Panel Organisers: Laurent Fourchard / Scarlett Cornelissen

The field of urban studies has witnessed an increasing development in the last twenty years marked by the multiplication of academic publications, the development of research institutions and programmes as well as a growing concern focusing on ‘urban problems’ within a set of international organisations such as the World Bank, the UN and the PNUD. The essential paradigms of yesterday literature (the Islamic, the colonial, the apartheid city, the ‘non global’ city) have largely been criticised by academic literature while international institutions have eventually recognised (albeit exaggeratedly) the role of cities of ‘the south’ in strengthening economic development, in producing new original cultural forms and in nurturing democracy.

Despite this however, the literature on cities in Africa is with a few notable exceptions poorly comparative at the continental level and remains in some disciplines either dominated by a local perspective or by a prescriptive approach aims to meet the needs of national and international policy recommendations. New (and even not so new) paradigms (the postcolonial, the cosmopolitan, the sustainable city, urban governance) are abundantly used but not fundamentally challenged and popular academics such as Rem Koolhaas or Mike Davies have popularized oversimplified vision of urban societies in Africa.

This panel would like to interrogate forces and weaknesses of the field of urban studies in Africa in some disciplines (political science, history, sociology, and geography and planning).Overview papers are welcome as well as critical papers discussing one of the current dominant paradigms found to analyse cities in Africa.