For the information of the Critical Geography Forum Network:
CRITICAL URBAN STUDIES CONSORTIUM
The Coalition for the Development of Urban Africa announces the formation of
a CRITICAL URBAN STUDIES CONSORTIUM. The function of the consortium is to
provoke new thinking and methodology regarding the changing realities of
African cities, their place and possible futures in a globalizing world.
Through an effort to engage diverse actors in a process of exchange, it is
hoped to elaborate the urban knowledge available to decision-makers in all
walks of urban life.
Codura is a continent-wide grouping of researchers, activists and other
professionals that has emerged from the work of the African NGO Habitat II
Caucus. Collaborations with the Global Urban Research Initiative and
Codesria exist in this process. Since May 1995, African NGOs were involved
in systematic and organised preparations for the Habitat II Conference in
Istanbul. From the beginning, a crucial objective for the Caucus was to use
Habitat II as an instrument in an ongoing process of consolidating the
capacity of African urban NGOs to implement new approaches to the
development of African cities in partnership with other sectors and actors.
African NGO deliberations at Istanbul reaffirmed this objective and ratified
the establishment of Codura.
Codura is presently engaged in a series of projects centred implementing
local Habitat II agendas in ten African cities. But also of great interest
to us is to look at African cities in ways that go beyond the development,
the technocentric and management oriented considerations that tend to
prevail in the African context. The bulk of research and attention
involving African cities today largely centers on urban management, urban
service provision, financing and infrastructural development. Alternately,
research either attempts to assess the broad macroeconomic and political
dynamics which configure African urban space or concentrate on detailed
descriptions of subterritories or sectors within urban systems.
In this light a Critical Urban Studies concentrates observations on social
economy and the generation of urban cultures that seek to reopen questions
about the aspirations and practices which form specific instances of African
urbanity. These considerations also entail the everyday life processes
through which urban residents, associated in various ways, mediate different
dimensions of power in order to produce livelihoods which embody their own
constructed meanings and understandings, as well as adhere to the prevailing
images and impositions of what urban life should be.
WHY AN AFRICAN CRITICAL URBAN STUDIES ?
*There needs to be a VISIONING process which looks at what African cities
could be, futures based on maximizing the strengths and resources that
already exist. Therefore, it is more critical than ever to carry out
systematic investigations which detail the productive assets of local
communities and the prospective for alternative modalities of social
organisation that can begin to link diverse sectors and economic across
African cities and between African cities and those of different continents.
*There is a need to look at something else besides the details of urban
poverty, housing, land, governance, development projects, environmental
deterioration, structural adjustment and macroeconomic reform, urban-rural
linkages, urban household formation, migration and urban environments per
se. What is not implied by this is that these issues are unimportant—they
are. More and more people are trying to survive in cities with less and
less. But despite this fact, people act on the city, give shape to the
city, as the city acts on them—and this is a broad dynamic which requires
further investigation.
*The urban development process must now intensify its efforts to evolve
organisational forms which will more clearly correspond to how local
communities generate highly particular mechanisms of survival and which are
balanced with more transnational, cross-regional enlargements of urban
identity, economy and governance processes. Additionally, the social and
economic development of individual urban areas increasingly necessitates a
translocal focus, i.e., a deliberation and forging of links between cities,
much can be gained by comparative assessments of how specific urban
realities can be addressed in varying locations.
POSSIBLE AREAS OF FOCUS FOR A CRITICAL URBAN STUDIES
*Contemporary Urban Identities and Associational Life—especially considering
the effects of the severe strains of urban impoverishment on conventional
support networks and survival practices, as well as the dynamics of
globalisation. How does popular urban culture act to specific ways of
living in cities, reshape traditional identities, and also to create a
framework for the continuation of important values and understandings? What
kind s of social organisations are emerging, or being renovated, which
attempt to counter social disintegration and provide a measure of coherence
to the intensifying informalisation of urban survival and management ? What
kinds of social conflicts predominate ? How are the conceptions and
compositions of residential, socialisation, decision-making and work
contexts being reconfigured ?
*Spatialisation Within Cities—especially relationships between centers and
peripheries, historic quarters and peri-urban suburbs. How are the
distinctions and identities of specific territories, districts and quarters
sustained and reproduced ? How do districts function as markers and
vehicles of movement and interchange ; how do they open themselves onto
other territories, as well as border themselves from them ? What happens in
the interstices between those administrative, economic and cultural
practices that reassert the different identities of districts ; in between
diversified and administrative functions and the continuities of networks
and activities which cross district border ?
*Crossing the City : Transporation, Transit and Transshipment—looking at
structures and processes of movement across cities and the policies which
intersect and attempt to organise the transport of persons and the
transhipment of goods across urban space. Its focus is on what happens
across the parameters of public space, how people move within their
residential districts, between quarters, between work, home, school, and
social institutions, and how the ways people use the city, the kinds of
activities in which they are engaged, their social networks and affiliations
are shaped and affected by the structures of this movement. Additionally,
the unit will posit a framework and general overview on what happens between
points of transit, between the loading and unloading of important
commodities, such as foodstuffs, building and energy materials.
These considerations are important not only for the overall coherence of the
city as a whole and the productivity of local activiities and economies but
is also signficant in terms of identifying how African cities can be linked
across the continent and beyond.
*Frameworks of Transnational Urban Development. How can conceptual and
operational frameworks be developed to build upon existing economic and
cultural linkages to put in place a system of information retrieval,
exchange and comparative studies of urban dynamics and local economic
development assessment that could be applied to future elaborations of
interurban economic cooperation. How can a nexus of inter-city exchanges be
consolidated into an ongoing policy and urban development forum that
capitalises on the historic and/or potential positions of specific cities as
strategic connecting points to subregional markets and cultural zones ? How
could participating cities use a more self-conscious plying of the actual
or potential linkages that exist among them as mechanisms to generate new
development strategies and abilities to act in concert around select issues
consensually recognised as important ?
OUR REQUEST
We would like to think through such a consortium with potential
collaborators who have substantial experience in both theoretical and
practical considerations of urban Africa. Perhaps the best way to begin, if
you could, is to give us a brief update on your current interests and
programs, and perhaps some ideas about how you approach the elaboration of
both the conceptual underpinnings of a critical urban studies for Africa, as
well how functional collaborations among interested institutions might be
cohered. Additionally if you have any written documents or articles
prepared, particularly concerning the relationship between what African
cities are and could be, we would like to have permission to disseminate
them amongst the Codura constituency.
All the best in your work, and we look forward to hearing from you.
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AFRICAUCUS / CODURA
c/o Programme ECOPOP
BP 3370 DAKAR - SENEGAL
TEL: +221 25 32 00
FAX: +221 25 32 32
Email: [log in to unmask]
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