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Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City
Edited by Abdulmaliq Simone & Abdelghani Abouhani

Published 2005; 320 pages; ISBN: 2-86978-142-3

 This volume illustrates the complex and constantly social and human dynamics of African city making and human survival today. It explores how African urban dwellers have had to find the not only effective ways of pursuing their livelihoods and other aspirations within cities but also ways of managing their interactions with often more powerful economic and political interests that seek to impose particular uses of urban space. 

Amidst very different socio-cultural contexts in Dakar, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Kisangani, Jos, Zaria, Cairo, and Marrakech, the research in this volume focuses on the 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 country side and city remain, these are constantly being reworked as African agency gives life to highly diverse urban formations which are further fashioned through the geographically uneven dynamics of globalisation that articulate with locally specific histories, cultural practices, and political contingencies.

The result is an emphasis in Africa on city making through fluid and rapidly changing institutional structures, informal agreements, and finding innovative ways to interweave various sectors and actors. Urban change, as a consequence, is not a process easily managed.

Contents 

1. Introduction: Urban Processes and Change
   AbdouMaliq Simone

Part I: Making Urban Politics

2. Urban Policies in Cairo: From Speeches on New Cities to the Adjustment Practices of Ordinary City Dwellers
   Bénédicte Florin

3. Feasts: Panoramas in Town: The Spaces and Times of the Moulids of Cairo
   Anna Madoeuf

4. Kisangani: A city at its Lowest Ebb
   Jean Omasombo

5. The City Centre: A Shifting Concept in the History of Addis Ababa
   Bahru Zewde

6. At the Limits of Possibility: Working Notes on a Relational Model of Urban Politics
   Edgar Pieterse

Part 2: Urban Practices

7. Life in a High Density Urban Area: Anguwar Mai Gwado in Zaria
   Mohammed-Bello Yunusa

8. Ethnicity and the Dynamics of City Politics: The Case of Jos
   Victor A. O. Adetula

9. Urban Development and Urban Informalities: Pikine, Senegal
   Mohamadou Abdoul

10. Formal and Decentralized Financing of Housing: Operation 200,000 Houses, Marrakesh
    Mohamed Gheris

HB ISBN 1 84277 620 7   £ 65.00   $85.00
PB ISBN: 2-86978-142-3 $22.50 (Africa); £ 18.95 $29.95 (Elsewhere

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