African cities in conversation: who are we listening and talking to?

ABSTRACT

The “where” of urban geography as a discipline, and Urban Geography as a journal, has changed significantly over the last 40 years. Here, we take a quantitative and qualitative look at this history. We find, unsurprisingly, some articles about African cities in the journal before 2010, and a notable and ongoing uptick since. Drawing on debates over how southern cities ought to be studied, we identify different framings and lines of argumentation. Some authors frame their case in reference to theories derived primarily from global northern cities, while others focus their literature review on regional scholarship. Some push against, and some seek to advance, universal understandings of what a city is, and ought to be. We reflect on positive changes as well as where we collectively might head as the field and journal continue working to make sense of how to theorize, and where to theorize from.

KEYWORDS:

• African cities
• urban geography
• urban theory
• southern urbanism

Notes

1 Or note that 22 of these focused on South African cities, including a special issue in 1988 and 8 of the first 9 papers about African cities in the journal. North Africa is nearly absent, with the exception of Tangier, examined in Kutz and Lenhardt (2016), and a perhaps surprising absence of studies of Cairo.

2 A brief look at the titles suggests that there is something wrong with these cities: the focus of analysis includes underdevelopment, constraint, conflict, segregation, manipulation, razing, resistance, and violence. Surely, we agree that these are relevant considerations for apartheid urbanism, but it is also telling about the way that African cities were first written about in the journal.