Panel 83: Managing African Cities: Institutional Desire and Everyday Life

How can institutional desire – for order and manageability – be reconciled with the dynamism, messiness and unpredictability of urban life? What of municipal management and public affairs when local government seems to have failed, is corrupt or acts purely on self-interest? What can be learned from the often precarious and ambivalent arrangements urban residents make in their daily endeavours to get by? What creative (and destructive) forces are today at play in the cultural practices of urban youth? Under what circumstance do these open new possibilities for urban life in Africa? Relevant throughout the world, these questions are particularly salient in urban Africa where informality, making do and getting by is the norm. In recent years, the management of African cities has generated copious academic writing, generally oscillating between dystopian visions of doom and naively optimistic business-as-usual managerial fixes. Drawing on broad and extensive engagements with African cities, with their residents and institutional actors, the panel members will put to work a particularly differentiated set of expertise to achieve a highly dynamic discussion on the practice and theory of African cities management, focussing on the nature and roles of various actors - from youth and local government to religious organisations and global agencies - asking what we can learn from an engagement with the more overlooked and unrecognised, yet often more relevant practices of everyday African residents and exploring what radical approaches for providing for African cities, and the lives of their residents, can be imagined today.