African Cities, African Urbanization

If the predominant mode of development in African cities is informal and unplanned giving rise to new modes of life, livelihood, and leisure beyond the organizing infrastructures of formal architecture and design in reality, the new African urbanism seems to give rise to two distinct conditions of life--the one crisis and the other ingenuity. Concerned to think through the gendered forms of labor arising from rapid urban growth taking place without conventional facilities, infrastructures and technologies, 'African Cities, African Urbanization' turns to the ethnography of informal settlement; to women's relationships to informality; to the ways in which productive and reproductive labor play their part in urban formation and deformation in African cities.