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Africa’s urban population is growing rapidly, raising numerous environmental concerns. Urban areas are often linked to poverty as well as power and wealth, and hazardous and unhealthy environments as the pace of change stretches local resources. Yet there are a wide range of perspectives and possibilities for political analysis of these rapidly changing environments.
Written by a widely respected author, this important book will mark a major new step forward in the study of Africa’s urban environments. Using innovative research including fieldwork data, map analysis, place-name study, interviewing and fiction, the book explores environmentalism from a variety of perspectives, acknowledging the clash between Western planning mind-sets pursuing the goal of sustainable development, and the lived realities of residents of often poor, informal settlements. The book will be valuable to advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses in geography, urban studies, development studies, environmental studies and African studies.
This chapter examines the scientific, scholarly and policy analyses on the environmental crisis perceived to exist for cities in Africa – the perspectives of ‘experts’ on such factors as urban water supply, solid waste management, air pollution, forestry, transportation infrastructure, and climate change. After a broad overview of the literature, the chapter assesses the Economist Intelligence Unit’s African Green Cities Index and the United Nations Habitat’s State of African Cities 2014 as examples for why an interactionist urban political ecology approach can contribute a more critical, political analysis. It includes a case study of the implications of the experts’ views for the applied sphere of urban environmental planning, with special reference to Nairobi. The chapter concentrates on Nairobi’s Metro 2030 master plan.
Although there are some exceptions, most African urban historical studies have paid fairly limited attention to environmental dynamics. Most of the recent spate of environmental science research in the continent’s urban areas has lacked sufficient historical analysis. This chapter argues that in order to develop a full and critical reading of today’s urban environments in Africa, it is essential to re-read their pasts through an interactionist urban political ecology. There is a broad overview of the pre-colonial and colonial urban environmental history of cities across the continent, showcasing specific examples in different regions. Lusaka is the case study focus here, given its significance as a created environment meant to manifest the British colonial planning order. The case study analyzes the contemporary legacy of the planned Garden City, with its orderly and politicized urban biogeography. The overall argument is that the urban environments of 21st century Africa have been shaped by forces that often reach far back in time. When approaching tangible environmental issues of today, one cannot do so as if these issues or problems have no politicized past. They are what they are as a result of historical forces.
This chapter centers on the actual physical-natural substances of African urban environments, but also on the imaginary – the symbolic and spiritual conceptualizations of those landscapes, as seen for instance in place-names - with Zanzibar as the featured city. Conceptually, the chapter builds from both African studies scholarship and from what was once called the ‘new’ cultural geography. It examines the cityscape physically, politically and metaphysically, arguing for the significance of spiritual cityscapes to everyday cultural understandings of urban environments as well as the generally common pattern of risk in terms of physical settings (emphasizing vulnerabilities to climate change). Emphasis on the importance of religion and spirituality in African cityscapes is not about further exoticising urbanism on the continent but instead a crucial space for using insights from African urban political ecology to speak back to UPE in other parts of the world. The Zanzibar case builds an understanding of the structures of feeling in the cityscape as manifestations of the Swahili term, fitina, meaning discord. The chapter shows that the development of a critical analysis of environmental politics requires recognition of the depths of complexity in socio-environmental conflicts such as those in Zanzibar.
Since political artistic visions of urban environments come in many forms of art, it is totally impossible to do justice to the whole panoply. This chapter examines the visions of environments and environmentalism in art largely with novels, but extends in the end to popular music, and to a lesser extent institutions of the arts. The case study concentration lies with Dakar, as a city alive with visual, musical, performing, and written arts which have been influential around the world – and specifically with its satellite city of Pikine – as well as the environmental issues surrounding waste, water, and urban floods. Theoretically, the chapter utilizes work from the scholarly field of postcolonial ecocriticism, which analyzes ecologically sensitive writing from the global South. Postcolonial ecocriticism has the potential to be very helpful in furthering the interactionist framework for urban political ecology, as this chapter seeks to show in its reading of novels from Ayi Kwei Armah, Chris Abani, Nuruddin Farah, and, especially, Ousmane Sembene. The chapter offers an extended ecocritical reading of Sembene’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood, and discusses its legacies in contemporary hip-hop artists’ political-environmental activism in Dakar and Pikine.
In this chapter, the goal is to work through the multi-vocality at the grassroots of Africa’s urban environments, in places like Pikine in Dakar, Kibera in Nairobi, or the Cape Flats in Cape Town. The grassroots are crucial for addressing urban environmental issues, and the voices of people at the grassroots and the margins are often justifiably pushed to the center in political ecological analysis. The experts show that there are myriad complex environmental problems in Africa’s cities. Previous chapters argue for seeing the beginnings of these problems in the past; for understanding the cityscape both physically and spiritually as a part of the political-environmental dynamics; and for seeing the problems from ecocritical perspectives. This chapter turns to what is being done at the grassroots across many cities. One segment surveys some of this terrain, beginning with the intellectual terrain of urban political ecology, followed by a set of urban contexts on the continent, before moving to an in-depth focus on Cape Town. The contemporary context of what Edgar Pieterse calls ‘rogue urbanism’ calls for ‘radical incrementalism’ built around the grassroots, but this is seldom successful on the continent.
The book’s conclusion contemplates what an interactionist urban political ecology approach can offer in terms of activism, policy-making and everyday environmental politics. The chapter examines forms of interactionist urban political ecology in action, in Nairobi (Kibera Public Space Project) and Cape Town (CityLab at the African Centre for Cities) in particular, as samples of Edgar Pieterse’s ‘radical incrementalism’ – small, progressive and interactionist steps toward producing urban environments that are more just, equitable and sustainable, while in tune with African ideas of the urban. Given the emphasis in the book on ‘African ideas,’ the conclusion returns to the works of a set of African environmental philosophers who seek to find workable concepts for indigenous African re-imaginations of the environment, including the urban environment. The chapter ends with goals for what a critical analysis of environmental politics for Africa’s cities can offer to global urban political ecology and for African activists and policy-makers alike.
The Introduction lays out the geographical parameters and conceptual framework of the book. It contains an overview of the diversity and complexity of urban environments in Africa. It details what is meant by a situated, interactionist urban political ecology, reviewing the relevant literature. The review includes the work of political ecologists generally considered to work in ‘rural’ Africa as well, alongside an analysis of African environmental philosophy. It is argued that an interactionist, Africa-centered urban political ecology offers: an appreciation of the multi-vocality that surrounds urban-environmental conflicts; a valorization of the wide range of African voices in that multi-vocality; the vitality of an everyday environmentalism that foregrounds that multi-vocality; and a problematizing of the edges of the ‘urban’ in urban political ecology. The Introduction also summarizes the chapters which follow.
Chapter one examines historical processes of urbanization, with the focus on Hartford, seen from indigenous, postcolonial, Caribbean and African/African-American re-mappings of its metropolitan geographies. The chapter thus applies global South ideas to an examination of planetary urbanization in an urban area conventionally located in the global North. It argues that southern concepts are highly relevant to understanding and remapping Hartford as a global urbanism. Developing an historical geography from indigenous, postcolonial, and southern angles gives opportunities for detailing the specificities of planetarizing processes. Scholars need to look at longer-term processes producing planetary urbanization from elsewhere, to erase blind spots that universalizing theorizations produce. Here, this means rethinking the historical geography of indigenous peoples in the region, slavery, and labor migration.
The second chapter centers on patterns, specifically the geographic land-use and housing patterns common to rapid urbanization that overtakes the surrounding countryside. The chapter uses the Chinese concept of chengzhongcun, or urbanized village, along with the related concepts of chengbiancun and chengwaicun, villages on the city-edge and in the suburbs, and Chinese scholarship analyzing what happens to them in the PRD. The chapter applies these ideas to other similarly rapid urban transformations in Dakar and Zanzibar, with references to the comparability in other cities of the book. The purpose is to work toward conceptualizing from outside global North frameworks when looking at land-use patterns in urbanization. If one seeks to understand the patterns of 21st century planetary urbanization, one ought to look at the places where those patterns are most rapidly transforming the landscape and find the language there that is used to describe and analyze them. This chapter is a small experiment in doing so.
