For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities

by AbdouMaliq Simone

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.

Genres: Urbanism, Africa, Urban Planning, Anthropology

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great concept, the author is the right person to write the book, but the prose is a problem.

[Sherief · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gem of a book that I'm currently re-reading. At times Simone's prose can sit heavy with Deleuzian jargon; this however is less of a bad taste in one's mouth than the slight discomfiture that comes after having eaten a particularly rich, delicious meal. Simone has an amazing ability to see the layering of networks and relationships within cities that few other authors I've read can do with such elegance. One of the greatest things that For the City Yet to Come... brings to the table, besides the familiarity and acuity of Simone's 30-plus years of experience in the field, is Simone's commitment to focus on the productiveness of the anarchy, informality, and idiosyncrasy of African cities. Without romanticizing poverty ala- the detestable Thomas Friedman (beggars as entrepreneurs), and always mindful of the tenuous "state of emergency" that most of the inhabitants he describes live in, Simone challenges us to look at the novelty and potentiality of new forms of networks and sociability that are being produced daily in cities in Africa (and beyond).

More after the reread...

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful, invaluable, if sometimes jargon-y book on urban life in Africa. Without glossing over the endemic violence and state-collapse in African societies, Simone elegantly dispels the doom n' gloom that clouds over too much Western discourse on the "dark" continent by focusing on the strategies deployed by African actors to control, shape and make sense of urban life.

Inspired partly by Deleuze, Simone uses the Deleuzian conceptual apparatus, particularly "assemblage", "multivocality" and "becoming," to mark out the difference of African cities without reducing them to the "Other" of Western modernity's concept of the urban.