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Abstract

Chinese

Scholarship on African cities represents a growing yet still scarce subfield in urban studies, especially considering the scale and variety of African urbanisation patterns. The purpose of this Virtual Special Issue is to review the scholarship published on urban Africa in Urban Studies over the past five decades. In this Editorial, we reflect on the contributions of African urban scholarship and present a selection of articles to highlight the ways in which it has shaped key fields of urban studies. We also note the challenges that underpin ongoing lacunae in urban knowledge production and suggest directions for future work. This discussion provides a lens on our understandings of the urban condition in Africa and the general trajectory of urban scholarship.

Keywords

African urban studies theory from the south urban knowledge production

Introduction

While African urban scholarship has historically held a marginal role in urban studies, today African cities are increasingly prominent. Many of these debates have been printed in Urban Studies where African cities have come to serve as important conceptual and theoretical exemplars that expand our understanding of urban studies beyond the continent. Specifically, African urban research has enhanced our understanding of concepts like urbanisation (Fox and Goodfellow, 2022; van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018), governance (Cirolia and Harber, 2022; Pernegger, 2021), housing (Agyemang and Morrison, 2018; Croese and Pitcher, 2019), gentrification (Lemanski, 2014), energy (Baptista, 2019; Silver and Marvin, 2017), policy mobilities (Côté-Roy and Moser, 2019; van Ewijk et al., 2015), smart urbanism (Guma, 2019; Pollio, 2020) and transport (Agbiboa, 2019; Wood, 2022a). These studies also overlap with concepts beyond urban studies including art and design (Halligey, 2021), the Anthropocene (Fox and Goodfellow, 2022), migration (Zack and Landau, 2022), neoliberalism (Swilling, 2014) and ecology (Choplin, 2020). The growth in African urban scholarship reflects the central role that African cities play in decentring traditional geographies of knowledge production and their influence on urban concepts and conversations. It also reflects the interdisciplinarity of African urban scholarship by contributing to architecture, development studies, geography, politics and sociology as well as urban and African studies.

This is not to say that scholarship on African cities is new – far from it. Early work published in Urban Studies provided important critiques of dominant notions of ‘informality’, ‘squatters’ and the ‘urban poor’ by describing the everyday ways in which people settled and made life in African cities (Konadu-Agyemang, 1991; Nathan and Spindler, 1993; Peil, 1976). For a long time, however, such studies of African cities were not framed as contributions to urban theory, but rather as exceptions to common mainstream rules on the workings of urban planning, the economy and politics.

This Virtual Special Issue (VSI) reveals that Africa’s urban revolution (Parnell and Pieterse, 2014) is well underway within existing urban scholarship, while also highlighting ongoing gaps and silences. It contributes to the growing use of curatorial platforms and VSIs on African urban studies – such as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research’s Spotlight on African Cities (Mercer, 2022), Urban Geography’s African Cities in Conversation (Lawhon and Mwaura, 2023) and Antipode’s intervention symposium on Urban Theory from the global South (Hart and Marr, 2023) – to highlight the growth in volume and prominence of African urban scholarship. In doing so, this VSI not only contributes to an emerging tradition within Urban Studies of foregrounding scholarship on specific themes or geographical areas – previous VSIs published by Urban Studies cover urban scholarship on China (He and Qian, 2017), India (Coelho and Sood, 2022) and Latin America (Ortiz, 2024) – but also illustrates a wider reckoning within the various disciplines that compose urban studies on the past and futures of urban knowledge and theory production in Africa and the global South.

The aim of this VSI, then, is twofold: first we highlight the contributions made on African cities across the past five decades from Urban Studies; and second, we direct readers to ongoing challenges in African urban scholarship. While recent special issues on African cities aim to showcase the frontiers of contemporary urban debates, our purpose is to reflect on past scholarship by reviewing overall trends and highlighting key conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions that we see as having shifted the field of urban studies. Accordingly, our collection highlights the diverse but uneven geographies of urban knowledge production and circulation in Africa, affirming the importance of questioning ‘what, where and who’ is involved in the field of contemporary urban studies as a basis for creating a more equal playing field (van Heur, 2023).

Before continuing the discussion, it is important for us to reflect on our positionality. While both having personal and professional roots in the continent and having lived and worked in academia, civil society and local government in various African cities, we currently hold positions outside of Africa. We are mindful of the privilege that comes with that and the ways in which our positionality both illustrates and reinforces deep-seated inequalities and politics of urban knowledge production. Having both engaged with Urban Studies as authors and now as editors, we are keenly aware of the structural and ongoing barriers for Africa-based researchers in both accessing and publishing in urban studies journals. It is therefore one of our broader aims to contribute to making the journal among the key platforms for the dissemination of knowledge on African cities and to encourage readers to think more critically about them. This means not wanting to essentialise African cities and being critical of the tendency to generalize across African cities. Rather, we advocate for the development of a rigorous scholarship that is generated by and within African cities and then shared with the world for broader reflection.

We proceed with some methodological notes and reflections on the trajectory and state of African urban scholarship, after which we present a selected set of papers that we see as having shaped key fields of urban studies, before concluding with final reflections.

African scholarship in Urban Studies

To collate this collection, we reviewed 156 research papers (excluding review papers or book reviews) published in Urban Studies on Africa between 1968 and 2021. This represents a small fraction of the total number of publications during this period. Of the 563 papers published in Urban Studies between 2018 and 2020 (185 in 2018, 195 in 2019 and 183 in 2020), just 4.4% (nine in 2018, seven in 2019 and nine in 2020) cover African cities. Contributions as well as text downloads from the journal continue to be dominated by the global North (although China now follows the USA and UK in the top three countries).

This selection of papers was generated through a deep search of the term ‘Africa’. The search resulted in the inclusion of a few papers on African Americans and Afro-Brazilians and a number of studies including high-level statistical data on Africa (which we have not included in our analysis), while possibly excluding papers that did not use this term and only referenced a particular city (e.g. Johannesburg) or a particular country (e.g. Ghana). It also excludes those papers published in Urban Studies since we began our study, which despite their merits do not deviate from the general patterns we outline in this VSI (e.g. Amankwaa and Gough, 2022; Finn and Cobbinah, 2023; Guma et al., 2023). The generated list is therefore far from exhaustive, but for the purposes at hand it does allow insight into key trends and contributions in African urban scholarship. From there, we created a spreadsheet of all the papers, organising it by author, title, date of publication, themes discussed, cities or countries featured and overarching contribution to urban studies. This spreadsheet of Urban Studies publications provided us with a foundation from which to trace more than five decades of research across Africa.

Geographically, the scholarship is located across the continent, with a few notable imbalances. Of the 156 papers published in Urban Studies between 1968 and 2021, nearly half (73) were at least partly based on findings from South Africa, followed by 10 from Ghana, six from Nigeria and five from Mozambique. In contrast, just one article was published based on findings from Angola (Croese and Pitcher, 2019), Benin and Togo (Choplin, 2020), Burkina Faso (Dos Santos and LeGrand, 2013), Cameroon (Simone, 2006), Liberia (Sletto and Palmer, 2017) and Zimbabwe (Kamete, 2009), while Ethiopia (Goodfellow and Huang, 2022; Lamson-Hall et al., 2019), Tanzania (Briggs and Mwamfupe, 2000; Myers, 1995) and Zambia (Crankshaw and Borel-Saladin, 2019; Potts, 2005) were each covered by two papers. North Africa is poorly represented, with only one inclusion from Morocco (Bogaert, 2012). Within the countries, most studies focus on the main urban centres – such as Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa – and very few discuss small towns and secondary cities (except e.g. Shannon et al., 2021 on Beira, Mozambique). Several papers also reference urban research in Brazil, China, India, the UK and the USA. Additionally, 14 papers use urban African scholarship to develop broad theoretical discussions without being grounded in any specific empirical context.

From a historical perspective, the papers published in Urban Studies over the past five decades can roughly be divided into three periods. The first is an early period between 1968 and 1990 when just seven papers were published on urban Africa. During these years, alongside broader disciplinary attention towards quantitative and spatial analysis and modernist development paradigms, most of these papers detail urban and regional growth and development planning matters (Dewar et al., 1986; Kahimbaara, 1986; Onyemelukwe, 1974), including the planning of new cities such as Tema in Ghana (Kirchherr, 1968). Some noteworthy contributions were made in this period that challenged Western theories of urbanisation. Accordingly, this period reflects early efforts at theorising from Africa: Peil (1976), for example, develops a comparative study of African ‘squatter settlements’ for developing countries, and Megbolugbe (1989) challenges the usefulness of the literature on Latin American urbanisation for understanding the dynamics of African housing markets.

In the next period from 1990 to 2000, another 22 papers on urban Africa were published. This era is marked by a shift towards more comprehensive reviews of African urban conditions and the resulting scholarship – for example, Stren’s (1992, 1994) studies of urban research in Africa. The papers are still predominantly marked by concerns with economic and spatial development, but now as a product of the pressure put on cities due to the impact of structural adjustment programmes (Pugh, 1995; Riddell, 1997). South African urban scholarship also emerges as dominant in this era. During apartheid years, many of the studies of South African cities focused on racial segregation and spatial inequality (Christopher, 1990; Morris, 1994), while in the post-apartheid years this scholarship shifted to concerns with spatial and economic change in post-apartheid cities (Kotze and Donaldson, 1998; Maharaj and Ramballi, 1998; Rogerson and Rogerson, 1997) and the impact of housing policies (Goodlad, 1996; Tomlinson, 1999).

Between 2000 and 2021, there was a notable increase in the number of papers published on African urban scholarship in Urban Studies– a total of 127 papers, representing an average of six papers published per year. The papers published in this period reflect a broader interest in understanding urban conditions in Africa – for example, the development of peri-urban land markets (Antwi and Adams, 2003; Briggs and Mwamfupe, 2000; Gough and Yankson, 2011), the effects of neoliberalism and privatisation on access to basic services such as water (McDonald and Smith, 2004; Smith and Hanson, 2003) and the dynamics of informal trade and street vending (Lyons and Snoxell, 2005; Tipple, 2005), translating into wider contributions to the study of urban governance (Jaglin, 2014; Lindell, 2008) and infrastructure (Dos Santos and LeGrand, 2013). This scholarship focuses on local development as part of a broader movement against the globalisation and homogenisation of the discipline.

These somewhat crude categorisations are far from rigid. Indeed, much of this rich scholarship cuts across disciplinary boundaries. In the next section, we provide a rationale for the papers selected for the VSI and delve deeper into some of these themes.

This VSI

In this VSI, we highlight a selected set of contributions from African urban scholarship based upon four key fields in urban studies: theorising from the South – papers that generate theoretical concepts based upon African urban experiences and in so doing demonstrate how African cities can serve as sites for theory generation; everyday urbanism and informality – papers that examine routine and repetitive urban experiences as a basis for rethinking the concepts of governance and informality; the politics of infrastructure and planning – papers that conceptualise urban infrastructures from economic, political and social perspectives and that are particularly critical of normative planning approaches; and urban comparisons – papers that demonstrate the role of African cities within the wider world. This scholarship draws on a broad range of research approaches – archival work, ethnographies, surveys and interviews, participant observations and statistical analysis. Authors range from early career academics to holders of prestigious posts. Some scholars work within the continent but many others hold positions in global North institutions. Our aim here is to draw attention to agenda-setting contributions, even if some of these have been unevenly recognised as such. Together, these papers represent an entry point into reflecting on the contributions and challenges of African urban scholarship for urban studies and beyond.

Theorising from the South

The papers selected for the VSI make an essential contribution to the concept of ‘Southern urbanism’ and the postcolonial turn in urban studies (Watson, 2009). These papers consider African cities as the starting point from which to generate urban theory applicable across the global South as well as global North.

Watson’s (2009) paper is one of the most well-known examples – and with over 1000 citations the most frequently cited paper of this VSI – of scholarly work that challenges the dominance of Western theories for understanding African cities. In proposing the concept of ‘conflicting rationalities’, Watson provides not just keen insight but also fruitful grounds for theorisations of the logics and interactions that drive the complex and contested interface between those who govern and those who are governed in cities. This is an exercise that has been taken up by many urban scholars over time.

Yet, early papers on urban Africa published by Urban Studies were already calling for theories from the global South. The Nigerian urban scholar and planner Okpala’s (1987) paper is a critique of the uncritical application of European analytical perspectives and theories. His work is especially critical of scholarship that fails to consider the socio-cultural systems indigenous to Africa and the negative impact this neglect has on the effectiveness of urban management policies and programmes. This paper should be read alongside the scholarship of Mabogunje (1990) and Coquery-Vidrovitch (1991), both of whom reflect on the historicity of processes of urbanisation and urban planning in post-colonial Africa.

Lusugga Kironde (1992) from Ardhi University in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which currently houses one of the key urban research centres in East Africa, extends Okpala’s critique. Kironde argues that while progress had been made in terms of the recognition of the inadequacy of externally received concepts and theories, challenges remained in relation to their use in a way that was ‘within the capacity of both the local authorities and the urban citizens to initiate, to maintain and to improve upon’ (Lusugga Kironde, 1992: 1289) – an observation that has come to hold renewed purchase in debates on the role of cities in achieving global urban development goals and agendas (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020).

In later years, Parnell has made significant contributions to defining the rise of the ‘global urban development agenda’ in the African context (Croese and Parnell, 2022; Parnell, 2016), but on the pages of Urban Studies she uses a different entry point to critique Western urban concepts. In particular, she warns against the potential parochialism that could come with a focus that was limited to theorising the perceived uniqueness of (South) African cities (Parnell, 1997). By drawing on a set of core themes from the wider body of urban studies, she demonstrates the value in conceptualising African urban spaces with reference to conventional urban theory, while showing that the dynamics typical of African cities could equally contribute to understandings of cities elsewhere.

More recent contributions provide concrete examples of just how productive it can be to theorise between and across Northern and Southern contexts, by problematising both universal and local understandings of urban concepts and practices (e.g. Wood, 2022a). Here, we highlight Lemanski’s (2014) paper – also winner of the best article published in Urban Studies in 2014. Based on her study of the sale of state-subsidised houses in South Africa, she proposes the concept of ‘hybrid gentrification’ to make sense of processes of urban class-based change that are generally only discussed as part of either Northern or Southern urban contexts, thereby challenging and redeveloping existing urban theory. Hence, rather than measuring the ways in which African cities fail to meet global norms and standards, these papers illustrate the fertile grounds that African cities offer for theoretical innovation.

Everyday urbanism and informality

Thick description is one of the most generative ways of starting to theorise from the global South and offers an entry point through which to challenge conventional understandings of what constitutes the urban. The papers selected for the VSI represent a range of conceptual and methodological approaches by which scholars draw attention to everyday urban life in Africa.

The selected papers on everyday urbanism give prominence to what animates the city. For Odendaal (2021), human agency is central to this process. By drawing on science and technology studies and assemblage theory, she challenges dominant notions of the smart city as a standalone technical entity and solution to urban problems. Instead, she argues that the smart city in Africa emerges from ‘everyday urbanism’, or the interface between technology and human agency, and therefore represents a continuous process of emergence and remaking. Sletto and Palmer (2017) in turn draw on a Lefebvrian approach to highlight the cyclical nature of time, rhythm and temporality in the study of everyday open spaces in the informal settlement of Jallah Town, Monrovia, Liberia. By combining ethnography with phenomenological methods and rhythm analysis, they map the social contexts and meanings of multiple everyday movements and encounters at different scales, showing how open spaces, such as streets, street corners and market stalls, are both liminal and central to the constitution of the daily fabric of the African city.

In so doing, the scholarship critically upends informality ‘from below’ as the main logic for understanding African urban development. In their study of housing in a township in Cape Town, Cirolia and Scheba (2019: 598) argue for more hybrid, relational and multi-scalar forms of theorising informality as a way of ‘balancing the ethnographic narratives of everyday life with the macro-processes with which they interact and are co-constitutively shaped’. Lindell’s (2008) study of the everyday governance of marketplaces in Maputo similarly challenges the assumptions that tend to underpin Western understandings of urban governance in Africa as ‘beyond the state’. She uses a Foucauldian understanding of power as inherently diffuse to draw attention to the relations within the state and society. She goes on to propose an understanding of governance as consisting of ‘multiple sites where practices of governance are exercised and contested, [through] a variety of actors, various layers of relationships and a broad range of practices of governance that may involve various modes of power, as well as different scales’ (Lindell, 2008: 1880). Together, these papers remind us to remain critical of the power of the state when employing multiple scales and spaces in the analysis of African cities.

The scholarship on everyday urbanism likewise exposes the typically underconsidered elements of the city. Gender is a prime example – and one that African urban scholarship is relatively silent on, only discussing it tangentially in analyses of informal trading or urban agriculture (e.g. Simiyu and Foeken, 2014). Based on detailed ethnographic research in Mathare, Nairobi, Jones and Kimari (2019) provide an important contribution to studies of the role of women in the provision of security in informal settlements in African cities. They understand (in)security as ‘a multi-faceted phenomenon, closely related to broader structural dynamics’ (Jones and Kimari, 2019: 1838), and in so doing, emphasise the ways in which gender shapes the everyday agency of women in African cities. These thick descriptions demonstrate the need to engage with approaches that recognise the complex intricacies of urban life.

The politics of infrastructure and planning

The ‘infrastructure turn’ in urban studies is important for foregrounding the role of structures, technology and networks underpinning urban life and change (Graham and Marvin, 2001). The papers selected for the VSI critically expand the discourse on infrastructure by focusing on the evolving politics and potential driving the use, meaning and future of infrastructure and planning in African cities.

In this regard, Gandy’s (2006) paper on metropolitan Lagos, Nigeria represents an important account of the ways in which the state may actively (re)produce infrastructural crisis over time through various forms and practices of planning and ‘anti-planning’ (see also Kamete, 2009). In so doing, Gandy does not ignore the agency, imagination or survival strategies adopted by Lagosians themselves, but instead highlights what he interprets as ‘the practical limitations and analytical weaknesses of both academic and policy-oriented literatures that failed to grasp the paradoxical characteristics of the contemporary African city as a dysfunctional yet dynamic urban form’ (Gandy, 2006: 374). Indeed, more recent studies of Lagos highlight the urban paradoxical nature of urban development, as government planning practices have continued to entrench socio-spatial fragmentation across the city (Olajide and Lawanson, 2022).

By emphasising the social and symbolic understanding of infrastructure as a response to the absence or dysfunctionality of existing physical infrastructure, other scholars have opened up new ways of theorising connection. Simone’s (2006) contribution stands out by featuring the social assemblages that emerge as a way of negotiating everyday life in under-resourced cities. This analysis strengthens his previous notion of ‘people as infrastructure’ (Simone, 2004) – a concept used to highlight the role of individuals and communities in urban systems that has since featured in many publications in Urban Studies (e.g. Guma, 2019; Xiao and Adebayo, 2019).

Others have similarly expanded our understanding of infrastructure and planning by exposing how the two intersect and overlap as well as their hybridisation – be it the governance of electricity infrastructure maintenance and repair in Maputo (Baptista, 2019) or urban planning in Johannesburg (Harrison, 2006). Baptista (2019) analyses how the electricity utility company in Maputo deals with ‘informality’ in the provision of ‘formal’ services. She adopts a hybrid notion of infrastructure, one that underscores a socio-technical approach and the ‘relational co-constitution through/with space, various combinations of actors, and diverse rationalities’ (Baptista, 2019: 514). Harrison (2006) adopts a parallel hybrid approach for understanding urban planning in Johannesburg. Building on Watson’s notion of ‘conflicting rationalities’, Harrison (2006: 333) proposes a reconciliation of Western planning theory ‘self-consciously and cautiously, but also by actively seeking sub-alternised and hybridised knowledge and by affirming and supporting the emergence of alternative rationalities and modernities’.

In so doing, African urban scholarship has challenged many of the assumptions that initially underpinned research on infrastructure and planning. Pieterse (2006) outlines three key conditions for building alternative futures in the context of Cape Town: vibrant city politics in a radical democratic mode, a substantial ‘epistemic community’ in cities that generate imaginative ideas about alternative urban futures, as well as sufficient investment capital to give economic support and expression to the implementation of concrete programmes and projects. Taken together, these papers highlight the role of politics and spatial planning in reinforcing or redirecting existing infrastructure path dependencies as well as the social, provisional and hybrid nature of infrastructure as a basis for imagining alternative urban futures.

Urban comparisons

Comparison is central to African urban studies scholarship (Wood, 2020). The papers selected for the VSI do more than compare City A with City B or this development and that development – they use comparison to stretch the complexity of geographical hierarchies and relationships and bring African urbanism to the forefront.

These papers aim to bring complementary experiences and perspectives from here and there to explain local actions – by studying urbanisation in eight housing developments in Ghana and Nigeria (Peil, 1976), by comparing responses to climate change in eThekwini/Durban (KwaZulu–Natal, South Africa) and Portland (Oregon, USA) (Aylett, 2013), by examining the discussions of slum upgrading experiences in São Paulo and Durban (Saraiva, 2022), by assessing the application of transit-orientated development in both Cape Town and Johannesburg (Wood, 2022a) and by showing how the process of migrant absorption and residential movement in Johannesburg is similar to, and different from, Latin America (Gilbert and Crankshaw, 1999). These papers expose the heterogeneity of comparison in, through and by African cities.

In these papers, comparison provides a conceptual framing through which to bring the city doing the comparing and the city being compared to into conversation with one another. Some ground their studies within city departments, as in the case of Aylett’s (2013) study of the internal workings of city departments in Durban versus the interagency dynamics across the municipality in Portland. Others see comparison mobilised and performed by policy actors and consultants, as in the paper by Saraiva (2022) and her study of the flows of knowledge between São Paulo and Durban, or in the case of Wood’s (2022a) politicians and planners based in Cape Town and Johannesburg but frequently visiting Curitiba (Brazil) and Bogota (Colombia). Across the papers, the connection between cities is at the heart of the analysis.

They therefore use comparison to foreground geographical complexity. The selected papers compare African experiences within African cities (Wood, 2022a), between African cities (Peil, 1976) and with cities in Brazil (Saraiva, 2022), Chile and Colombia (Gilbert and Crankshaw, 1999) and other cities around the world (Aylett, 2013). The papers go further, challenging the notion of comparison and its appropriateness for the African urban context. In different ways, most of the papers reference Latin American urbanisation and its influence on the African context –Peil (1976) opens her paper by contextualising the phenomenon of squatter settlements within Latin American urbanisation, while two decades later, Gilbert and Crankshaw (1999) criticise the comparisons made between the housing developments in Brazil, Chile and Colombia and the South African experience with migration. Saraiva (2022) likewise draws on the Latin American experiences with slum upgrading and the ways in which these policies were introduced in South Africa, and Wood (2022a) uses comparison to trace the influence of Latin American planning in South African transit-orientated development. All of the papers highlight the difficulties of making comparisons both within the African continent and beyond.

Directions for African urban scholarship

Urban Studies has been home to many discussions of African cities which have shaped our discipline in important ways – generating theories from African cities for urban studies, rethinking notions of governance and informality, moving beyond normative planning approaches and pushing the boundaries of urban comparison. In this final section, we reflect on these contributions and outline points of departure for possible trajectories of future African urban scholarship as well as ongoing challenges.

The contributions highlighted in this VSI illustrate how African urban scholarship has challenged many of the assumptions in Western thought by drawing on a host of alternative concepts and framings. Contributions ranging from Watson’s ‘conflicting rationalities’ to Gandy’s notion of ‘anti-planning’ show the fertile grounds of southern theorisations. The contributions on everyday urbanism in turn indicate the variety of scholarly traditions that animate this work, including science and technology studies and assemblage theory or the continued relevance of work of classic urban thinkers such as Lefebvre. In much the same way, the scholarship discussing infrastructure has pushed the frontiers of imagination regarding the diverse actors, uses and practices of urban planning. However, rather than falling into rehearsed tropes of African failure, scholars draw attention to the politics and power of state-sponsored urban development ranging from new cities (Côté-Roy and Moser, 2019; van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018) to industrial development zones (Goodfellow and Huang, 2022). Finally, the scholarship on urban comparison recognises the role that African cities can play in challenging global rankings and hierarchies. Together, these four subthemes show the ways in which African urban studies is operating at the forefront of urban studies scholarship.

There are also glaring omissions in the literature on African urban studies scholarship. First, too few papers engage epistemologically with race, feminist or Black geographies (except for e.g. Crankshaw, 2008; Rogerson and Rogerson, 1997), despite the fruitful avenues that such approaches open up for challenging the canons of Western knowledge production. Second, although many African cities already face the daily impact of climate change, few studies focus on the environment (except for Aylett, 2013) and related areas of study such as the politics of just transitions or climate-induced migration and conflict. Third, too few papers draw on art (except for Minty, 2006), cultural studies (except for Parker, 2017) or the expanding set of sensory approaches to urban studies. Furthermore, despite a growing interest in the changing finance–space nexus, too few papers critically appraise issues of urban finance and financialisation in the context of African cities (except for O’Brien et al., 2019). Fourth, too few papers directly address the disjuncture between the growing significance of scale and technological innovation and the continued scarcity and politics of urban data in Africa (except for Potts, 2017). We note these absences as essential for future African scholarship. This of course is not an exhaustive list of all the oversights; however, it does reiterate the need and potential of the continued generation of critical approaches to and from urban African scholarship.

We are also reminded of the need to expand the geographical locatedness of African urban scholarship. A significant number of the papers on urban Africa come from South Africa – nearly half of the papers we reviewed were at least partly based in South Africa. South African exceptionalism refers to the dominance of South African scholarship compared to scholarship from other parts of the continent and how this points to underlying barriers to urban knowledge production in Africa. Much has changed since Stren’s (1994: 733) assertion that ‘South Africa has been the powerhouse of urban research in Africa, even though, paradoxically, much of this work is unknown outside the southern African region’. To Stren, South Africa’s political isolation during the late apartheid period made it ineligible for research funding from international organisations, thereby excluding it from the wider urban scholarship landscape. He predicted that as South Africa entered the international research marketplace with the end of apartheid, there would be more of a convergence in research themes between South Africa and the rest of the continent. Yet today, the same barriers that limit the publication of urban African scholarship in Northern journals have ironically contributed to the lack of circulation of South African urban scholarship to the rest of the continent. For instance, in spite of the growth of urban comparative work, most comparisons involving South Africa include either intra-country comparisons or comparisons with cities outside of the African continent, not within it. And despite the strong focus in South African urban scholarship on combining theorisation with urban research that bridges the academy and society as a way of stimulating both theoretical and policy innovation, the conditions under which such urban knowledge and expertise can be ‘co-produced’ are highly specific to the context of South Africa and therefore geographically uneven (Croese and Duminy, 2023).

This brings us back to our original argument that African research is still far too under-represented in both Urban Studies and our discipline as a whole. Compared to the urban research generated on other parts of the world, it represents a disproportionate fraction of all the urban research and an even smaller amount of theoretical work. Several interrelated factors may explain the challenges for African scholars when it comes to publishing in Urban Studies– the language barriers involved in publishing in English for scholars working in/on Francophone and Lusophone Africa, persistent underinvestment in academic research across most of the continent outside of South Africa and the perverse effects of donor-driven funding landscapes and logics that tend to favour the same set of countries where established and accessible research networks exist.

Yet, this continued unevenness speaks to a wider, more fundamental challenge. While new bodies, concepts and geographies of urban knowledge are being created in Africa, we agree with Roy et al (2020: 926) that even if:

the citationary structures of urban studies might have moved just a bit […] that does not mean that our epistemologies and methodologies have as well – despite the southern turn, the epistemological and methodological foundations of urban studies remain untouched by postcolonial thought.

In conclusion, we argue that African cities warrant not only further reference by scholars in both the global North and the global South but also a deeper embedding into urban theory and conceptualisations.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Sylvia Croese

Astrid Wood

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African Urban Studies: Contributions and Challenges

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

African scholarship in Urban Studies

This VSI

Theorising from the South

Everyday urbanism and informality

The politics of infrastructure and planning

Urban comparisons

Directions for African urban scholarship

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

References