This book presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. Moving between precolonial, colonial, and contemporary urban spaces, it covers the major regions, religions, and urban societies of sub-Saharan Africa. African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. It presents original research and integrates historical methodologies with those of anthropology, geography, literature, art, and architecture. Moving between precolonial, colonial, and contemporary urban spaces, it covers the major regions, religions, and cultural influences of sub-Saharan Africa. The themes include Islam and Christianity, architecture, migration, globalization, social and physical decay, identity, race relations, politics, and development. This book elaborates on not only what makes the study of African urban spaces unique within urban historiography, it also offers an-encompassing and up-to-date study of the subject and inserts Africa into the growing debate on urban history and culture throughout the world. The opportunities provided by the urban milieu are endless and each study opens new potential avenues of research. This book explores some of those avenues and lays the groundwork on which new studies can build. Contributors: Maurice NyamangaAmutabi, Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, Mark Dike DeLancey, Thomas Ngomba Ekali, Omar A. Eno, Doug T. Feremenga, Laurent Fourchard, James Genova, Fatima Muller-Friedman, Godwin R. Murunga, Kefa M. Otiso, Michael Ralph, Jeremy Rich, Eric Ross, Corinne Sandwith, Wessel Visser. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Steven J.Salm is Assistant Professor of History, Xavier University of Louisiana.

Contemporary Africa is undergoing a period of unprecedented urban expansion, which is throwing up new challenges in the provision of essential services and contentious questions about ownership of urban spaces. This volume explores the interconnections between these processes, whilst avoiding the tendency to forget that cities are also embedded in deeper historical processes that are integral to the framing of entitlements. Histories of migrancy and the creation of urban 'stranger' communities are fundamental in deciding who lives where and what this means, materially and socially. The gated communities that are springing up are often layered across older forms of urban segregation and/or segmentation. Urban water and food supply, the management of urban land claims, inequality and popular culture are closely examined.

As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.

Cities have existed in sub-Saharan Africa since antiquity. But only now are historians and archaeologists rediscovering their rich heritage: the ancient ruins of Great Zimbabwe and Congo, the harbor cities at the Indian Ocean, the capitals of the Bantu Kingdoms, the Atlantic cities from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and the urban revolutions in the 19th century. Mercantile cities opened Africa to the world, Islamic cities became centers of scholarship and the trans-Saharan trade, Creole cities appeared after the first contact with Europeans, and Bantu cities of the hinterland reacted against them. The author has gone through vast numbers of archival records and conducted independent field research to analyze and describe the rich history of African cities even long before imperial colonization began, and she continues her story until the time of urban reorganization during industrialization. The result is a colorful panorama of urban lifestyles including unique examples of architecture, and lasting traditions of ethnic, cultural, religious, and commercial forms of co-existence.

This anthology addresses and analyses the transformation of interconnected spaces and spatial entanglements in the Atlantic rim during the era of the slave trade by focusing on the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast and their Caribbean islands of Saint Thomas, Saint Jan and Saint Croix as well as on the Swedish Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy. The first part of the anthology addresses aspects of interconnectedness in West Africa, in particular the relationship between Africans and Danes on the Gold Coast. The second part of this volume examines various aspects of interconnectedness, creolisation and experiences of Danish and Swedish slave rules in the Caribbean. *Ports of Globalisationis now available in paperback for individual customers.

Recent global shifts in population have led to the fast urbanization of Africa. For Africa and the developing world, choosing the right policy strategies, processes, and tools are essential to turning urban centers into engines of industry and economic prosperity. Industrial and Urban Growth Policies at the Sub-National, National, and Global Levels is a pivotal reference source that examines current and evolving conditions of industrial and urban policies and their relationships around the world, especially between developed and developing economies. While highlighting topics such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, urban policy, and global common good, this publication seeks to deepen and broaden the understanding of transformation in industrial development and responses to emerging urbanization processes. This book is ideally designed for industrial planners, entrepreneurs, urban development authorities, policymakers, academicians, researchers, and students.

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious. Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being. Original, deeply researched, and beautifully composed, this book speaks in innovative ways to scholarship on urban history, colonialism and decolonization, and the postcolonial state. Replete with rare photographs and other materials from private collections, Age of Concrete establishes Morton as one of a handful of scholars breaking new ground on how we understand Africa’s cities.