Africentricity – new ideas for African urban development
The real challenge for many African cities may be less how to create a city of ‘clean lines’ with no poor people working in the streets, and more one of how to amplify existing ways of living and working in the city into an advanced regime of higher information density. The anti-hawker and anti-kiosk stance of the political elite and economically mobile hurts many people’s livelihoods and lines many policemen and womens’ pockets. Alternatively, this active edge of infrastructure and economies can be understood as a future-oriented system of organization for the city—one in which flexible urban ecologies absorb new human material through a network of small-scale and low-tech productive nodes.
Tom 12:11 pm on March 19, 2010 Permalink
I’m not sure that this is particularly Africacentric. The misguided efforts of modernist-inspired urban planners to impose a particular vision of orderliness on cities has damaged cities all over the world. This is one of the themes of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities written in the early 60′s. A favorite quote:
“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”