire, dull and risky moves, and the most ordinary forms of watchfulness. (Stewart 2007, pp. 44–45)

This Symposium on African Urbanism is the outcome of one research exploration undertaken by the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. It reflects an attempt to work against and overcome the redundant division between applied and theoretical research agendas on the contemporary condition and possible futures of African cities. The bulk of the ACC’s research and teaching revolves around very concrete and pressing urban development challenges such as structural poverty, inequality, the impacts of climate change, uneven and exclusionary economic development patterns, weak and corrupt governance, and so on. However, in attending to these vital problems that confront the vast majority of urban citizens across the continent, there is an acute awareness that ‘solutions’ can only be sensed through a strong theoretical grounding in the social and philosophical perspectives on the emergent socio‐cultural dynamics of these places (Enwezor et al. 2002, Diouf 2003, Simone 2004, Robinson 2006, Jamal 2010, Pieterse 2010) – dynamics that are so unruly, unpredictable, surprising, confounding and portentous, it would be fitting to call them rogue.

Thus, at the inception of the ACC in 2008, the editors of this symposium began to plot to assemble a diverse collection of scholars, artists and activists with an abiding interest in the rich, complex and indeterminate dynamics of ‘cityness’ in Africa in all of its diasporic richness. The group was assembled on two occasions during 2009 and 2010 on the basis of the following propositional frame:

The African urbanism initiative arises from the need to push forward a debate on how we can think and theorise the specificity of African cities. The endeavour is foundational because (well intentioned) policy approaches to intervene in African cities with the aim of ameliorating poverty, empowering the poor, rescuing the environment and growing local economies all come with built‐in assumptions about the nature of the city, its people, cultures and possible futures. These invisible assumptions lie at the root of the litany of unintended outcomes in development work; the frustrated attempts at institutional reform and state craft at the local level; the sheer impossibility of attending to the inconceivable scale of need and protection that mark the vicissitudes of everyday life for the majority in most African cities. In other words, unless we can imagine and develop a more credible account of everyday urbanism, the desire for urban improvement will remain a frustrated yearning. That said, there is no direct correlation between better theory and effective policy. At best, strong and persuasive theory can indirectly stimulate more reflective and careful policy dispositions, which in turn could lead to more thoughtful and effective policy practices. Also, robust theory can bring better and more strategic politics into the world, which is more likely to lead to better policy outcomes than technocratic exercises in designing the ideal or so‐called pro‐poor city. For this reason, this initiative is determined to cocoon itself as an exercise in theory building through interdisciplinary provocation and dialogue inside an agonistic framework; in others words, we aim to bring diverse and divergent perspectives on the nature of the urban and cityness in confrontation in order to open up new lines of thought and imagination that may help us to forge more persuasive and compelling accounts of the complexity of everyday urbanism in multiple African spaces. By definition this intent must result in multiple forms of representation because the nature of the urban can only be captured, always partially of course, through multiple mediums – text, sound, visualisation, performance – that foreground different affective dimensions of the quotidian. (Pieterse and Simone 2009) ¹

The key to engaging with the provisional outcomes of this unruly programme of exploration is the notion of diversity. What follows in this special issue of Social Dynamics and in the follow‐up issue next year is a two‐part compilation of papers offering a wide‐ranging set of perspectives that build on the pertinent injunction of Mbembe and Nuttall in their recent work on Johannesburg:

A city (whether global or not) is not simply a string of infrastructures, technologies, and legal entities, however networked these are. It also comprises actual bodies, images, forms, footprints, and memories. The everyday human labor mobilized in building specific city forms is not only material. It is also artistic and aesthetic. Furthermore, rather than opposing the ‘formal’ with the ‘informal’, or the ‘visible’ with the ‘invisible’, we need a more complex anthropology of things, forms, and signs in order to account for the life of the city in Africa. Analytically as well as in people’s daily experience, simplistic oppositions between the formal and the informal are unhelpful. (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008, pp. 8–9)

With this injunction in mind, the African Urbanism programme sought to instigate and sustain a series of exchanges, and possibly collaborations, between scholars and artists with an interest in elucidating the specificity of everyday life and its underlying material, ecological and symbolic currents. This symposium draws together mainly the work of the scholars in this conversation; but, as will become clear, the insights of artists have made themselves felt in the accounts and perspectives that follow. For example, architectural historian Nnamdi Elleh (in this volume) explicitly draws on the historical work of African artists and writers, alongside the work of architectural historians, to explicate the imaginary and material effects that have shaped the production of shelter and housing for black majorities since the advent of modern urbanisation. His cross‐reading offers a unique and more complete insight into the evolution of informal urbanisms, attuned to their aesthetic and artistic dimensions; an appreciation that, one could argue, is a prerequisite for shifting conventional perspectives on how best ordinary citizens can be enrolled in state‐driven processes to ‘regularise’ such spaces, when and if appropriate. In a related but more suggestive move, Akin Adesokan (also in this volume) uses the narrative arc and representational devices of a classic Nollywood film, Owo Blow, to demonstrate the potent resource that artistic work offers for gaining an intimate and variegated understanding of contemporary social dynamics and contradictions in that great African megalopolis, Lagos. This is a powerful example of what ethnographic attention can achieve in redeploying the visual arts as a critical keyhole on the intimacies and vagaries of rogue urbanism.

That said, what is equally clear from the essays included in the two issues of the symposium on African Urbanism is that an engagement with the dynamic materialities of African cities is vital. In 2011 it is now clear that African cities lie at the heart of massive socio‐economic transformations in evidence across the continent as conventional economic growth measures come to mirror those of the virulent Asian economies, with all that this implies in terms of the remaking of the built fabric of major African cites (see for example Simone in this volume on economic development pressures and ambitions in Kinshasa); reshaping regimes of governmentality (see Hentschel and Bass in this volume on reverberations in Durban); and altering the dispositions of both political and economic elites, as the realisation dawns that an anti‐urban disposition is unhelpful in both economic and environmental management terms (see Swilling in this volume). Through the foregrounding of shifting materialities, we wish to build a stronger connection between recent moves to bring attention to cultural practices, everyday stylisations and affective dispositions, and theoretical explorations of the implications of massive economic flows (always intertwined as both informal and formal) that are reshaping the metabolic and built character of African cities.

The three over‐arching essays by Pieterse, Barac and Swilling in this symposium all take on this task – in very different registers, since they engage different literatures and debates. Pieterse builds a conceptual connection between the policy discourses of the developmentalist literatures that bring African cities into view as sites of the urbanisation of poverty, by insisting that such representations, valid as they are, must be offset by a more sensitive insight into the interior and communal life worlds of ordinary people, as they continually enlarge their affect‐driven engagement with the multiple worlds they inhabit and cross. Barac, in turn, focuses on a rehabilitation of the importance of ‘place’ and place‐making in order to demonstrate how essential a phenomenological account of the city is, when the speed and opacity of contemporary change accelerate. Finally, Swilling builds a bridge between an international set of discourses on how to read and define contemporary urbanisms and what is emergent on the continent, in the context of a looming polycrisis as shortages of energy, food, water and economic opportunity collide in the impossible proposition of unabated urbanisation in Africa over the next four decades. And it is in this essay that we decipher most clearly what this diverse and wide‐ranging exploration into African urbanisms may mean for rethinking the developmental prospects of African urban futures, without brushing aside the constitutive restlessness that marks rogue urbanism. Given the inevitable diversity and arguments across these essays, this symposium can only be read as a further instigation to debate and research, and therefore partial, and necessarily incomplete.

Notes on contributor

Edgar Pieterse is holder of the DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Urban Policy. He directs the African Centre for Cities and is Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, both at the University of Cape Town. Recent publications include: City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development (Zed Books, 2008); Counter‐Currents: Experiments in Sustainability in the Cape Town region (Jacana, 2010); and The African Cities Reader: Pan‐African Practices (Chimurenga & ACC, 2010).

Notes

1. More background information on the programme and the two colloquia that were held is available at www.africancentreforcities.net.