Panel 91: (Re)Ordering Cities and Histories: African Urban Street-Level Workers

Once imagined as concretisations of colonial rationality and postcolonial progress, most African cities are now seen as outstripping capacity to care for, count and contain their fastgrowing populations. And yet, every day, Africans set out on the streets to make the city legible, healthy, function and flow. Rather than describe the disordering of urban Africa, this panel seeks to interrogate the changing capacities, civic engagements, circulations and connections of those who work to order the city. The routine dimensions of urban street-level work –such as cleaning, collecting, inspecting, selling, transporting, surveying, policing and researching—connect official designs of governance, health and cleanliness to the liveliness of city streets; they also link the temporal layers that make up urban spaces. The histories of African cities were marked by the trajectories of these workers; while their current movements around the city continue to be animated by echoes and material traces of multiple pasts. By following the complex pathways of past and present mobile street-level workers in Africa, the papers in this panel will reflect on the city as a site of historical knowledge and experiences of transformation in Africa. Bringing together diverse historiographic and ethnographic approaches to a similar empirical object, the aim of this panel is to investigate how and to what extent colonial and postcolonial projects, and their erosion by processes of adjustment, informalisation and pauperisation, structure(d) the experience and ordering of the city.