Tariq Toffa, Cape Town Community Manager
With the holiday season upon us, here are some book suggestions that will be particularly relevant for those involved in the city as urban scholars, professionals, or activists, or interested in issues of urbanism and sustainability in cities. The following books from the African Centre for Cities (ACC) are significant contributions to the study of urbanism in African cities.
Based in Cape Town, the ACC is an interdisciplinary research and teaching programme focused on sustainable systems of urbanization in Africa. It argues that there is a “profound developmental and philosophical crisis” in these urbanization processes and, moreover, that “there is hardly any sustained scholarship on the existential and cultural dimensions of African urbanism.” In response, ACC advocates remaining rooted in context while building knowledge networks between research institutions across the continent. It conducts a series of applied research programmes in Cape Town, South Africa and significant parts of Africa.
Also among the strategic goals of the ACC is the promotion and dissemination of quality publications by African scholars on urban topics. Three recent ACC publications address sustainability and urbanism in Cape Town, South Africa, and African cities respectively.
Counter Currents: Experiments in Sustainability in the Cape Town Region (2010): Cape Town is undergoing a growth spurt driven by both public and private sector investments, although there are very few book-length perspectives on the nature and direction of this growth. Addressing the gap in the literature and to shift public ideas and discourses, the book argues that Cape Town’s physical metamorphosis is both unsustainable and culturally questionable. It explores several alternative urban development initiatives or “counter currents” to these processes, toward creating a more inclusive, vibrant, and sustainable city.
African Perspectives – [South] Africa. City, Society, Space, Literature and Architecture (2012): This book is the culmination of a series of discussions that began at the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology. It forms the seventh volume of the Delft School of Design Series focusing on particular questions of urbanism and sustainability related to the South African urban context. The book seeks to construct a contemporary critical dialogue of current spatial practices and contemporary design instruments in relation to social, political, and governance structures. Topics within this volume are addressed under headings of ‘Other Urbanisms’, ‘Tradition, Culture and Education’, ‘Urban Design, Civic Action and Agency in South Africa’, and ‘Future Perspectives’.
Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (2013): Rogue Urbanism is the outcome of a research exploration by the ACC at the University of Cape Town. The ambition of Rogue Urbanism is to produce new and relevant theoretical work on the “specificity” of African urbanism, working between theory, artistic representations of everyday practices, and phenomenology in African cities. The result is a series of exchanges between scholars and artists through textual and photographic essays, which showcase an ensemble of diverse perspectives to approaching and understanding African cities.
Each of the books above includes a multidisciplinary range of prominent and influential contributing authors in its respective field, and should make for an invaluable gift to anyone interested in the dynamics of urban development, and in issues such as urban inequality, environmental degradation, and social conflicts affecting African cities and the global South, as well as the sorts of proposals that are afoot to address these challenges.