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.
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