African Urbanisms

This book demonstrates the insights that literature brings to transdisciplinary urban studies, and particularly to the study of cities of the South. Starting from the claim staked by mining capital in the late nineteenth century and its production of extractive and segregated cities, it surveys over a century of writing in search of counterclaims through which the literature reimagines the city as a place of assembly and attachment. Focusing on how the South African city has been designed to funnel gold into the global economy and to service an enclaved minority, the study looks to the literary city to advance a contrary emphasis on community, conviviality and care. An accessible and informative introduction to literature of the South African city at significant historical junctures, this book will also be of great interest to scholars and students in urban studies and Global South studies.

The high profile attributed to African urban economies in the global market, the promise of the evergreen ‘development project’ and the contradictions produced by the rapid urbanization process contribute to make African cities important domains for the affirmation and maintenance of hegemonic projects. The discourse about the city is a key terrain through which hegemony is fought.
Nairobi is a point in case, where power and discourse have been interwoven with the production of the city. Since independence, the World Bank and United Nations have largely influenced urban policies. Nowadays, new players and interests are engaged in this battle for ideas.
Four urban projects initiated in the last decade by actors operating at multiple political and geographic scales are analysed in the paper. The main objective is to reveal the imaginaries they embed and explain why they have become hegemonic.

As many translocal and cross-border traders, mukheristas cover thousands of miles every week to supply urban markets, thus feeding themselves, their families and the cities they connect.
After an intensive field work travelling with mukheristas between Maputo (Mozambique) and Johannesburg (South Africa), the author shows the role of complex hybrid practices of trans-local mobility in shaping cities and territories in sub-saharan Africa.
A "research on the road" to reflect on the political relevance of informal mobile practices in troubled urban societies, but also on new theoretical concepts and empirical research approaches.
In a world where change is extremely rapid and new issues emerge unremittingly, 'Mobile urbanity' opens up new ways of thinking the spatial dimensions and the agency embraced in human mobility.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In a world where change is so rapid and new issues emerge unremittingly, this book contributes to make things even more complex. The research resulting from the in-depth investigation realized along and on the 'in-between' space that the mukheristas travel from Maputo to Johannesburg and to Maputo back again to sell the goods bought in Johannesburg, adds to the multiple facets of the urban space in Africa.
(...)
The entrepreneurial mukheristas who make their living and even prosper by traveling between Maputo and Johannesburg are one specific feature of urbanization in Africa (exactly, the 'mobile urbanity' proposed by the author).
As the book stresses urban mobility 'opens up new ways of thinking the spatial dimensions and the agency embraced in human mobility'. Recognizing the centrality of informality and the complex hybrid practices of trans-local mobility in shaping cities and territories in Africa, though, should not conceal the deep causes of inequality and the 'networked individualism' that lie behind them. In this sense, the book has the great value of opening more questions than giving responses".
[From FOREWORD by Marcello Balbo]

The general outlines of Benin City have not changed during past centuries until the beginning of the 1970s. The town is divided into two parts, i.e. to the north Orenokhua and to the south Ogbe. Orenokhua once housed the quarters of the ordinary citizens, craftsmen, various specialist groups and many chiefs. The palace quarter Ogbe, once separated from Orenokhua by a broad avenue, contained (and still contains) the royal palace, the harem, mausoleums for deceased rulers and the quarters of the once numerous court retainers with different functions who worked for the royal household. The town is completely surrounded by a wall- and ditch system made of earth. Joining this innermost system to the north-west is another similar rampart enclosing, however, a much larger area. It contains the residences of important chiefs and their retainers. Those residences could even be quite large villages. The reflections of both traditional and sosial system and philosophy of life of the Bini in th...

The general outlines of Benin City have not changed during past centuries until the beginning of the 1970s. The town is divided into two parts, i.e. to the north Orenokhua and to the south Ogbe. Orenokhua once housed the quarters of the ordinary citizens, craftsmen, various specialist groups and many chiefs. The palace quarter Ogbe, once separated from Orenokhua by a broad avenue, contained (and still contains) the royal palace, the harem, mausoleums for deceased rulers and the quarters of the once numerous court retainers with different functions who worked for the royal household. The town is completely surrounded by a wall- and ditch system made of earth. Joining this innermost system to the north-west is another similar rampart enclosing, however, a much larger area. It contains the residences of important chiefs and their retainers. Those residences could even be quite large villages. The reflections of both traditional and sosial system and philosophy of life of the Bini in their capital city's planning and layout are also traced in the present article.

Mozambique is located on the East coast of Southern Africa with a population of around 24 million inhabitants living in an area of approximately 812.379 km². The capital and the larger city in the country is Maputo, known as Lourenço Marques before the independence. The city is growing, the urban expansion and the large scale infrastructures and new developments along Maputo´s coastline are not compatible with the everyday needs of the local communities and the coastline estuaries ecological systems. The city is in a constant dual evolution between urbanization and nature, identity and stranger, local and foreign, formal and informal, high and low, density and sprawl, rich and poor, but also stressed the interdependence between them. The research question is how can urban expansion and transformation occur in a balanced way between urban and landscape dynamics, and how can the local communities evolve and survive finding in landscape structures a way to improve urban living conditions?

Out of the thirty cities with the highest growth rate, twenty-four are African. It’s just the beginning of an urban transition in Africa that is forecasted to take almost eighty years, compared to the two hundred years that it took in Europe. This unprecedented rapid and uncontrolled  urbanization is producing hybrid metropolitan structures with inadequate infrastructure, polarized development un-safety, inequality and environmental fragility. How to shape rapid growth in a context of informality, scarcity and misgovernment? Through an historical exploration and an overview on the contemporary situation, the paper investigates the attempts to re-center the problem on the city as public framework, overcoming the urbanization-without-urbanity attitude and proposing a new metropolitan paradigm matching transcalar civic robustness and in/formality gradient patterns as a strategy to reconsider the idea of public space as public good and ordering relational framework.

There is a certain ‘othering’ when cities in the African continent are presented. Literature on cities in Africa is saturated by narratives by ‘explorers and scholars’ from the north, often decades past their youth. Very few, if any, narratives in academia are from young voices who have lived and experienced urban spaces in various parts of the continent. The question is, how does one change that in a pedagogical landscape built entirely on narratives or texts that are ‘other’ to these youthful African voices? How does one shift pedagogy in an inherently colonial and industrial curriculum?

This study applies postmodern theories in narrating and studying both historic and contemporary realities of urbanization of cities in Africa through the lens of the self and storytelling as valid research method. It shifts focus from set literature and prioritizes lived experiences from young voices, moreover, it presents these as authentic pedagogical approaches.

The study is interested in how young people narrate, represent and present their immediate contexts. Since 2016, propelled by the 2014/15 ‘fees must fall’ student movement in South Africa which, amongst other things, advocated for the decolonization of education, the Department of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg introduced a lecture series focusing on cities in Africa within an existing module offering, but shifted the focus by inviting young and diverse voices as presenters.

In 2017, the series was taken out of the classroom into communal student spaces within the department to make it accessible to a larger interactive audience and to loosen the series from prescriptive curriculum structures. It is a work in progress, however what has come out from this two-year experiment, for the students presenting and participating in the series, is a yearning to hear more voices, the appreciation of various narratives and perspectives presented, and the need to expand such an experiment beyond the boundaries of the university campus.

Keywords:
Africa, Cities, Pedagogy, Postmodern, Urbanism

There is a certain ‘othering’ when cities in the African continent are presented. Literature on cities in Africa is saturated by narratives by ‘explorers and scholars’ from the north, often decades past their youth. Very few, if any, narratives in academia are from young voices who have lived and experienced urban spaces in various parts of the continent. The question is, how does one change that in a pedagogical landscape built entirely on narratives or texts that are ‘other’ to these youthful African voices? How does one shift pedagogy in an inherently colonial and industrial curriculum? This study applies postmodern theories in narrating and studying both historic and contemporary realities of urbanization of cities in Africa through the lens of the self and storytelling as valid research method. It shifts focus from set literature and prioritizes lived experiences from young voices, moreover, it presents these as authentic pedagogical approaches. The study is interested in how y...

There is a certain ?othering? when cities in the African continent are presented. Literature on cities in Africa is saturated by narratives by ?explorers and scholars? from the north, often decades past their youth. Very few, if any, narratives in academia are from young voices who have lived and experienced urban spaces in various parts of the continent. The question is, how does one change that in a pedagogical landscape built entirely on narratives or texts that are ?other? to these youthful African voices? How does one shift pedagogy in an inherently colonial and industrial curriculum?This study applies postmodern theories in narrating and studying both historic and contemporary realities of urbanization of cities in Africa through the lens of the self and storytelling as valid research method. It shifts focus from set literature and prioritizes lived experiences from young voices, moreover, it presents these as authentic pedagogical approaches. The study is interested in how yo...

The general outlines of Benin City have not changed during past centuries until the beginning of the 1970s. The town is divided into two parts, i.e. to the north Orenokhua and to the south Ogbe. Orenokhua once housed the quarters of the ordinary citizens, craftsmen, various specialist groups and many chiefs. The palace quarter Ogbe, once separated from Orenokhua by a broad avenue, contained (and still contains) the royal palace, the harem, mausoleums for deceased rulers and the quarters of the once numerous court retainers with different functions who worked for the royal household. The town is completely surrounded by a wall- and ditch system made of earth. Joining this innermost system to the north-west is another similar rampart enclosing, however, a much larger area. It contains the residences of important chiefs and their retainers. Those residences could even be quite large villages. The reflections of both traditional and sosial system and philosophy of life of the Bini in th...

Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) can be identified as a urban region with 3 million inhabitants exploding with a growth rate running since more than 10 years around 4-5% per year and the 80% of the population living in informal settlements. lts geopolitical conditions are making it one of the most important African metropolises, attracting investments from the worldwide system and attentions from the international organizations. Uncontrolled formalization phenomena, a collapsing mobility system, the vulnerability of the urban agro-ecological system producing 30% of the food consumed in the city, lacks in the energy production and distribution, natural hazard due to climate change are some of the issues to manage. The needed comprehensive strategy can be rooted in the geographical and urban character of the city, expressed by a threatened rich porosity based on the complex overlapping of formal and informal structures and a complex topography.
ln Dar es Salaam the geographical endorsement of settlements and the infrastructure network set a multiple layered net with high urban potential; for a vision that can be built by: ARMATURES: an evolving grey net of technological infrastructure providing fast interconnection and a green net of topographical ecological corridors currently neglected; NODES: multiscalar entities to be developed as alternative centralities activating densification and controlled formalization phenomena; SPONGY TISSUE: formality gradient patterns for the archipelago settlements preserving and enhancing porosity, managing informal urbanity, welfare equipments, urban farming.
The local peculiarity of the GREEN ARMATURES given by the geography of place could be the key issue for the urban growth, providing slow mobility porosity, renewable energy production, water treatment, farming areas, ecological reserve for carbon credits management, etc. A general urban landscape strategy for a network of eco-armatures could set a specific approach to water, energy and farming management, which can become the distinctive element of a conscious far-sighted vision for the city, transforming neglected flood areas in an economical and cultural resource. The virtuous balance of urban ecosystem through the flexible innovative solutions which structure the urban landscape could be the specific know-how and branding identity for the African green metropolis and its sustainable urban metabolism.

This chapter reviews the processes and findings from the alternative infrastructure work stream within the larger international, trans-disciplinary workshop Transforming Johannesburg: Reshaping Socio-ecological Landscapes Through Collaborative Practices (12–25 September 2015). The five parallel work streams making up the workshop (rethinking infrastructure, eco-incremental housing, place making, alternative economics and governance for collaborating upgrading) aimed at producing a master plan for the in situ upgrading of Kya Sands informal settlement in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Rethinking Infrastructure work stream focused on service provision through cross-examining the connections between different scales and different systems: the local and the regional scales, and the human and natural systems. After initial site visits, the group chose to concentrate on the concerns of water (drinking, waste, storm and river) and waste management. Inputs from data collection, Kya Sands Residents, City officials and external experts, were explored through the lens of dialogue and debate and distilled into three pragmatic regenerative strategies towards settlement upgrading. The chapter is constructed as both an account of and a reflection on the specific results and experiences of this work stream.

Full citation: Pieterse, E. (2018) “Reconstructing / Ricostruendo. Edgar Pieterse  in conversation with Elena Motisi”, in:  Njami, S., Motisi, E. and Corraini, E. (eds.) African Metropolis. An Imaginary City. Rome: MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts.

East-Africa is one of the least urbanized regions in the world, but living one of the fastest urbanization. Its urban history has roots in the cosmopolitan Swahili culture and common experiences related to British and German colonialism and the East African Community. During the 20th century it has been a great laboratory regarding the effort of ordering growth according to very different political visions and social projects. Almost everything has been tested in planning and urban design, with a relevant gradient of determinism in the designing efforts, from total to minimal. The East-Africans are excellent samples of contemporary metropolises facing the unstoppable proliferation of informal growth, due to uncontrolled migrations and unsustainable development. Dar-es-Salaam, Nairobi, Mombasa, Kampala, Kigali, Zanzibar are rapidly urbanising with more than half of this growth occurring informally. From the beginning of their urban history all these cities have faced the issue of hosting different communities with different lifestyles, symbols, rituals, fears and public spaces. Their urban history reveals the relevance of urban architecture in determining their future. The paper proposes an overview on urban design and planning attempts over the last century, investigating their influence in driving city growth and discussing their teachings for contemporary openings.