For the City Yet to Come

Simone AbdouMaliq Simone

Description

Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa's burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For the City Yet to Come, AbdouMaliq Simone argues that by overlooking all that does work in Africa's cities, this perspective forecloses opportunities to capitalize on existing informal economies and structures in development efforts within Africa and to apply lessons drawn from them to rapidly growing urban areas around the world. Simone contends that Africa's cities do work on some level and to the extent that they do, they function largely through fluid, makeshift collective actions running parallel to proliferating decentralized local authorities, small-scale enterprises, and community associations.Drawing on his nearly fifteen years of work in African cities-as an activist, teacher, development worker, researcher, and advisor to ngos and local governments-Simone provides a series of case studies illuminating the provisional networks through which most of Africa's urban dwellers procure basic goods and services. He examines informal economies and social networks in Pikine, a large suburb of Dakar, Senegal; in Winterveld, a neighborhood on the edge of Pretoria, South Africa; in Douala, Cameroon; and among Africans seeking work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He contextualizes these particular cases through an analysis of the broad social, economic, and historical conditions that created present-day urban Africa. For the City Yet to Come is a powerful argument that any serious attempt to reinvent African urban centers must acknowledge the particular history of these cities and incorporate the local knowledge reflected in already existing informal urban economic and social systems.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 07 octobre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386247
• Langue: English

Extrait

For the City Yet to Come

For the City Yet to Come

Changing African Life in Four Cities

Duke University Press

AbdouMaliq Simone

Durham and London 2004

∫2004 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper$

Designed by CH Westmoreland

Typeset in Sabon with Helvetica Neue display

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page of

this book.

For Karin, Zaira, and Na’ilah

1 2 3 4 5

6 7

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Remaking African Cities 1 The Informal: The Projet de Ville in Pikine, Senegal 21 The Invisible: Winterveld, South Africa 63 The Spectral: Assembling Douala, Cameroon 92 Movement: The Zawiyyah as the City 118 Reconciling Engagement and Belonging: Some Matters of History 136 The Production and Management of Urban Resources 178 Cities and Change 213 Notes 245 References 269 Index 291

Acknowledgments

I offer much gratitude to the following persons, who contributed a great deal to my work on this project: Mohamed Soumaré, acting executive secretary of Environment Developmental Action in the Third World and former coordinator of the AfricanngoHabitat Caucus; my colleagues at the caucus, particularly Jérome Gérard and Mohamadou Abdoul Diop, as well as members of the caucus network; and Marilyn Douala-Bell Schaub, Cecilia Kinuthia-Njenga, Maria Rosario, Mario Rosario, Ousman Dem- bele, Malick Gaye, and Pauline Biyong. For many years of institutional, professional, and personal support, I thank my colleagues at the Isandla Institute of South Africa and the Founda- tion for Contemporary Research: Edgar Pieterse, Dominique Woolridge, Frank Mentjies, Kam Chetty, Paul Thulare, and Sue Parnell. For the oppor- tunity to intersect with a wide range of African scholarship on urban issues, I am particularly grateful for the support offered to me by colleagues at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, particu- larly Ebrahim Sall, Thandika Mkandawire, Mamadou Diouf, Moumar Coumba Diop, Mahmood Mamdani, and Tade Aina. For the opportunity to complete a draft of this book, I am particularly indebted to the Inter- national Center for Advanced Studies at New York University, the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, and the Center for Interna- tional Studies at Yale University. Key colleagues and friends who have pro- vided both substantial intellectual and moral support include Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Deborah Posel, Jennifer Robinson, Jean-Charles