Rethinking African Urbanization: The Global Lineages of Informality and Spatial Transformation Across the Continent

Abstract

African urbanization is often understood in an exceptional light. Africa-focused work within the field of urban studies emphasizes the distinctiveness of African cities through their growing populations and generative informal social and economic spaces. Such work often highlights the exceptional local nature of African cities and urbanization ‘beyond’ the Global North. While recognition of the heterogeneous nature of African cities, populations, and cultures is necessary, such exceptional arguments risk obscuring the profoundly global histories embedded within African urbanization and its implications for global capitalism. These obstructions prevent urban studies scholars from acknowledging the salience of African urbanization to the broader field.

Since the Berlin Conference on West Africa in 1884-1885, African urban transformation has been fundamental to the history of global capitalism. The General Act of the Berlin Conference divided the colonial control of Africa across European powers and determined the terms of labor, land access, and trade within and beyond the continent. The lineages of this spatial transformation continue to structure current labor regimes, economies, cities, and spaces in Africa, which, in turn, shape social and economic processes on a global scale. Colonial state strategies of dispossession, informalization, racialization, and political subjugation utilized urban space as a mechanism through which to establish and sustain a broad range of inequalities. Such inequalities include access to employment and land, exposure to infectious disease risk, and inadequate housing and infrastructure. The historical creation of these disparities has emerged at the fault lines of current challenges across urban Africa.

This dissertation consists of five chapters addressing African urbanization and its implications for global capitalism through a theoretical and empirical lens. The first chapter interrogates the historical structure of informality in Zambia through the transforming colonial labor regimes in the Copperbelt. The second chapter addresses how urbanization and urban segregation for the purposes of mining labor and pandemic control were used to define and reify the concept of ‘race’ in South Africa. The third chapter demonstrates the global economic prominence of Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, through its resource extraction since 1885. The fourth chapter returns to South Africa, addressing the country’s contention with post-apartheid democracy, protest, and popular sovereignty. The fifth and final chapter covers ground more broadly, as it revisits the topic of urban informality and its legacies by considering it in relation to climate change, a key issue facing Africa and the world today.

Themes of this dissertation are considered both historically and contemporarily and include urban informality, the purposeful manufacturing of impoverished workforces, the racialization of people through spatial strategies, and the socially produced nature of health and disease. This dissertation thus tackles core African urban issues which are present in and critical to global discourses on spatial inequality and the continent’s theoretical and empirical position in relation to colonialism and global capitalism. This analysis of African urbanization invites readers to rethink concepts such as ‘informality,’ ‘race,’ the ‘global,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and ‘agency’ within the field of urban studies, demonstrating the salience of African urbanization to the field.