Pieterse - Grasping the Unknowable

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AFRICAN CITIES: GRASPING THE UNKNOWABLE

Inaugural Lecture

Edgar Pieterse1

Delivered at the University of Cape Town on 26 August 2009

It is said that at the edge we encounter danger, but this is just another way of saying

that there we are forced to communicate critically with a great many dimensions at

once.2

Africa has the fastest rate of urbanisation compared to all other regions. According to UN

Projections Africa will more than double its urban population over the next two decades, from

400 million presently to a staggering 750 million in 2030 and 1.2 billion by 2050! The rapidity

and scale of this demographic and social transition is almost unimaginable especially if one

considers that the vast majority of existing urbanites make do in utterly miserable living

conditions due in part to state neglect, skewed economic development patterns, limited

resources and administrative incompetence; dynamics that are of course in one way or

another tangible legacies of the savage colonial experiments we have been subjected to for

most of the Enlightenment. However, tonight I am less interested in spending all my time on

painting the visible demographic drama that will remake the Continent in an irrevocable way,

but rather want to explore what it means when we are bereft of a philosophical-social

theoretical vocabulary to make sense of these transitions in the specificities of our African soil,

spirit and phenomenologies.

For the better part of a decade now the absence of a well-rounded body of thought on the

specificities of African urbanism has been recognised. However, the scholars who have worked

to populate this lacuna have tended to create new obscurities. They have tended to delve into

the psycho-social, linguistic-discursive with insufficient regard for the natural and material

structures and systems that do enable and press down on diverse social formations and

identities. The understandable reason for this has been the tendency to focus in on individual

or micro practices in order to surface nuance, texture, variability, diversity and of course,

contingency. I have deep sympathy and respect for these advances by scholars such as Akin

Adisokan, Philip de Boeck, Mamadou Diouf, James Yuma, Achille Mbembe, Dominique

Malaquais, Sarah Nuttall, and so on, but equally recognise that we are not likely to arrive at a

more rounded conceptualisation of the specificity of African urbanism by merely collating

idiosyncratic micro examples and case studies. We need to find ways in which we can clarify

the knowledge agenda that will be able to articulate macro trend data and perspectives with

insights about the novelty of contemporary urban life as it comes into being at this late



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capitalist moment when Africa remains an afterthought, an invisible placemat for larger

power struggles, and the globalized allegory for failed modernisation.

What follows is some orienting information about the dynamics and trajectories of

urbanization in Africa in order to underscore how much we still do not know and to caution

against simplistic extrapolations that we need to “manage” a so-called disastrous tendency. I

then switch registers and draw out some of the scholarly perspectives and debates on how we

can create an account of African urbanism with an eye on some of the limitations of this

relatively new literature. I then use this convenient binary or enter into some reflections on

what the methodological and philosophical implications might be of trying to come terms with

the elusive essence/core of African cities. This account is used to then spell out my research

agenda for the next while in part to demonstrate the continued imperative to act on, through,

and with African cities even when our knowledge remains as patchy, biased, and under-

theorised as it is.

African urbanization

To be sure, African cities and towns a marked by profound crisis. The visible face of this crisis

are the endless vistas of shantytowns and the burden of self-help and abandonment that they

imply. In fact, informal, autoconstructed, makeshift shelter responses house 62% of African

urbanites. In other words, the shanty city is the real African city. This further implies that the

bulk of city building can be attributed to actors outside of the state and formal business sector.

This is an arresting realisation because the deep-seated assumption of modernisation theory is

that “development” arrives incrementally as the state provides housing and services for the

ever expanding working classes that swell the factories built by the private sector. In fact much

of mainstream development economics point to the virtuous connection between urbanisation

and economic growth. In the post-colonial era much of Africa has seemingly elided this

“inevitable” outcome. I do not have time on this occasion to explore the reasons for this but

rather want to provide a quick overview of some macro urbanisation trends and dynamics

that underlie the informal city as the real city.

The first general orienting point to make is that Africa is still in the beginning of its urban

transition. Africa is only 38% urbanised at present and this masks great variances between the

four regions of the continent. For example, North Africa is already 51% urbanized compared

to only 21% in East Africa; Central and Western Africa is 42% and Southern Africa, 46%.

However, Africa boasts the fastest annual rate of urbanization at 3.31%.3 Factoring in a

slowing of rates of urbanization, UN-Habitat foresees the urban population achieving 750

million by 2030 and 1.2 billion by 2050. In other words, Africa will achieve much of its urban

transition over an 80-year period compared to the 200 years between 1750 and 1950 that it

took the West to transition from 10% to 52% urban.4 And as we know, the West had the



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lucrative colonial economies to draw on to finance much of their urbanization response. This

financing model is obviously not available to us.

Having established the rate and population size of Africa’s unfolding urbanization transition,

it is secondly important to stress that the vast majority of African urbanites reside, and will

continue to reside, in urban settlements with populations of less that 0.5 million people. For

example, Table 1 indicates that in 2007, 52% of the urban population lived in settlements

with less than 0.5 million people, compared to 10% in cities sized between 0.5 - 1 million

people; 27% in cities between 1 - 5m people; 3.8% in cities of between 5 - 10 million; and

only 6% in cities with more than 10 million people. This is fundamentally different to the

typical scenario of mega-city explosions that is popularly associated with urbanization. It is

interesting to note that projections suggest these proportional shares will remain more or less

in tact by 2025.

Table 1: Size of African Cities in 2007 and projection for 20255

Size >10m 5-10m 1-5m 0.5-1m <0.5m

Number 2007 2 2 48 69 UnknownPopulation(1000s)

23,076 14,238 102,418 41,057 231,404

% of urbanpopulation

6.18 3.81 27.53 10.10 52.48

Trends for 2025 3 8 73 84 Unknown

However, one caveat is important to consider. At the same time as we are witnessing theimportance of small and medium sized cities, we can also identify the emergence of a number

of profound city-region zones and corridors, for example: the Greater Cairo Region; the

corridor along Ibadan-Lagos-Cotonou-Lome-Accra; and of course the Gauteng city-region.6

The implications of this mega and flowing urban form is only beginning to surface in

academic and policy communities.

The third trend that is important to emphasize is almost all of the growth that will unfold in

African cities take the form of slum growth. According to the most recent State of the World’s

Cities Report , “between 1990 and 2000, slum areas grew at a rate of 4.53, whilst overall urban

growth rates were 4.58% in the same period.”7 This reinforces one of my opening comments

that the real African city does not correspond to our modernist biases about the physical

fabric of cities. The salience of this become much clearer later on when I argue for the need to

theorise African urbanism from the perspective of ordinary people who live in these slum

conditions.

The prevalence of slums in African cities and towns highlight the lack or insufficiency of basic

services such as water, sanitation and access to energy at the household level. Two factors

have driven the dramatic growth of backlogs in basic services: One, most African



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governments continue to regard migration to cities and towns as a bad thing and see pro-

active policy to address the needs of the urban poor and slum dwellers as an incentive for even

larger volumes of migration; a signal they are reluctant to send to the rural masses. Two, there

has been very little public (or private) finance for urban infrastructure. In fact, investment in

urban infrastructure has been on a reasonably sharp decline since the 1980s from 4% of GDP

to less that 2% by the early 2000s (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Infrastructure and social expenditures as % of GDP, 1980-20018

It is therefore not surprising that the basic service backlogs are as staggering as the data

suggests: in sub-Saharan Africa only 20% of the population has access to electricity networks;40% have access to portable water; 27% have access to sanitation; and 4% have access to

fixed or mobile telephony.9 These are aggregate numbers that include rural and urban

deficiencies. However, it is generally accepted that the urban population in Africa without

adequate access to water, is somewhere 35-50% and without sanitation: 50-60%.10 This

suggests better access in urban areas but the numbers obscure country differences (South

Africa would have a major skewing effect) and it under represents the extent to which

available infrastructure has become moribund due to a lack of maintenance. The limited

coverage of network infrastructures also mean the urban poor pay much more for access to

basic services per unit than the wealthy who are connected to bulk infrastructure systems.11

One simple illustration reinforces the point forcefully: the urban poor of Accra who reside in

slums without access to piped water pay exponentially more for access to water compared to

other urban residents in the city: The cost of 100 litres of water in Accra is USD8 when

consumed as a 500 millilitre sachet, which is the norm for the urban poor and 5c for

households with a piped connection.12

But this is not the only way in which slum dwellers and slum areas are disadvantaged. As I

have argued more extensively elsewhere, in the hierarchy of desired urban infrastructures, the



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preferences of urban elites, large businesses and especially foreign companies tied to skew the

investment priorities of cities as they juggle economic, household and public infrastructures.13

Whatever way one looks at the phenomenon of urbanization in Africa, it is impossible not to

be alarmed by the cumulative dynamic of exclusion, impoverishment and deepening inequality

that is in stark evidence. If one is to layer over this the anticipated impacts of climate change it

is equally clear that the fate of the majority of urban dwellers in Africa will go from bad to

disastrous. The urban poor are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts and the least

able to adapt.14

Against this backdrop one can be forgiven for assuming that the only academic endeavour

that could possibly matter is to generate knowledge that can produce effective policy

responses. However, you may then be surprised to learn that the bulk of urban scholarship in

Africa and on African cities during the post-colonial has in fact been preoccupied to explain

the structural economic reasons for this state affairs and or focussed on specific sectoral or

governance policy solutions. If not any of these, then an excursion into the institutional

reasons for policy failure in order to try and understand how African governments can get

better at implementing what is “known” about how to fix the ills of African cities.15

Tonight I want to put it to you that a big part of the problem has been the tendency to try and

“fix” the negative social and environmental externalities of urbanization. Why? Well, if our

automatic response is one of moral outrage about the suffering of the poor, we tend to loose

sight of the very people we try to help and their innately complex and diverse “lifeworlds”

must figure into problem-solving research.16 Moreover, developmentalist obsessions tend to

focus on the poor and allow the rich and wealthy classes to go about their routine

reproduction of urban space outside the analytical attention of scholars, or when they do

come into the frame, they are caricatured as rational market actors or exploitative class

agents. As I will explain at considerable length in a moment, this tradition or genre of urban

scholarship has obscured more than it uncovers.

The lived vitalities of African cities

The most compelling insights into the lived dynamics of everyday life in African cities come to

us through literary works, finely crafted anthropological studies, films, and sometimes,

investigative reportage. It is instructive to draw out a few examples to illustrate how different

these knowledge registers are compared to the aggregate statistical representations presented

before. A good place to start is the classic love story by Nigerian writer, Ben Okri, Dangerous

Love. I cite this example because it was one of the first novels I read that persuaded me that

there were much more compelling ways of bringing cityness and mundane beauty to life than

the wooden development tropes that remain the stock and trade of NGOs and often even

developmentalist academic discourses.



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Okri’s story is set in the immediate aftermath of the brutal Biafra civil war and is refracted

through the phenomenological experiences of his lead protagonist, Omovo, who is a fledgling

painter that happen to live in one of the worst Lagosian slums and hopelessly in love with a

woman married to another man who also live the in the sprawling compound. In the

following scene, Omovo makes a stab at grasping his city…

When he got home he sat on the bed and pondered their conversation. Soon he felt his head spinning in

a cross-wind of too many things he had to think through. He opened the windows. The air that blew in

was fresh at first and then it brought all the smells of the compound. Light streamed in. He decided to

paint in order to escape the traffic jam of his thoughts.

He brought out his easel and oils. He mixed the colours, his mind became progressively engrossed in the

act, the ritual of preparation for work. He breathed more gently. His mind cleared. Then he got out the

canvas he had abandoned earlier. He looked at the confused, ugly colours and half-formed images he

had daubed there. He looked at the canvas a long time. Then, curiously, he began to discern the

potentialities in the half formed shapes. He read himself into them. With his natural aversion for

shapes that were not anything related to blood and feeling, with his respect for the narrative aspect of

painting, his mood guided him to attempt something he would not ordinarily do because he felt it too

difficult and demanding. He started to paint a Lagos traffic jam. The moment he realised what he was

doing he was happy, he felt light, and he ceased to think altogether. The vision and his mood carried

him on their unique stream and he soon wasn’t even aware that he was painting. And in the moments

when his concentration broke and he became aware that he was indeed painting he began to do

something strange, something he had never done before. He began to name the images he was bring into

being, began to chant them, as if he were praying, as if the naming of them in some way guided his

hand:

‘Metal. Hot road. Copper sun. Sweating drivers. Busy hawkers. Policemen accepting bribes. Lights

on painted metal. Yellow and black taxis. Glittering windscreens. Weather-beaten faces. Struggling

faces. A million colours of sun and city. The faces of my people. Hallucinatory sunlight on the green

lagoon. Gasoline fumes. Beggars. Soldiers everywhere. Traffic jams everywhere. Noise. Chaos.

Everything jammed. Motion. Confusion. Houses jammed. No birds in the air.’

And so he spoke and worked as if he was transcribing images from a cloud.

After a while he felt drained and aching. He took it as a sign to stop. […]When he went back to his room he sat down and, after his eyes had readjusted to the level of the light in

the room, looked at his painting. It wasn’t as good as what he had seen in his mind. He was a little

annoyed by the poor reproduction of imagined reality. He always disliked the feeling of knowing that

what was good in his painting nearly always came from his inability to do what he intended, to catch

what he saw.17

In a more dystopian vein I can also invoke the reportage of George Packer, who is able in a

few pages to capture the grinding intensity of routinised violence in contemporary Lagos

without loosing sight of the silent capacity of ordinary Lagosians to make do despite these



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impossible odds.18 On the other end of the Continent, an Ethiopain journalist, Yohannes

Edermariam provides an equally affecting and resonant account of the odd mixture of

inventiveness, tenacity, cunning, cruelty, and truncated dynamics of daily life in contemporary

Addis Ababa. One of the themes that emerge very strongly in this piece is the degree to which

sex work by girls and women become one of the primary livelihood practices and how,

seemingly, both unavoidable and psychically corrosive this is. One of the characters we meet

in Edermariam’s essay is a young woman called Mekdes. She had fled to Addis when her

relationship with her boyfriend turned violent and in the process left her newborn with her

grandmother. In Addis, she knew no-one and ended up being inducted into the ways of the

city by two newly acquired friends who had also ended up in Addis on the back of fleeing

from violent domestic relationships. Both of her new friends were sex workers and inducted

Mekdes into the trade. At some point in the conversation as she laments her fate and

especially lack of options, she reflects: “Nobody can really deal with this kind of life” […]

“Without knowing it, you start off at a certain okay place and slide downward, and when you

find yourself in this place, where you are amazes you; it scares you. But you’ve reached the

place, touched your feet to it, and so, because you have no choice, you just live.”19

For most poor youth in many cities of Africa, the city is a highly circumscribed funnel that

delivers them to contexts within which they have very little option but to opt for a life of

violence, excess and terror because of the profound deprivation that characterise their

households and neighbourhoods which coincides with the crumbling of former familial and

traditional socialisation frameworks.20 However, to simply see them as victims of the horror

story that is failed modernisation in Africa is to entirely miss the point. This insight comes

through most compellingly in the unflinching scholarship of Mamadou Diouf. He

demonstrates how something else, something yet unknown, and certainly untheorised is

unfolding in the crisis-ridden spaces of contemporary African cities: “Excluded from the

arenas of power, work, education, and leisure, young Africans construct places of socialization

and new sociabilities whose function is to show their difference, either on the margins of

society or at its heart, simultaneously as victims and active agents, and circulating in a

geography that escapes the limits of the national territory…”.21

Diouf continues to argue that a focus on the embodied work of identity marking and

circulation that these youths engage in, we can foster an alternative reading of the African

city:

In most African societies, distress as well as success adhere to the body and are read onthe body, especially among young people. Clothed, adorned with jewels, powdered,

perfumed, and shaped, their bodies also bear the scars left by the struggle for survivalor the longing for “a good life” through licit or illicit activities such as prostitution,

vagrancy, or delinquency. By living life on the margin, young people abolish the gap

between adolescence and adulthood, and in some cases, between childhood and



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adolescence. Sex and violence become rites of passage and initiation which, like thenew religious practices, produce a historicity of dissidence and dissent. By escaping the

political and moral discourses that hemmed them in, and by moving into the cracksopened up by the crisis of the state and society, African youth has provoked an

unprecedented moral and civic panic. Young people are now seen and constructed asa menace, as much because of their pleasures and leisure activities as because of the

violence they can manifest. These two aspects have become indissociable from them,with their most evident expression in the AIDS epidemic that is ravaging thecontinent. To kill, to experience violence and pleasure, to move along the obscurepaths of night and migration, of witchcraft, of the urban and rural undergrounds-all

these impulses produce new cultures, new sociabilities, and new meanings of pleasure,life, and death.22

What I draw from this framing is a fertile research agenda that can immediately open a vast

terrain for more grounded, spatially attuned and phronetic research23 that can potentially

yield the microscopic details of everyday practices as imagined and experienced by the

contemporary protagonists of the city, whom, through their abandonment by the nationalist

development project, have been forced to carve out a distinctive, even if often monstrous

‘morality’ of risk, chance, narcissistic pleasure, and also, tenderness and intimacy.24 It is

precisely due to the moral ambiguity embedded in such emergent socialities that we need a

post- or critical humanist philosophical frame to underpin such a research agenda.

The point I want to leave you with in citing these affect abounding representations of

contemporary urban life is to accentuate the dangers associated with a narrow body of urban

scholarship that remain fixated on macro demographic, economic and political trends within

a developmentalist mindset. Those registers are important, have their place but have enjoyed

exclusive reign over the African urban knowledge project for too long and has in fact caused

considerable damage because it evacuates more interpretive, phenomenological and relational

accounts of the social, cultural dynamics and psychological dispositions; what Arjun

Appadurai calls the ingredients for the “production of locality”.25

However, the key point is not merely that we need fuller, richer and more textured accounts

of ordinariness in African cities as we find in the vast literature on western urbanism; the point

is that we need these differentiated accounts to help us understand what geographers call the

spatiality of the city. Current debates on spatiality are deeply indebted to the pathbreaking

work of Henri Lefebvre who developed a sophisticated theoretical account of how urban

spaces are relentlessly constructed at the intersection of “representations of space” by

architects, planners and I suppose developers; “spaces of representation” which denote the

vast symbolic associations we link with particular kinds of spaces, e.g. when we as

Capetownians hear the words ‘Waterfront’ or ‘Khayelitsha’ all manner of symbolic registers

spring to mind which may or may not have anything to do with the material and cultural

realities of those sites. Lefebvre also invokes the idea of “spatial practice” which denotes the



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material, concrete, tangible dimensions of social activity and interactions. Space, according to

this framework gets reproduced as these different moments continuously interact and collide

and then gets filtered very subjectively in how we all, uniquely perceive, conceive and live

space at every moment of every day.26 What this schema suggests to us is that urban space is

never an empty container in which individual or collective identities can be read off people’s

class status, or their residential address, nor their mobility patterns. As scholars we have a

fundamental responsibility to investigate and theorise the specific ways in which various

levels/orders/dynamics of spatial organisation and territory are literally fleshed out, animated

and rendered new through the unpredictable combination of spatial practices and imaginaries

that invariably collide in cities. Put differently, if we build on Lefebvre’s basic approach we

can appreciate how cities embody immense heterogeneity in terms of “their density as

concentrations of people, things, institutions and architectural forms; the heterogeneity of life

they juxtapose in close proximity; and their siting of various networks of communication and

flow across and beyond the city.”27 This idea that there is an inevitable spatial dynamism to

urban life has spawned a massive body of scholarship on the generative capacity that arises from

the energies embedded in such constitutive pluralism. However, almost all of that scholarship

pertains to Northern cities and contexts even though the unique, hybrid, informalised

modernities of cities in the South arguably offer up even more dramatic juxtapositions and

generative potentialities. Unfortunately, these remain largely unwritten scholarly accounts.

The question we must confront is whether our narrow obsession with developmentalist

solutions will ever produce the institutional conditions to see this overdue scholarship come to

pass. On this note it is appropriate to now turn to some methodological/philosophical

implications of the argument thus far.

Philosophical intimations

The foregrounding of new spatial theories to excavate and explain the dense and rich

indeterminacies of African cities is not only essential to elaborate more compelling theoretical

accounts of African urbanism, which is a worthy academic goal in and of itself, but is also

essential for relevant applied research in a developmentalist vein. In fact what we need is a

knowledge milieu that allows for rigorous engagement between these genres of urban

scholarship that will allow us to formulate much better questions and maybe even answers

from time to time. However, if we are to succeed in forging this kind of interpellation, I am

convinced that our conceptual frameworks about the functioning of structural political

economy dynamics in African cities are inadequate.

Over the past decade or two urban political economy analyses have been dominated by either

neoclassical or neo-Marxist approaches. Neoclassic approaches are more economic in

orientation and tend to focus on the relationship between urban infrastructures, productivity

and effective mediating institutions to ensure that market-based solutions can succeed. Neo-

Marxists are more focussed on political systems and seek to demonstrate that urban policies



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almost always only serve the interests of elites who are hell bent on securing foreign direct

investment and tailor urban investments accordingly, at the expense of the urban poor of

course. What is ironic is that radical urban theorists draw on regime theory, or regulation

theory and/or governmentality theories to explain how these class-based power dynamics

unfold. Ironic because all of these theories arise from northern contexts and assume a well

developed welfare state as an inheritance of Keynesian policies over a number of decades.28

Of course none of these conditions apply in African cities, because the grounding conditions

of political institutions, political cultures, economic regulatory systems, economic structure,

educational levels of the labour force, etc. are simply not present in comparable historical

terms as they are in Northern worlds. Yet, despite what one may regard as an obvious

structural difference with profound conceptual implications, we still see little evidence of

attempts to analyse urban economic systems and associated political and cultural institutions

in the context of the Africa’s particular asymmetrical insertion into a variety of overlapping

and contiguous “spaces of flows” in the lexicon of Manuel Castells.

Another, equally obvious anomaly to point to is the complexity of economic processes and

interactions and livelihood dynamics unfolding in African cities amidst the widespread

prevalence of illicit and grey economic activity. UN-Habitat data suggests that more than

60% of urban residents in Africa obtain employment and incomes from the informal sector.29

In others, informality is the norm. This trend is likely to continue but with an increasingly

youthful face as more than 50% of Africa’s population is under 24 years of age.30 What we do

not know is what it means for the functioning of urban economic systems when distinctions

between formal and informal are seemingly redundant and the imaginary of long-term wage

work becomes permanently displaced?

It should be fairly obvious by now that I regard our vast gaps in knowledge about African

cities as an outgrowth of our over-reliance on western derived theoretical frameworks.

However, I am certain there is also a deeper, more insidious dynamic at work. Most scholars

are overburdened by apriori moral assumptions about what is good, normal, modern and

what is not and therefore not worthy of study, or if studied, not to be valourised. We urgently

need to move towards a more dispassionate approach to get a handle on the real city, the real

economy and the real social practices and identities of the majority of urbanites who are

building our cities and we need to do this in a much more sophisticated theoretical framework

that can foreground the specificity of spatial practices in our diverse cities and towns.

However, it is not enough to simply invoke the need for dispassioned scholarship and to follow

the evidence whenever it may lead us. There are more fundamental philosophical issues at

stake if we are serious to find and account for the elusive ‘real city’. I have been circling

around this problematic over the past few years through an exploration of urban violence and

popular responses. If we consider for a moment in Congo alone, there has been 5.4 million



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conflict related deaths between 1998 and 2008; let alone the other thirty African countries

where conflicts were recorded in the past few years, then is it clear that violence dominates

social life.31 Read in conjunction with available data on urban poverty and multiple

dimensions of deprivation and insecurity, it is inescapable to conclude that ‘the everyday’, i.e.

mundane normalcy is profoundly sutured by structural and symbolic violence which in turn

reproduce an acute level of social violence that overdetermine familial and domestic relations.

How can one remain dispassionate amidst this relentless cruelty, you must be wondering?

Here I think it is sensible to follow John Gray’s advice that we need to abandon both liberal

humanist and Marxist beliefs in a teleological approach to history and by extension the

human condition, which in this reading is always somehow on its way to somewhere better.

Instead, we need to opt for a more realist approach that accepts the inescapability of the

conclusion that “there is no right way of settling conflicts among universal values”. This is

premised on the rejection of “any belief in ultimate convergence in history”, which eschews

the “lure of harmony in ethics.” For moral conflicts can often be “of a kind that cannot be

fully resolved” and the contemporary world is a stark reminder of the perpetual choices we all

make for a lesser evil.32

This, I believe, is consistent with the postcolonial pragamatist philosophical stance advocated

by Phillip Harrison.33 Postcolonialism, with its interest in how the colonial encounter violently

repressed and sought to erase indigenous practices and associated knowledges is a productive

seam of analysis with which to reveal the inherent teleological biases of western rationality,

and more importantly, the potential that reside in repressed and occluded knowledges that

were never successfully done away with through the colonial encounter and the skewed

modernist enterprise built on top of it.34 Harrison proposes that through careful excavation,

subjugated knowledges and subjectivities can be retrieved and revealed. There is ample

opportunity for such excavations because the failure of the western modernist adventure in

much of the global South provide the cracks through which other practices, rationalities and

world views can be glimpsed. This line of argument leads Harrison to suggest that we need to

conceive of multiple modernities, and by extension, multiple rationalities, which must imply

plural moralities, that underpin contemporary life.35 This move opens up a hopeful reading

whereby Africa seizes to be a basket case of multiple pathologies by western modernist

standards, but rather an example of inventiveness but not necessarily en route to a

preordained future.

Rather than seeing Africa as an incomplete or deteriorated example of modernity, wemight focus on how Africa, and its many different parts, is—through the resourceful

responses of its residents to conditions of vulnerability—in the process of becoming something new that is both part of and separate from Western modernity. This newimaginary may provide a conceptual opening that would allow us to think about

Africa in ways that are more hopeful and positive; that acknowledge the success of



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Africans in constructing productive lives at a micro-scale, and economies and societiesat a macro-scale, that work despite major structural constraints.36

Even though I think Harrison tries to leap to quickly to a discourse of hope, his philosophical

project does chime with the unsettling injunction of cultural theorist Ashraf Jamal, who insists

we need to abandon our deeply embedded belief that all moral and ethical questions must be

resolved on an axis of hope and depair.37 Instead, Jamal urges us to eschew such a simplistic

moral scheme and rather opt for an ethics that forces us to confront the horror of human and

natural torment with the full realisation that we do not have the answers to solve these

dilemmas but can cultivate a sensibility to inhabit the horror, as a first and necessary step to

truly grasp its decisive grasp; and then find new languages and registers with which to name

and possibly displace it. I obviously do not have the time and space on this occasion to fully

develop this philosophical project but felt compelled to register it because it provides the

passageway to a different kind of urban scholarship. At the core of this ethical disposition, I

believe, is a radical reconsideration of social being and becoming.

Recasting social life

One of the most promising conceptual developments over the last while has been the recasting

of social identities at the confluence of socio-cultural and biological sciences through the

foregrounding of affective consciousness. In its simplest terms affect denotes the experience of

feelings or emotions and forms a key part of an organisms’ interaction with external stimuli.38

Affective consciousness is distinguishable from cognitive consciousness and biologically our

response to external stimuli taps into affective predispositions before any cognitive reaction

can be triggered. There is a difference in how affect is regarded in psychoanalytic theory and

philosophy. William Connolly draws on the philosophical stream, which is indebted to

Spinoza, to build a case that political theory needs to be recast to take cognisance of the

insights that emerge when people are not perceived as simply calculative beings who operate

primarily on the basis of cognitive modes of consciousness. Instead, Connolly suggests that we

need to draw together biological accounts of life with cultural theories of being for “biology

and culture are always mixed together in human life.”39 This recognition of the

“body/brain/culture network” allows for the constitutive role of affect in thought and

judgement to come to the fore.

Affect, Connolly demonstrates is particularly important for action-oriented decision-making

processes because humans tend to act on the basis of external stimuli at a faster pace than

what the brain can process, which means that something else, affective dispositions, inform

responses through preliminary orientations that we have. In drawing on the evidence from

neuroscientists, Connolly demonstrates that individuals with diminished capacity in the brain

regions associated with affect “are unable to reason their way to practical conclusions”40

Affect holds the key to decipher deeply embedded dispositions, desires and concerns that steer

us towards a particular kind of response that is most resonant, most appealing, most



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promising, and these tendencies are activated in the gap between an event unfolding in the

now and our brain figuring out what it means in order to trigger a considered response; often

that response is a complex emotional state which is more processed that initial affective states.

This is a universal quality in all human beings, which Connolly believes explains much about

the power of seduction that characterises contemporary cultures of consumption and the

symbolic distractions that underpins contemporary democratic systems.41

The key point about foregrounding an affective conception of the social is that affect is tied to

the embodiment of all experience. Thus, for Massumi, the key to understanding the significance

of affect is to come to terms with the minuscule transitions the body goes through as it moves

in various gravitational fields.42 For the body to move to its next point, it requires a great deal

of implicit negotiation of gravity, equilibrium, and balance and that capacity resides before

cognitive consciousness as an affective awareness brought into being through experience and

endless feedback loops and reconfirmations. However, crucially, affect also represents a

profound connection with micro-contexts, people and processes that surround bodily

transitions. Affective responses draw deeply on layers and layers of experiences that

continuously folds into itself creating a richer reservoir of potential affective resonances, which

denotes an inherent and constitutive potentiality for becoming something or someone else

even if the transition is microscopic. Brain Massumi captures this potentiality aptly:

A body’s ability to affect or be affected – its charge of affect – isn’t something fixed. Sodepending on circumstances it goes up and down gently like a tide, or maybe storms

and crests like a wave, or at times simply bottoms out. It’s because this is all attachedto movements of the body that it can’t be reduced to emotion. It’s not just subjective,which is not to say there is nothing subjective about it. Spinoza says that everytransition is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity. The affect and thefeeling of the transition are not two different things. They’re two sides of the samecoin, just like affecting and being affected. That’s the first sense in which affect is about

intensity – every affect is a doubling. This experience of a change, an affect-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience. This gives the body’smovement a kind of depth that stays with it across all its transitions – accumulating inmemory, in habit, in reflect, in desire, in tendency. Emotion is the way the depth of thatongoing experience registers personally at a given moment.43

Given that this research has only recently entered the social sciences, it remains unclear how

exactly it will transform our theories of identity, collective being and action, and of course

politics. What is clear though from the work of, for example, Kathleen Stewart is that it offers

us a much richer and fine-grained language to research and represent everyday practices,

spaces and dynamics. In her book, Ordinary Affects, she argues that

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life. Ordinary affects

are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the



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quality of continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences.They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations

daydreams, encounters and habits if relating, in strategies and their failures, in formsof persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and

agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.44

This account of individual and social becoming forces a break with established theories about

false consciousness whereby popular and other classes get caught up in a comprehensive

ideological web that undermines collective action and critical thought. An affective conception

of the social – firmly embedded in a biocultural ontology – enables a more empowered and

differentiated conception of agency in which all people become more ‘autonomous’ and pro-

active actors in the construction of their lives and socialities. Set against this reading, it

becomes clear why I think it is so important to learn from the attention to social detail in the

work of Mamadou Diouf cited earlier.

Thus, the aspect that seems particularly potent to me is the idea of cultural practices that

allow people to rethink their relationship with the various spaces that they traverse and

mobilise in order to reproduce an existence in the city. Thus, if we circle back to the 60% of

African urbanites who live in slums, we must acknowledge their incessant efforts to find ways

of breaking through the numbness that stems from having to carve an existence at the brutal

end of daily life framed by routinised processes of exclusion, exploitation and discrimination;

processes that demand a stylised resignation to one’s fate because at least, there are always

small mercies to be counted: not being as bad off as another; the prospect of a better life in the

hereafter or somewhere else when the moment of migration finally arrives; the prospect of

immediate and recurring pleasures that reside at the other end of a bottle, or spliff, or sex, or

dancehall, or church, or mosque, or brotherhood meeting, or tailor’s fitting, or another

episode of a Nollywood soap opera, or well worn string of gossip, and so on. In rehearsing the

mundane pleasures of banal escapism that suture the lives of the urban poor or popular

classes, I am not making a moral argument about false consciousness or ideological

indoctrination, but rather suggest the importance of reading the affective functions of popular

practices because it is only through the redeployment of such registers that one can begin to

fathom what is going on in the real city and potentially animate a resonant engagement with

the city.

Grasping in the dark

All of the above may lead you to assume that I believe it is impossible to intervene in African

cities in order to create “order”, access to basic human entitlements, economic resilience and

inclusion and functioning political institutions. On the contrary, given my intellectual

awakening in the midst of the Wilsons’ and Rowntree strike in 1981 when I was almost

expelled on my second day of high school for distributing solidarity pamphlets, I remain first



15

and foremost an activist for purposive change even though my tools of revolution may,

ironically, have shifted from the street to the classroom. In fact, all of the above for me adds

up to a much more refined political acuity that is a prerequisite for strategic and effective

politics that deserve rigorous scholarship. On this note, I will now conclude my lecture by

sketching my research agenda for the next period.

Given this account of severe limitations of data and theory, you may be curious about my own

contribution to the field. My primary interest is in persuading other African scholars that we

have a crisis of knowledge on our hands in terms of how to recognise, think about and

research the specificity of the African city. Building onto some of the methodological

considerations I flagged earlier, my aim is to construct interdisciplinary exchanges along the

spectrum of the aesthetic and functional in the banal mundaneness of the everyday practices.

With aestheticism I have in mind the ineluctable demands of beauty, desire and transgression

that bubble up from all of our subconscious to anchor and orient our engagement with the

world, the city and its infinite myths, of course always heavily inflected by popular cultures. By

functionalism I wish to signal pragmatic requirements of dwelling, mobility, sociality and

economy that require of all urbanites to incessantly negotiate their livelihood and wellbeing

imperatives. Given that our interior and exterior impulses are intertwined, I am convinced

that we cannot access a satisfactory, even if always partial, account of cityness in Africa.

Practically I am facilitating a dialogue between African urban scholars (from diverse

disciplinary backgrounds) and artists who have a shared obsession with African cities and

inventing new concepts and representations to define the unknowable.

This dialogue is being structured around five sets of issues/questions in order to flesh out the

aesthetic—functional spectrum of cityness: senses of belonging, attachments, zones of contact,

deal making and lines of movement. I will briefly explore each of these lines of enquiry. One,

what are the senses of belonging that ordinary cityzens feel, display, mobilise, invest in and

invariably ambiguate when the need arises? Does the city offer a distinctive context in which

the dichotomies simply dissipate in the wake of what people do, often have to do, to keep as

many senses of belonging in play? Also, when the severity of urban violence or evictions or

extortion gets too overwhelming and people turn to new religious formations that offer a host

of access points to various kinds of support and intelligences, do these new sites of belonging

and community replace former ones or do they simply add to an expansive set of identities

and belongings? How does the work of belonging and social association impact on the

spatiality of the city? What roles do the new places of congregation, association, leisure, and

ambling, play as gravitational points in subtle and highly malleable geographies of affiliation

and distinction?

Two, what are the attachments that city dwellers display? Which attachments matter more

than others? Are attachments to consumables more or less important than social ones? Does



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commodity obsessions and social attachments implicate particular places over others? Can

attachments be disentangled in such ways? How do conflicts over, particularly, consumer and

gendered attachments shape inter-generational and inter-class conflicts in the city? How are

attachment embodied, especially amongst the youth who invest greatly to demonstrate their

mastery of particular styles and fashions in order to advance their range of opportunities for

inclusion, mobility, access and of course, belonging? And again, what kinds of spatial

geographies are discernable when we trace and expose the shifting waters of desire and

aspiration as reflected in the work of attachment?

Three, how can we define, uncover and understand the multiple zones of contact across a

variety of social and identity boundaries? Building on the rich oeuvre of AbdouMaliq Simone

that demonstrate how even in the most divided and internecine contexts, groups who are

supposed to be enemies and implacably engaged in (violent) conflict can still be counted on to

find zones of interaction and cooperation in the endless search for opportunity and

intelligence.45 In other words, in most African cities there are counter intuitive processes

underway to redeploy the seeming insularity of groups to get certain kinds of mobilisations

done. Given the intimate connection between the levels of poverty, inequality and economic

exclusion and the hardening of social group identities and conflicts, is it not essential to begin

to understand these counter intuitive processes better? Is this not one of the key specificities of

the African urban condition that can aid our search for a more grounded and fleshed out

account of African cityness?

Four, and closely related to the previous vector of daily practice, is the question of deal making .

There is now a considerable body of scholarship that provide insight into the elaborate and

intricate processes that are embarked upon to come to agreements to cooperate to achieve

some modest access to cash, information, favours, goods, the possibility of a reciprocal turn in

the future (a kind of futures trading of sorts). At the same time this body of work also reveals a

constitutive fragility to these processes because there are so many players and events and

forces that could ruin the deal even before it is completely hatched. Yet, despite the modest

returns on deal making, the incredible effort expended to simply be in the right place at the

right time to even be in the equation, the practice of deal making is clearly endemic.

Furthermore there is a mimetic quality to it because the generalised perceptions in the

broader public sphere is that the state, and especially state interventions, are quintessentially

about the art and violence of deal-making. This intimates a very different approach to ‘the

political’ and the available avenues for rethinking it.

Lastly, and more in the symbolic domain, we could be asking what the various lines of

movement and transsection that ordinary people use to read, navigate and represent the city

by? It is obviously impossible to find single or homogenous conceptions of the experiences and

representations of space, but it would be interesting to remap the geography of connectivities



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across the city from the perspective of those who make these journeys all the time. These

pathways and maps would tie back to the vectors discussed before dealing with senses of

belong, exercising attachment and knowing where to be or not be. A completely different

geography of movement, open spaces, closed spaces, black holes, open thresholds, and the like

can emerge if we take the care to surface and represent navigational registers that underpin

daily routines and imaginary obsessions with more ambitious migrations to foreign lands and

opportunities.

These vectors of the everyday are of course not exhaustive or adequately comprehensive but

can register a start to a qualitatively different research engagement about the material and

sensorial dimensions and folds of everyday urbanism. However, if we are to truly benefit from

a focus on specific slivers of locality production, it must be endeavoured with a full

appreciation of the spatial turn that I addressed briefly earlier on and which shines through

the fertile work of scholars such as Mamadou Diouf, Okwui Enwezor, Matt Gandy, Joyce

Nyairo, Sarah Nuttall, AbdouMaliq Simone, amongst many others.

Within this broad framework, that I will advance in concert with a network of scholars and

artists across the Continent, more concrete research of mine will explore the potential for

democratic renewal through public culture interventions that seek to engage and enrol citizens

in more creative ways. This will tie in with a more specific interest in the practices of a new

generation of urban social movements that one finds in most slums of the global South;

movements that use their existing power to build cities as a source of collective power to

fashion much more autonomous, realist and utopian pragmatist discourses and practices to

generate new forms of politics. At the same time, I hope to continue my own more policy-

oriented explorations into the political-economic-cultural drivers of urban regulatory systems

so as to speed up the unavoidable transition to low-carbon networked infrastructures. Of

course, as you can gather, all of these themes flow through the broader notion of relational

governance and politics.

I hope that I have succeeded in demonstrating to you tonight that as yet the African city

remains an elusive mirage clouded by limited data, and more presciently, inappropriate

theoretical approaches that prevent us from coming to terms with immensely complex, but

also generative dynamism of the spatial alchemy that can only be sensed there, or should I

say, here. Clearly, for both what we know and do not know, the African city is indeed an

edge, a site of danger, for there are an impossible many dimensions to grasp at once.



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1 The following preamble was read at lecture: There is absolutely no reasonable explanation for why I amhonoured today by this reputable institution to enter the priesthood of higher learning. My life has been a series

of contingencies and adventures that can be ascribed to the generosity, belief, challenges, love and deepcommitment of many friends and family. In many ways I feel as unsure and confused about what I want tobecome when I ‘grow up’ as when I happened upon six rather arbitrary first year courses at UWC when I startedmy BA in 1987. There are just so many puzzles and conundrums that continue to vie for my attention that Iforever feel I am just starting on one or the other journey. So, tonight, this inaugural lecture and all the symbolicweight it carries in tow is simply overwhelming in the best possible sense. I am particularly pleased that I canshare it with so many loved ones, esteemed colleagues and fellow trench mates from the African Centre forCities. I thank everyone who has crossed my life because you can be assured that I always take something fromany kind of brush-up and invariably remould it into the restlessness that fuel my praxis and desires. Really, thank you for being here to share in this elaboration of my current preoccupations and yearnings.

2 Kwinter, S. (1996) ‘Flying the bullet or Where did the future begin?’ in Kwinter, S. (ed) Rem Koolhaas:Conversations with students. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 73.

3 This rate is slower compared to earlier periods: average growth rates in 1965-1975 was 4.65% and between1985-1990, 4.16% and this is slowing to 3.1% between 2005 – 2010. Drawn from: UN-Habitat (2008) The State of

African Cities 2008: A framework for addressing urban challenges in Africa. Nairobi: United Nations Human SettlementProgramme, p. ix.

4 Satterthwaite, D. (2007) ‘The transition to a predominantly urban world and its underpinnings’, HumanSettlements Discussion Paper. Theme: Urban Change No. 4. London: International Institute for Environment andDevelopment. It is important to heed Satterthwaite’s caution that urban projections that go too far into thefuture, e.g. 2030, must be treated with great circumspection because the underlying data sets for manydeveloping countries remain extremely problematic. Also see: UNFPA [United Nations Population Fund] (2007).State of the World Population 2007 . New York: UNFPA, pp. 7-8.

5 UN-Habitat, (2008) The State of African Cities 2008: A framework for addressing urban challenges in Africa. Nairobi:United Nations Human Settlement Programme, p. 6.

6 UN-Habitat (2008) The State of African Cities 2008: A framework for addressing urban challenges in Africa. Nairobi:

United Nations Human Settlement Programme.

7 UN-Habitat, (2008) State of the World’s Cities 2008/9: Harmonious Cities. London: Earthscan, p. 19.

8 Drawn from: AfDB (2008) ‘Concept Note: Fostering Shared Growth: Urbanization, Inequality and Poverty inAfrica.’ Briefing paper for: The 2008 ADB Annual Meetings Ministerial Round Table Discussions and HighLevel Seminars, Maputo, Mozambique.

9 World Bank data quoted in: Ajulu, C. & Motsamai, D. (2008) ‘The Pan-African Infrastructure DevelopmentFund (PAIDF): towards and African agenda’, Global Insight , Issue 76, Johannesburg: Institute for GlobalDialogue.

10 Tannerfeldt, G. and Ljung, P. (2006) More Urban Less Poor: An introduction to urban development and management. London: Earthscan, p.60.

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This trend is brilliantly demonstrated in the global survey of the history and political economy of urbaninfrastructure provision by: Graham, S. and Marvin, S. (2001) Splintering Urbanism. Networked infrastructures,technological mobilities and the urban condition, London and New York: Routledge.

12 Lee, K.N. (2007) ‘An Urbanizing World’, in Starke, L. (ed) State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, p. 16). [See this reference for original sources.]

13 It is important to bear in mind the differences between economic, household and public infrastructures.

Economic infrastructure refers broadly to connectivity infrastructures such as roads, ports, airports, stations andother transportation or information and communication network systems. Household infrastructures includewater, sanitation, energy, waste removal and in some countries like South Africa, the physical house and the land

it is located on is provided for free to the poor. Public infrastructures refer to public good resources and spacessuch as streets, pavements, squares, parks, community halls, libraries, markets (which can also be an economicinfrastructure of course), and so on. Typically, powerful classes and interest groups who drive the economy have

a disproportionate say in which kinds of infrastructures will be prioritised and where exactly. The consequence of



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these dynamics is a deepening of urban poverty, cemented by inequality, laying the foundation for long-termuneven development. This argument is explored at greater length in: Pieterse, E. City Futures: Confronting the Crisisof Urban Development . London: Zed Books; and: Parnell, S., Pieterse, E. & Watson, V (forthcoming). ‘Planning forCities in the Global South: An African Research Agenda for Sustainable Human Settlements.’ Progress in Planning .

14 See: Douglas, I., et al (2009) ‘Unjust Waters: Climate Change, Flooding and the Urban Poor in Africa’, inBicknell, J., Dodman, D. and Satterthwaite, D. (eds) Adapting Cities to Climate Change: Understanding and Addressing the

Development Challenges. London: Earthscan; Simon, D. (2008) ‘When Do You See It? The Challenges of GlobalEnvironmental Change for Urban Africa.’ Paper presented to the UNU-WIDER Project Workshop “Beyond theTipping Point: Development in an Urban World”, Cape Town 26-28 June.

15 A number of studies make this case compellingly: Mbembe, A. and Nuttall, S. (2004) ‘Writing the World froman African Metropolis’, Public Culture 16(3): 347-372; Murray, M.J. and Myers, G (2006) ‘Introduction’, inMurray, M.J. & Myers, G. (eds) Cities in Contemporary Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Robinson, J, (2006)Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development . London: Routledge; Simone, A. (2004) For the City Yet to Come:Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

16 See the erudite work of Norman Long on the lifeworlds of the poor: Long, N. (2001) Development Sociology. Actor

Perspectives, London: Routledge.17 Okri, B. (2002[1996]) Dangerous Love. London: Phoenix House, pp. 188-90.

18 Packer, G. (2006) ‘The Megacity. Decoding the chaos of Lagos’, The New Yorker , November, 62-75.

19 Edemariam, Y. (2007) ‘From an Ancient Cloud: Getting by in Ethiopia’s Slums’, Harper’s Magazine, May: 67-75, p. 72.

20 For a brilliant overview of how these social erosions have unfolded and shaped contemporary African politicsand economics, see: Chabal, P. (2009) Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling . London: Zed Books.

21 Diouf, M. (2003) ‘Engaging postcolonial cultures: African youth and public space’, African Studies Review, 46(1):

1-12, p. 5.

22 Ibid., p. 9-10.

23 For an elaboration on phronesis through case study research, see: Flyvbjerg, B. (2004) ‘Phronetic planning

research: theoretical and methodological reflections’, Planning Theory and Practice, 5(3): 283-306; Flyvbjerg, B.(2001) Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it can Count Again, London: Sage.

24 These readings and conclusions also come through in the arresting work of anthropologist, Philip de Boeck onKinshasa, Dominique Malaquais on Douala, and Scheld on Dakar: de Boeck, P. and Plissart, M. (2004) Kinshasa:Tales of the Invisible City, Brussels: Ludion; Malaquais, D. (2006) ‘Douala/Johannesburg/New York: CityscapesImagined’, in Murray, M.J. & Myers, G. (eds) Cities in Contemporary Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Scheld,S. (2007) ‘Youth Cosmopolitanism: Clothing, the City and Globalization in Dakar’, City & Society, 19(2): 232-253.

25 Appadurai, A. (1996) ‘The Production of Locality’ in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

26 Schmidt, C. (2008) ‘Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space’, in Goonewardena, K., Kipfer, S.,

Milgrom, R. and Schmid, C. (eds) Space, Difference, Everyday life, Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York: Routledge,p. 36-37.

27 Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002) Cities: Reimaginaing the Urban. Cambridge: Polity, p. 2.

28 For a jargon free introduction to these theories, see: Byrne, D. (2001) Understanding the Urban, New York:Palgrave.

29 See the special issue on urban informality in Habitat Debate, Volume 13(2), 2007.

30 Cheru, F. (2008) ‘Africa’s development in the 21st century: Reshaping the research agenda.’ Current African Issues, No. 41, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.

31 ADB [African Development for Africa] (2008) African Development Report 2008/2009: Conflict Resolution, Peace and Reconstruction in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

32 Gray, J. (2008) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Penguin, pp. 277 & 279.



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33 Harrison, P. (2006) ‘On the Edge of Reason: Planning and Urban Futures in Africa’, Urban Studies, 43(2): 319-335.

34 On this point specifically, see: Rakodi, C. (2002) ‘Order and Disorder in African Cities: Governance, Politics,

and Urban Land Development Processes’, in Enwezor, O., et al, (eds) Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. Dokumenta 11_Platform4. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. I do not have space here toexplore the counter arguments to a postcolonial epistemological stance as, for example, advanced by: Zeleza, P.‘Historicizing the Posts: The View from African Studies’, in Mugabane, Z. (ed) Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and

African Studies. Trenton: Africa World Press. Drawing on a very US focussed academic cultural milieu he comesto a very different understanding about what postcolonialism refers to compared to my own reading. I work withan approach that concurs with the reading that arises from the following two scholars: Ahluwalia, P. (2001)

Politics and Post-Colonial Theory. African Inflections. London: Routledge; Sylvester, C. (1999) ‘Development studiesand postcolonial studies: disparate tales of the ‘Third World’,’ Third World Quarterly, 20(4): 703-722.

35 For a related line of argument, see: Watson, V. (2003) ‘Conflicting Rationalities: Implications for Planning Theory and Ethics’, Planning Theory & Practice, 4(4): 395-407.

36 Harrison (2006) op cit. p. 323.

37 Jamal, A. (2009) ‘Terror and the City’, in Pieterse, E. and Edjabe, N (eds) The African Cities Reader: Pan-African Practices. Cape Town: Chimurenga & African Centre for Cities.

38 This statement is drawn from Wikipedia.

39 Connolly, W.E. (2006) ‘Experience & experiment’, Deadalus, Summer: 67-75, p. 67.

40 Krause, S.R. (2006) ‘Brains, Citizens, and Democracy’s New Nobility’, Theory & Event , 9(1): 1-6, online version: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.1hrause.html; accessed: 30 August 2006, p.1.

41 Connolly, W.E. (2002) Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

42 Massumi, B. (2002). ‘Navigating Movements’, in Zournazi, M. (ed.) Hope: New philosophies for change. New York:Routledge.

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Ibid, p. 213.44 Stewart, K. (2007) Ordinary Affects. Durham & London: Duke University Press, p.3-4.

45 See: Simone, A. M. (2004) For the City yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham & London: DukeUniversity Press.

Pieterse - Grasping the Unknowable

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