This volume offers valuable anthropological insight into urban Africa, covering a range of cities across a continent that has become one of the fastest urbanizing geographic areas of the globe. Consideration is given to the structures, social formations, and rhythms that constitute the definition of an African city, town, or urban space, and to current concepts for thinking about African cities in the twenty-first century. The contributors examine topics including notions of belonging, the effects of globalization, colonialism, and transnationalism on African urban life, the cultural dimensions of infrastructure and public resources, mobility, labor issues, spatial organization, language, and popular culture trends, among other themes. The book reflects on how the ethnography of urban Africa fits within anthropology and urban studies, and on new theoretical concepts and methodologies that can be created through anthropological fieldwork in African cities. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students from anthropology, African studies and urban studies, as well as sociology and geography.

Focusing on a sub-set of the Dagomba of northern Ghana, this book looks at the first generation to go through secondary school in the north. After university and post-graduate education, they relocate to Accra, the capital, hundreds of miles south. They crossed social and physical space and have become cosmopolitan while holding on to tradition and attachment to their home town. This bridge generation are patrons to those living up north. This book charts their path into elite status and argues that they use the tools gained through education and social connections to influence politics back home.

"Landlords and Lodgers "analyzes the results of a long-term study of a Ghanaian "zongo," or "stranger quarter"--a place of refuge for Hausa migrants from northern Nigeria who have relocated to the city of Accra. Deborah Pellow explores the relationships among community members both in terms of the built structures--rooms, doors, communal structures, and hallways--and of the social networks, institutions, and routine activities that define this unique urban neighborhood. This volume will be useful to students and scholars of the relationships between architecture, migration, and social change.
"This richly observed and lovingly constructed portrait of a distinctive community will be of interest to spatially informed scholars of religion, immigration, minority communities, and gender."--"Gender, Place and Culture"
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"This theoretically informed, well-researched, and closely written book should be quite useful. . . . A fine case study of urban sense of place in a unique, yet in some ways emblematic, West African neighborhood."--Gareth Myers, "Professional Geographer"""

Based on 25 years of research on and in Sabon Zongo, one of the oldest migrant communities in Accra, Ghana, this book is about the spatial and social production of this community within this urban setting. While Sabon Zongo is clearly part of the larger urban landscape of Accra, it is also culturally distinct, representing the melding of a migrant Hausa ethos, informed by Islam, its values and its institutions, and the metropolitan knowledge shared by all city dwellers. The author explores the interconnections of community residents to one another both in terms of built space--the boundaries of community, community structures, and compounds--and social space--the social networks, institutions, activities, and routines through which Sabon Zongo residents reproduce meaning as constituted by and in their built environment.

There is no body of data similar to this study's both in breadth and depth of understanding relating to this particular urban community. Much of the material has never been published. Both theoretically and substantively, this book makes a unique contribution to the literature on African urban life. Written in a clear, open style, this book will appeal to specialists and interested general readers alike.

Proxemic studies concentrate on the structure and organization of space, its design and use, allocation, and the relations encoded in it as aspects of cultural communication. Space is perceived through the senses, and since cultures use the senses differently, they create boundaries differently. Pellow, in her edited collection of boundary studies, focuses on the social conception and production of boundedness. The essays by 10 scholars, eight of them anthropologists, explore the nature of boundaries in terms of change, space and place, society and culture, politics, class, urbanization, housing, and secular and spiritual life.