African Cities: Modernity and Slums, Urban Literature, and Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Jeremy Tambling
Keyword(s):  
Urban Literature ◽  
African Cities

YOUTH WELLBEING IN SOUTH AFRICA: WHAT DIMENSIONS SHOULD WE MEASURE?

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dabesaki Mac-Ikemenjima
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Health Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
South African ◽  
Time Use ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
African Cities ◽  
South African Cities ◽  
Selection Of

There is growing interest in the development of measures and indexes of youth wellbeing. However, there has been a limited discussion on indicators to measure and select them. This paper reports on the results of a qualitative study on the selection of indicators to measure the wellbeing of young people in South Africa, and reflects on the relevance of the content of their values in choosing indicators for measuring their wellbeing. The data used in this analysis is based on telephone (9) and email (6) interviews conducted with 15 young people (male=5, female=10) aged 22 to 32 from five South African cities during July 2010. In the interviews, participants were asked to identify five issues they considered important to their lives, after which they were asked to rank them in order of importance. The issues indicated by the participants are described and discussed in six dimensions: economic, relationships, spiritual and health, education, time use and material. The indicators developed from this study are discussed in terms of their relevance for use in a measure of youth wellbeing in South Africa.

Taken for a Ride

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Rizzo
Keyword(s):  
Public Transport ◽  
Dar Es Salaam ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Urban Informality ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Contextual Understanding ◽  
Informal Economies ◽  
Political Economy Analysis ◽  
Analytical Power

The chapter starts by describing public transport in Dar es Salaam as ‘functional chaos’. It then critically reviews two thematic literatures, on African cities and on their informal economies, to reveal that references to chaos, dystopia, and their opposites, order and functionalism, are common. The key argument is that a highly contextual understanding of urban informality and of how African cities work is required to avoid overly deterministic structural accounts and romantic celebration of African agency without due attention to structural constraints. The chapter presents the book’s approach: namely a political-economy analysis, centred on class analysis and wary of automatically reading off the political interests of actors from their class position. It argues that neoliberalism and post-socialism are key to understanding Tanzania and public transport in Dar es Salaam, and calls for grounding ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in a particular context while retaining the analytical power of the concept of neoliberalism.

Fluid Multilingual Practices among Youth in Cameroon and Mozambique

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torun Reite ◽  
Francis Badiang Oloko ◽  
Manuel Armando Guissemo
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
The South ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
The Social

Inspired by recent epistemological and ontological debates aimed at unsettling and reshaping conceptions of language, this essay discusses how mainstream sociolinguistics offers notions meaningful for studying contexts of the South. Based on empirical studies of youth in two African cities, Yaoundé in Cameroon and Maputo in Mozambique, the essay engages with “fluid modernity” and “enregisterment” to unravel the role that fluid multilingual practices play in the social lives of urban youth. The empirically grounded theoretical discussion shows how recent epistemologies and ontologies offer inroads to more pluriversal knowledge production. The essay foregrounds: i) the role of language in the sociopolitical battles of control over resources, and ii) speakers’ reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of register formations of fluid multilingual practices. Moreover, it shows how bundles of localized meanings construct belongings and counterhegemonic discourses, as well as demonstrating speakers’ differential valuations and perceptions of boundaries and transgressions across social space.

scholarly journals ‘We are taught to act’: hustling on the move in Kampala and Nairobi

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
William Monteith ◽  
George Mirembe
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Individual Survival ◽  
Urban Contexts

AbstractThis article explores the question of what happens when highly socialized and contingent forms of provisioning go wrong, and young men are forced to start again in unfamiliar urban contexts. The decline of George Mirembe's moneylending business in Kampala pre-empted his departure from the country and his arrival in Nairobi in search of new socio-economic opportunities. Lacking the documents and language skills necessary to enter formal sectors of the economy, George claimed asylum as a sexual refugee while working as a smuggler and a voice actor in the shadow film industry. His activities illustrate the advantages and limitations of the hustle as a framework for understanding the activities of transnational ‘others’ in African cities. I argue that translational practices of acting and storytelling have become a generalized tactic of survival among migrants in urban East Africa. Such practices are illustrative of a form of ‘uprooted hustle’ – or hustling on the move – that is oriented towards individual survival and exit rather than place-based transformation.

scholarly journals WOMEN’S MOBILITY AND TRANSPORT IN THE PERIPHERIES OF THREE AFRICAN CITIES: REFLECTING ON EARLY IMPACTS OF COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Porter ◽  
E. Murphy ◽  
F. Adamu ◽  
P.B. Dayil ◽  
A. De Lannoy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African Cities

scholarly journals Colonial legacies: Shaping African cities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neeraj G Baruah ◽  
J Vernon Henderson ◽  
Cong Peng
Keyword(s):  
City Planning ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
New Developments ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Compact Development ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Dual Mandate

Abstract Institutions persisting from colonial rule affect the spatial structure and conditions under which 100s of millions of people live in Sub-saharan African cities. In a sample of 318 cities, Francophone cities have more compact development than Anglophone, overall, in older colonial sections, and at clear extensive margins long after the colonial era. Compactness covers intensity of land use, gridiron road structures and leapfrogging of new developments. Why the difference? Under British indirect and dual mandate rule, colonial and native sections developed without coordination. In contrast, integrated city planning and land allocation were featured in French direct rule. These differences in planning traditions persist.1

Slums in African Cities

2019 ◽  
pp. 251-284
Author(s):  
José Forjaz ◽  
Jéssica Lage
Keyword(s):  
African Cities
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