New book investigates do-it-yourself practices in African cities
Patience Mususa, co-editor of the book, in conversation with a group of young men in Lusaka, Zambia, while doing field studies for the research that informs the book project on DIY Urbanism.
Protracted economic crises, inequalities, and resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas. A new book, DIY Urbanism in Africa, investigates these practices.
Patience Mususa, Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI), has co-edited the book together with Stephen Marr, Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at Malmö University in Sweden.
With contributions from African and international scholars, the book develops a theoretical framework through which to analyze the DIY Urbanism practices, and it presents a series of case studies to demonstrate how residents invent new DIY tactics and strategies in response to security, place-making, or economic problems.
This book offers a timely critical intervention into literatures on urban development and politics in Africa. It is valuable to students, policymakers, and urban practitioners keen to understand the mechanisms and political implications of widespread dynamics now shaping Africa's expanding urban environments.
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Table of content
Introduction: Do-it-yourself Urbanism in Africa’s Cities
Part I: Conceptual Framing (chapters 1-4)
Part II: Case Studies (chapters 5-12)
- Comparative DIY Urbanisms: Reflections on a Concept’s Pasts, Presents and Futures
- The Makeshift City and Do-it-yourself (DIY) Urbanism
- Reflections on the DIY Paradigm and Urban Living in Nigeria
- DIY Urbanism in an African Context and its Potential as a Collaborative Placemaking Tool for Bridging Africa’s Urban Infrastructure Deficit
- Political Economy of Community-Led Security Provisioning in Urban Africa
- The Politics of Urban Insecurity: Hybrid relations and party dominance in Lagos, Nigeria
- ‘Accra We Dey’: Precarious Histories, Creative Place-Making, and Reimagined Futures in Urban Ghana
- Everyday spatial practices and production of urban commons in Accra, Ghana
- Learning from DIY urbanism: Lessons from Freetown
- DIY Urbanism as Ecotopia: The Case of the Green Camp Gallery in Durban, South Africa
- Disability and Urbanism in Malawi
- The Biopolitics of Do-it-yourself Urbanism on the Zambian Copperbelt
Conclusion: DIY Urbanism as Politics of Interruption
Reviews
“This lively and important new collection pushes the study of the politics of urban development in African cities in to new terrain. A must-read for students of the African city.”
Claire Mercer, London School of Economics, UK
More from the same series
DIY Urbanism in Africa – Politics and Practice is the latest title in the book series Africa Now, published by the Nordic Africa Institute in collaboration with Bloomsbury. You can find previous titles here
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Related events
On Friday 13 September 2024, 15:00 - 16:30 (CEST), NAI will be having the webinar Responding to crises: What to learn from African experiences, to discuss the findings of the book. You can find more information here.