For the City Yet to Come: Remaking Urban Life in Africa

Introduction

Urban Africans have long made lives that have worked. There has been an astute capacity to use thickening fields of social relations, however, disordered they may be, to make city life viable.

Yet, if the primary resource that urban Africans have had to draw upon to make their cities has essentially been themselves, then the process of configuring an urban public life is crucial to this story. If an accelerated differentiation of social practices and organization has had to compensate for the long-term absence of investment, infrastructure development, formal employment and multiplex economic articulations with the larger world, how are the ensuing complex social fields managed? How do residents construct the differences in livelihood activities, accumulation possibilities, specialization, and social identity incumbent in urban life and yet maintain their anchorage in cultures long valuing a sense of equanimity, mutuality and social balance?

It is true that African cities have been an ambivalent refuge when livelihood was no longer possible in rural areas. It is true that these cities most visibly serviced the agendas of external interests, and that those interests shaped the physical and social terrain in ways that constrained a broad range of uses and developmental possibilities. It is true that these cities reflect a certain marginalization from the prevailing trajectories of urbanization that emphasize capital intensity and technological innovation. The costs of this history have been enormous.

Urban Projects in Africa

Still, African cities enclose a multiplicity of projects. Putting bread on the table and maintaining the social relationships that enable one to do so are key projects. There are also projects informed by dreams and by consultations with spiritualists and mystics.

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Written by AbdouMaliq Simone

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