Introduction: the stuff of African cities

Abstract

What kind of stuff makes cities? What sorts of relations between humans, materials, infrastructures, animals, plans, substances, climates, machines, imaginaries, labours, foodstuffsthingsare mobilized to produce the dense, vibrant, provisional assemblage that we call a city? What happens when such relational flows become blocked, broken or otherwise constrained? What is distinctive, if anything, about the substance of African cities? These are a few of the questions that lie behind our preoccupation with urban materialities in Africa, and the promise of stuff for thinking through what makes African cities workand, conversely, for unravelling what happens when things fall apart.This special issue brings together six articles examining the contested materialities of African cities, building on an emerging focus on the stuff and substance of urban Africa (e.g. Hoffman 2017; Melly 2017; Smith 2019; Archambault 2018). This recent work constitutes a turn away from prevailing themes in the scholarship of African cities. Such themes have, until recently, been dominated by the invisible, informal and ephemeral as defining features of African urbanism (De Boeck and Plissart 2004;Guyer 2004;Simone 2004a;Nuttall and Mbembe 2008). The longevity of such themes is in some ways surprising given the earlier 'materiality turn' in anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography and cognate disciplines, which generated a wealth of influential, materially minded research (

City of icebergs: materiality, surface and depth in Nairobi’s built environment

“…Since the turn of this century, literatures on materiality (Miller 2005), active landscapes (Bender 2002) and the entanglement of humans and non-humans in shifting networks and assemblages (Bennett 2009;Farías and Bender 2012) have been widely influential in the social sciences and humanities, foregrounding a vital material world and undoing distinctions between lively subjects and dull objects. Such approaches have made fewer inroads in Africanist scholarship, as the Introduction to this issue examines (Fontein and Smith 2023). In this article, I take up this literature to explore the vibrant powers of the material in the formation of urban worlds.…”

Building concrete futures: materiality and urban lives in West Africa

“…Following the flow of cement and concrete, this article examines what kind of space is produced by concrete, who experiences it, for whom it is conceived, and how this material shapes urban forms, the lives of city dwellers and their urban futures. By investigating three dimensions associated with concreteits links with capital, its social meanings for inhabitants-builders, and its ecological impactsthis article aims to contribute to recent work on urban materiality (Hoffman 2017;Archambault 2018;2021a;Smith 2019;Dawson 2021;Choplin 2020a; that analyses the major role of everyday stuff in African cities (see Fontein and Smith 2023).…”