Our interdisciplinary Urban Studies list examines how the built environment shapes behaviour and how to address complex problems like urban poverty, gentrification, climate change and educational inequality.
Subjects covered include urban planning, urban geography, urban policy, local governance and community-based participation, to offer a broad understanding of how urban dynamics shape both global interdependence and local spaces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This chapter discusses how sustainable development discourse is shifting towards the notion of resilience that seems more conservative than the concept of sustainability, and less likely to offer a way to challenge the inequities of socio-spatial development pursued in the name of sustainable development. In evaluating the potential effects of the shift in emphasis, the chapter recommends that there is need to move debates, plans and policies away from the current sustainable cities agenda, which is concerned primarily with pursuing sustainable cities that balance environmental concerns, the needs of future populations and economic growth. Instead, it suggests a reconsideration of interpretations of sustainability concerned with the traditional notions of social justice which seek to balance market and social interests in the public good.
This chapter examines the future of London’s Healthy City aspirations at a time when the need to address environmental risk factors grows stronger, but the political will and capacity to do so is limited by economic retrenchment and policies highlighting the need for ‘personal responsibility’. The incorporation of public health sensibilities within urban planning’s logic has been hailed a recent and welcome advancement in the ‘Healthy Cities’ agenda. However, the flow of knowledge has been largely unidirectional and, consequentially, policy to build healthier environments has been limited in scale and scope. Given that political attention is trained on a modifiable risk factor, through the formation of ‘Responsibility Deals’ between public health bodies and industry, the long-term sustainability of London as a ‘Healthy City’ seems unclear.
