African Urbanization

Abstract

Africa is typically seen in urban studies as both the least urbanized continent and the most rapidly urbanizing one. This perception relies on eliding the substantial differences between urbanization trajectories in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Despite these differences in pace and extent for urbanization in these regions, most themes of the scholarly literature are shared in both northern and sub-Saharan zones. While most of this chapter focuses on works from the sub-Saharan region, the thematic scope is continent-wide. For the continent, the modern scholarly literature on urbanism and urbanization includes titles dating back more than eighty years to the work of the former Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in the Zambian Copperbelt, but urban studies in general experienced a retreat of sorts throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, however, there has been a dramatic resurgence of African urban studies literature. Across the social sciences and humanities and across the continent, a wide range of works have emerged that examine the ways cities in Africa are developing. Both the urbanization process and the character of urbanism in the region come under scrutiny in this work. Major debates concern the presence or lack of distinctions between African cities and those elsewhere. Contested questions involve whether African cities are anomalies or dystopias, whether they exhibit unique patterns worthy of scrutiny, and whether they are following expected routes of development. Perhaps the most cogent crystallization of this might be expressed as a debate between Afro-pessimist and Afropolitan perspectives, but the reality is that most of the literature expresses neither of these perspectives exclusively. The new literature of African urban studies is very vast and diverse, but it is possible to discern several broad themes, as reflected in the headings and subheadings in this article. For each of these, the bibliography reflects only a sample of the many works available that examine the themes presented.