Urban Africa Changing Contours of Survival in the City

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.

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.