Power and Informality in Urban Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives (2025)

Place Resists: Grounding African Urban Order in an Age of Global Change

Social Dynamics-a Journal of The Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town, 2011

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.

The Social Infrastructures of City Life in Contemporary Africa

2010

Seven Themes in African Urban Dynamics

2010

Examining Power and Inequality through Informality in Urban Africa

Power and Informality in Urban Africa, 2021

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details.

Secondary Cities in West Africa: Urbanity, Power, and Aspirations

Urban Forum, 2021

This article claims space for secondary cities in urban studies. It criticizes that scientists tend to study urban life in metropolises and, hence, do not represent urban life in its full diversity. In reality, the majority of the worlds’ urban dwellers live in secondary cities; therefore, research on urbanity should reflect this fact. The article argues against simple approaches to secondary cities, such as defining them based on a single quantitative variable like population size. It rather proposes that anthropological research has a unique potential to reveal the urban dwellers’ relational and situational perceptions of, and perspectives towards, secondary cities. The paper puts this approach into practice by examining two West African secondary cities: Kankan in Guinea and Bouaké in Côte d’Ivoire.

Rents and entitlements. Reassessing Africa's urban pasts and futures

This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its 'post-normative' orientation, firmly discarding the 'expectations' of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the 'vernacularization' of urban structures and strategies in Africa. While such work has developed a host of new insights into the idiosyncratic nature of African urbanization, it has largely eschewed comparative analysis of enduring economic strategies that lie at the heart of the massive growth of African cities. By focusing on the longer-term historical role of such processes -namely urban rents and urban price regulations -this article suggests a more comparative framework for the study of urban Africa that still accounts for the otherwise seemingly hyper-local and idiosyncratic forms of urban livelihoods and strategies.

Grasping the unknowable: coming to grips with African urbanisms

Social Dynamics, 2011

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

Exploratory notes on African urbanism

African Centre for Cities, University of Cape …, 2009

Living in African Cities: Urban Spaces, Lifestyles and Social Practices in Everyday Life

2018

The Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Bayreuth promotes and coordinates African studies in 12 subject groups distributed over the six faculties of the University of Bayreuth. It coordinates research and teaching, training junior researchers, and promotes the exchange of information between persons and institutions engaged in research and teaching in or on Africa. The 'Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers' report on ongoing projects, the results of current research and matters related to the focus on African Studies. Contributions may be submitted to the Editor-in-chief Antje Daniel

Africa and Urban Anthropology

Routledge eBooks, 2023

By 2030, 80% of the entire world's population will live in cities. This trend has reinforced the participation of anthropologists in the analysis of urban growth and change, defining distinctive features, appearances, qualities, and problems, as well as the emergence of unique and shared forms of urbanisms around the world. There is also a long tradition of anthropologists working in sub-Saharan Africa, for decades largely in rural townships and villages. And there are those who have combined the two, focusing their energies on African cities, observing the impact of the West, differences from the countryside, the new roles and relationships engaged in, the qualitative difference from so-called traditional society. Over the last 50 years, urbanization has become one of the most remarkable features of the African continent. Based on demographic studies, approximately 27 million people lived in urban centers in Africa in the 1950s, a time of increasing urbanization on the continent. Today, approximately 567 million people live in African cities (Kanos and Heitzig 2020; OCED/SWAC 2020). This growth is staggering and necessitates the reclassification of the urban, as new cities emerge in the interior and density has increased in existing cities. Despite these changes, and a tradition of anthropological research in and of the urban agglomeration in sub-Saharan Africa, there has been no volume published that focuses on urban African anthropology. We hatched the idea for this book at a conference, as we were conversing about our respective urban West African research. I, Deborah, was trained in the 1970s in British social anthropology, at a time when urban anthropology was broadening and focused on issues related to adaptive strategies, social stratification, social identity, and poverty. I went on to observe urban community processes in Ghana, especially in Accra, the capital located in the south, and subsequently Tamale and its environs, the gateway to northern Ghana. I, Suzanne, was trained in the 1990s with an accent placed on neo-Marxist perspectives of the urban. In anthropology, eclecticism was beginning to replace identifications with theoretical traditions, and urban anthropology was taking a turn toward spatial concerns. I went