Creative Cities in Africa: Critical Architecture and Urbanism

Critical Architecture and Urbanism

The contemporary notion of the ‘creative city’, connected to present-day regimes of digital urban creative (or smart) cities in neoliberal, city branding, place marketing, digital marketing nomads, is a dominant trope of international progress and development, and there has been a surprisingly positive, yet often uncritical uptake of the discourses of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Buzz words abound in city studies such as resilience, sustainability, innovation, and inequality, yet these are all too often framed within scientific, technical and political economy debates. As editors, we are interested in how these issues seldom appear as carefully considered questions integrated with scholarship around the social and especially the aesthetic. This collection seeks to frame critical approaches to architecture and urbanism, exploring new and alternative disciplinary forms of writing, thinking and making the city. Beyond the current debates, the work of authors in this collection variously surface patterns of critical interdisciplinary thought and historicise this in relation to debates in African Studies, historical and heritage studies as well as in the creative arts and popular culture realms.

Creative Cities in Africa will examine how the built environment and its complex relationship to aesthetics, art and design, were part of the historical processes of city building or city transformation. Through decolonial struggles, independence and after, high modernism, and the search for African authentic identity, ‘creativity’ has been employed to build and shape cities that needed to respond to challenges of the day. Architects, landscapers, craftspeople, musicians, artists, designers, curators, restorers, model-makers from Africa and Europe were involved in imaging, structuring and shaping African cities. How did politicians, planners and power brokers deploy notions of creativity across the history of African cities from colonialism onwards and how did their plans correspond to the practices of creative practitioners in ‘contemporary’ art, gallery design, curatorial practice, heritage management, music, public sculpture and public art, decorative programmes and ecological design? In thinking through dream maps of the unbuilt, unplanned, and ‘informal’ architectures and aesthetic, exhibitions and speculative and Afrofuturist propositions the volume brings together a variety of creative writing in a scholarly frame about the African city.

The volume draws together planners, artists, architects, historians, literary and visual scholars from across the continent and the globe into debate on critical architecture and urbanism in Africa. The voices brought together, ranging from internationally-renowned figures to emerging scholars, provide analysis of African cities — Ville Fantôme, Johannesburg, Lubumbashi, Dakar, Nairobi, Douala, Dalaba, Durban, and Maputo.