Positing the Polis: Topography as a Way to De-centre Urban Thinking

Abstract

Urban living constantly attempts to 'suture' the city, finding ways to stitch gains and losses, or pasts and futures together in the moment of the 'urban now'. De Boeck's reflection on the complexities of the postcolonial urban world in the Central African locale is shaped around the visual archive that he built up over the past years with photographer Sammy Baloji. This article addresses the possibilities of such a combination of ethnography and photography to de-centre and reframe urban theory and build an alternative urban archive to explore in novel ways what this 'suturing', this living and living together, might mean in Central Africa's urban worlds today.

Introduction: the stuff of African cities

“…It is in response to these challenges, we suggest, that there has recently been a renewed enthusiasm for academic collaborations with other, less semantically dominated forms of intellectual production and exchange, particularly with visual artists, creative writers, musicians and performers. There are some strong examples of such attempts within African urban studies, notably De Boeck and Baloji's (2017;2016) visual collaborations on Kinshasa. More recently, we have been part of a five-year collaboration with a range of creative producers, writers and artists in the research project 'Nairobi Becoming', which produced a series of exhibitions, events, films and a forthcoming book (Fontein et al 2023).…”

Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air: Gadbad and the Sensate Ecologies of Driving Work in Contemporary Mumbai

“…The debris from this digging had made its way to the paved road. The mounds of debris that extended out of the naka and onto the roads made it difficult to tell where the construction began, where the naka ended, or where the road emerged in textural and topographic terms (De Boek and Baloji 2017).…”

The Incorporation of the 2030 Agenda in the Design of Local Policies for Social Transformation in Disadvantaged Urban Areas

“…In these countries, social inequality has increased, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, a situation that has been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These events have led to the loss of public confidence in the government [3] and in the increasingly incipient fragmentation of society [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], marked by a multipolarity, where multiple centers of political and corporate power, housing markets, etc., exercise social predation from a systemic relationship, configuring diverse realities of social inequality, which are accentuated in cities all over the world [12,[20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

“…Urbanism is configured as a heterogeneous and dynamic process of social, economic, political, and material division and fracture, which lands in different ways in each context, varying geographically not only between cities but also within them [13][14][15][16][17][18]. This fragmentation configures in cities urbanism of exception [34], where wealth concentrated in different political and economic powers generates zones of impoverishment and neglect, allowing elites to carve out new urban areas where life can develop separately from the vast majority of people living in the city [13][14][15][17][18][19]24,25,35].…”