For the City Yet to Come

Reviewed by: For the City yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities Phyllis M. Martin Simone, AbdouMaliq . 2004. For The City Yet To Come: Changing African Life In Four Cities. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 297 pp., $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper). According to a recent report on global urbanization by the United Nation's Population Division, a majority of Africans will live in cities by 2025. Although such reports are wisely framed by caveats concerning problematic and inadequate data, and by discussions of what constitutes a city, the continuous and rapid growth of African cities over recent decades is not in [End Page 139] doubt. A constant refrain dominates much of the literature: African cities do not work, and the great majority of their people are doomed to lives of abject poverty, lack the most basic amenities, and have little to look forward to. While not at all romanticizing conditions in African cities or denying the suffering and injustices that townspeople endure, AbdouMaliq Simone presents an innovative perspective on what is going on, one that holds some promise, both for those involved on a daily basis and those who sit around tables at national and international seminars. Based on the author's fifteen years of experience in African cities as a researcher, activist, teacher, and consultant, this book admirably combines a broad-ranging analysis of contemporary issues and structures with vignettes and case studies that resonate with the dynamism and resourcefulness of urban populations. A paramount theme concerns the identification of successful local "platforms" of action that can provide bases for the articulation of popular needs with institutional structures. In this view, informal economic activities are not just inadequate and compensatory strategies that save those who might otherwise fall through the cracks—or gaping holes—in national formal economies, but are workable and central strategies that can provide a grounding for wide-ranging social collaboration and the growth of economic opportunity. In other words, what may appear to conventional eyes as makeshift, deficient, and impermanent may, with support from governments and agencies, become a crossing of boundaries, an enlargement of experience, and a sustainable means of economic advancement for otherwise vulnerable groups, such as women and unemployed youth. The willingness of units of governance and of international agencies to recognize the potential of groups that are not necessarily fully formed associations is a key in the process of what the author terms "becoming"—as urban dwellers and cities of the future. The process of identification and implementation of such strategies is exemplified in four case studies. Each is framed by a particular theme, more for heuristic purposes than in reality, given the flexibility and creativity of daily life. A study of the "informal" concerns Pikine, a large suburb of Dakar, where the "Projet de Ville," conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Local Agenda 21 Program, allowed individuals from poor communities to combine with recognized authorities such as marabouts to deal with community problems and to combine across neighborhoods in new entrepreneurial activities, such as fish-processing, market-gardening, and trading across national frontiers. Recent developments in Winterveld, a fringe urban area of Pretoria, are explored through the politics of the "invisible," described as a diffuse yet forceful means of collective resistance to visible government-sponsored actions and policies. Forged in a historical culture of segregation, apartheid, forced integration into Bophuthatswana, and the fiercely competitive politics of the 1990s, yet unrecognized as potential "platforms" of social collaboration, interest groups seek to shape policies, often through extralegal means. Attempts at development projects [End Page 140] that do not take account of such "invisible" forces have stirred up unanticipated reactions and put unforeseen pressures on authorities. A study of Douala focuses on the "spectral," going beyond the invisible to consider the city as imagined, conveyed in rumors, and "haunted" by uncertainties. It is in this context that individuals have attempted collaboration for economic advancement across traditional units, such as households and quarters. Urban improvisation is conveyed in a controversial piece of sculpture, which the author discusses in some detail. Standing at a central roundabout and composed of pieces of junk, it is for many an expression

Dynamism · Economic growth · Political science · Population · Poverty · Sociology · Theme (computing) · Urbanization · Demography · Gender Studies · Law · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

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