Urban Africa: Changing contours of survival in the city, edited by AbdouMaliq Simone and Abdelghani Abouhani

Abstract

This edited volume is one of six books published or forthcoming within Codesria's exciting series on ‘Africa in the New Millennium’. Scholars from across the continent produced its 10 chapters. As is often the case with Codesria projects, the book works hard to overcome the major linguistic divide of Africanist social science by bringing together in one volume both Anglophone and Francophone urban studies. Although the book itself is entirely in English, most of its authors come out of Francophone scholarship—which is unsurprising given the generally stronger tradition of African urban studies in French. The organizing framework is one that sees African cities as laboratories of change that embody the ‘determination of urban Africans to find their own way’ (p. 1), with two sections—the first on making urban politics and the second on urban social practices. The volume covers an eclectic combination of cities—some familiar stopping points for African urban studies (i.e. Cairo, Addis Ababa or Cape Town), and some cities rarely subject to wider scholarly analysis, at least in recent literature (such as Zaria, Jos or Kisangani).