This section explores what radical development might mean in contemporary African cities. Using fiction, allegory, ethnography, speculative and visual ways of story telling, the authors complicate typical representations of African cities. While disrupting dominant narratives of failure, they offer glimpses into the contradictions and complexities of urban life, and the fragile ways in which everyday survival is negotiated. Taken together, these radical contributions depart from traditional ways of seeing African cities. All too often, urban scholars and policy makers discuss African cities as a manifestation of the failure of development where, unlike cities in the West, the evolutionary process of development has stalled, or been disrupted. To be sure, the dominant images that Africa’s cities conjure are ones where the landscapes are rolling shantytowns; where rivulets of sewerage snake through cobbled-together homes, where the State has lost control and economies have failed. Africa’s cities, it seems, tell a story of crisis. African cities do experience infrastructure, governance, financial and population challenges, but these are not the sum total of their experiences. Through their innovation, ingenuity and desire to survive, African urban actors are redefining the city, its artefacts and spaces, in ways that call us to rethink what we define as progress, development and success. Through ordinary artefacts – the wall, building, infrastructure, plan, cave, and blueprint – the articles in this section pose critical questions about modernity, social divisions, capitalism, consumption, development and decay. For example, Zack and Lewis’s ‘They Eat Buildings: Revaluing a City’s Carcass’, uses the carcass as a heuristic to explore the ways ordinary city dwellers devour the city, sculpting it into a carcass that sustains and spawns life. Vally and de Villiers interrogate the wall, a ubiquitous architectural artefact that is imbued with multiple meanings. Using drone photographs, they explore the visible and invisible thresholds between classes, faiths, ethnicities and races in Johannesburg in ways that allow us to see how these are navigated, imagined and overcome. Wambecq, de Meulder and Shannon look critically at the devastating impact of development on the landscape of Tete – the largest city on the Zambezi river basin. Using a design research methodology, they reinterpret traditional practices, producing a landscape that recovers the city’s ecology. Their development is not one of consumption, or devastation, but of recovery and the reproduction of space. The articles in this section underscore the way creativity and multiple ways of seeing can present different ways of knowing the African city. From mosques to chimneys, infrastructures to caves, these stories explore the tensions between reality and imagination, present and past, aspiration and defeat in urban spaces.
RADICAL DEVELOPMENT FOLIO 22