The African Metropolis: Struggles Over Urban Space, Citizenship, and Rights to the City

On a planet where urbanization is rapidly expanding, nowhere is the growth more pronounced than in cities of the global South, and in particular, Africa. African metropolises are harbingers of the urban challenges that lie ahead as societies grapple with the fractured social, economic, and political relations forming within these new, often mega, cities.

The African Metropolis integrates geographical and historical perspectives to examine how processes of segregation, marginalization, resilience, and resistance are shaping cities across Africa, spanning from Nigeria and Ghana to Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa. The chapters pay particular attention to the voices and daily realities of those most vulnerable to urban transformations, and to questions such as: Who governs? Who should the city serve? Who has a right to the city? And how can the built spaces and contentious legacies of colonialism and prior development regimes be inclusively reconstructed?

In addition to highlighting critical contemporary debates, the book furthers our ability to examine the transformations taking place in cities of the global South, providing detailed accounts of local complexities while also generating insights that can scale up and across to similar cities around the world.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African Studies, urban development and human geography.

Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Bisola Falola studies spatial and social inequality as a researcher in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.