Cet ouvrage privilégie un objet - la ville et ses pratiques de gouvernement - en combinant les jeux d'échelles (globale, nationale et locale) et les jeux d'acteurs (publics/privés). Sont analysés ici les liens entre l'Etat et le gouvernement local autant que les relations des acteurs privés (individus, associations, syndicats, milices) avec les différents échelons de l'Etat. La ville est considérée comme un terrain d'expression des rapports de pouvoir entre des coalitions d'acteurs dont rend bien compte la multiplicité des secteurs analysés (services urbains, gestion des marchés et des gares routières, gestion foncière, politiques de propreté, plans d'aménagement, réformes institutionnelles, sécurité, gestion des héritages de l'apartheid). La diversité des terrains observés en Afrique de l'Ouest (Nigeria, Ghana, Guinée, Burkina Faso) et en Afrique australe (Afrique du Sud, Namibie, Zambie, Mozambique) montre l'impact inégal des politiques de décentralisation en ville, le poids relatif des normes internationales ainsi que la prégnance d'arrangements locaux labiles. La combinaison du temps court et de la moyenne durée permet d'identifier l'émergence ou non de nouveaux acteurs. Cet ouvrage est l'aboutissement de plusieurs programmes de recherche internationaux et d'enquêtes de terrains menés entre 2002 et 2004. Géographes, historiens, politistes, sociologues et urbanistes contribuent ensemble à une analyse pluridisciplinaire du gouvernement urbain en Afrique anglophone, francophone, et lusophone.

Cet ouvrage privilégie un objet -la ville et ses pratiques de gouvernement- en combinant les jeux d'échelles (globale, nationale et locale) et les jeux d'acteurs (publics/privés). Sont analysés ici les liens entre l'Etat et le gouvernement local autant que les relations des acteurs privés (individus, associations, syndicats, milices) avec les différents échelons de l'Etat.

Research on cities worldwide still takes its cue from cities in Europe and the US, which are seen as the standard model. However, cities in the global South are undergoing a much more rapid transformation, including multiple interlinked transitions, with Africa featuring the highest urbanization rates world-wide. Scholars therefore call for a new approach to urban studies which examines cities from a more global comparative perspective. This book discusses the new approach, which pays added attention to the role that societal creativity plays in processes of urbanization, instead of concentrating exclusively on expert-driven planning and intervention. Especially in fast-growing cities with weaker institutional capacity for interventions, the interplay between intervention and invention, between expert and societal agency, becomes more tangible and all the more significant. (Series: Swiss African Studies / Schweizerische Afrikastudien / Etudes africaines suisses - Vol. 10)

This festschrift in honor of Professor Ayodeji Olukoju, one of Nigeria’s brightest historians, brings together scholarship representative of the third wave of historical scholarship on Nigeria. Olukoju, a pioneering historian of Nigerian maritime history, also produced significant revisionist scholarship in the areas of economic, urban, and infrastructure history. The contributions in this volume epitomize the groundbreaking directions of his career; they are marked by a search for new explanations and venture into uncharted terrain in Nigerian history. Aside from its critical engagement of Olukoju’s impressive scholarship, this volume presents chapters on such underresearched aspects of Nigerian history as sexuality, children and youth, crime, memory, and HIV/AIDS. It offers historical explanations of a host of development challenges confronting Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, and resilient reinterpretations of the place of history in nation building. The contributors, pioneering experts in their various subfields, bring their research and teaching experience to the fore and deploy neglected data as they unfold topics that shed light on Nigeria, its peoples, and cultures. They show that history, both as a daily practice and as an academic endeavor, remains vital as Africans seek solutions to the continent’s critical development challenges.

This volume examines the discursive relations between indigenous, colonial and post-colonial legacies of place-naming in Africa in terms of the production of urban space and place. It is conducted by tracing and analysing place-naming processes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa during colonial times (British, French, Belgian, Portuguese), with a considerable attention to both the pre-colonial and post-colonial situations. By combining in-depth area studies research – some of the contributions are of ethnographic quality – with colonial history, planning history and geography, the authors intend to show that culture matters in research on place names. This volume goes beyond the recent understanding obtained in critical studies of nomenclature, normally based on lists of official names, that place naming reflects the power of political regimes, nationalism, and ideology.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies is a timely intervention into the field of global urban studies, coming as comparison is being more widely used as a method for global urban studies, and as a number of methodological experiments and comparative research projects are being brought to fruition. It consolidates and takes forward an emerging field within urban studies and makes a positive and constructive intervention into a lively arena of current debate in urban theory. Comparative urbanism injects a welcome sense of methodological rigor and a commitment to careful evaluation of claims across different contexts, which will enhance current debates in the field. Drawing together more than 50 international scholars and practitioners, this book offers an overview of key ideas and practices in the field and extends current thinking and practice. The book is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines which converge in the study of urbanism, including geography, sociology, political studies, planning, and urban studies.