African Urbanisms

Concept Note

Population growth and migration are driving urbanisation in Africa against a backdrop of climate change and other environmental challenges, social inequalities and economic crisis. The result is a multiplicity of different urbanisation experiences across the African continent. Nevertheless, urbanisation dynamics across African cities also share certain experiences and challenges and are interlinked through economic relations, transnational politics, networks of knowledge, migration and finance among others. This conference acknowledges and explores the multiplicity of interlinked African urbanisms as a starting point to question the status quo of urban policies and planning paradigms, to seek transformative practices that present alternatives to “business as usual” urban development, and to imagine alternative urban futures. Therefore, the conference aims to bring together work at different scales, exploring urbanisation experiences and relating these to each other. This may range from contributions on local phenomena and challenges, work that explores experiences shared across various cities on the continent, to research on the ways in which African urbanisms influence and/or are impacted by the world beyond the continent. The conference will address these issues in three different thematic streams: Critical Engagements, Transformative Practices and Alternative Futures.

Critical engagements

The conference endeavours to bring together critical reflections on hegemonic norms, concepts and ways of thinking that have dominated global and African urban development and environmental policies and agendas in recent decades. By and large, these have not delivered the promised outcomes for the majority of urban residents or they have proved to be impossible to implement at the local level. We invite contributions that document the impact of those norms on urban development policies and practice in Africa in detail and that trace how and in which (geo)political contexts they originate and how they became dominant in Africa. Moreover, the conference aims at bringing together contributions that challenge, deconstruct and disrupt dominant assumptions as well as the concepts and buzzwords that may have become empty signifiers in recent decades. What are the theories, models and praxes that shape of African urban contexts for better or worse? How did they create enablers of and/or barriers to everyday urban life in Africa? Critical engagements grounded in the African urban everyday can open up space within which to dismantle the assumed neutrality of normative concepts, laying a foundation for providing constructive and actionable suggestions for meaningful change in policy formulation. This theme aims for reflections on a broad range of everyday experiences from African cities that may include economic practices, housing, social and cultural networks, ways of moving and infrastructural assemblages amongst others.

Transformative practices

Critically engaging with the status quo generates questions about how things could be done differently and what policy makers and practitioners could learn from those reflections. Thus, the conference invites contributions that explore transformative urban practices, from academic but also practitioner and activist perspectives. These might include local community-based approaches and grassroot activism or experimental approaches of local governments attentive to issues of socio-spatial and environmental justice. They may also involve meaningful ways in which public authorities, agencies or NGOs shape urban development processes together with communities, social movements and marginalised groups beyond conventional participation in planning. Transformative practices may also be premised on solidarity, co-creation and co-production, generating cross-sectoral benefits in communities and cities. Key concerns that the conference aims to explore under this theme are issues of scalability and transferability of transformative approaches. This theme of the conference also aims to explore the role of higher education and knowledge production in imagining, training for and enabling transformative practices through reflection on research agendas, pedagogies and curriculum development with linkages to urban development practice. Transformative practices relate to ways of organising and governing urban development processes and also to material practices such as designing, building, repairing and moving, which co-constitute and maintain the urban. What can be learnt from Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone colonial influences and trajectories in articulating such practices in Africa’s cities of today?

Alternative Futures

Creating plans and frameworks that address current challenges and will shape future development are major concerns of urban planning, urban design, architecture and related disciplines. However, the underlying assumptions and expectations of future development are often based on developmentalist imaginaries as promoted in international policy frameworks. Thus, dominant imaginaries of the futures of urban Africa seem to oscillate between narratives of African cities being at the centre of future global economic development and growth – the last frontier for global capital – and dystopian narratives based on challenges presented by the impacts of climate change, increases in population, corruption within governments, the private sector and society, and violent conflicts. This conference theme calls for a discussion of African urban futures that goes beyond those narratives and is attentive to specific local conditions, relationships, histories, (popular) culture and memories and allows for the development of counter-imaginations. This theme invites contributions that interrogate current ideas of African urban futures and how these are mediated but also utopian speculation about the future of African cities that allows radical difference to be imagined, particularly in terms of justice, equality and structures of solidarity and resilience. How can alternative ideas of urban futures rooted in everyday experiences and needs be developed and articulated by citizens and practitioners? Which role can planning institutions, academia and other actors involved in urban development play in enabling these processes? This theme also encourages debates on new concepts and vocabularies and alternative epistemologies through which to formulate different futures for African cities.