African Cities by Garth Myers: Reassessing African Cities

Reassessing African cities is the programme of African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice (2011), the work of the American geographer Garth Myers, a professor at Trinity College in Hartford and a specialist on Lusaka, Zanzibar and Nairobi. Published by Zed Books, its thesis is that urban theory, built from Chicago, Los Angeles or Paris, cannot explain African cities or, in truth, the urbanization of the twenty-first century, which is happening above all in Africa and Asia, and that African cities must be read on their own terms and as a source of ideas for the rest of the world.

Against the deficit gaze: ordinary cities with their own trajectories

Myers starts from a critique of the development gaze. For decades, African cities were described as backward, chaotic or failed, measured by what they lack relative to a Western model, and that reading, inherited from colonialism, justified policies that copied master plans, highways and new towns unrelated to how residents live. Following Jennifer Robinson and AbdouMaliq Simone, Myers proposes treating Lagos, Nairobi or Dakar as ordinary cities with their own trajectories, and studying the informality, self-organisation and social networks that make them work as capacities rather than defects.

Five themes: postcolonial, informal, governed, wounded and cosmopolitan

The book is organised around five themes. The postcolonial city, where the segregated layout of the colony, with its European centre and African quarters, still structures inequality in Nairobi or Lusaka. The informal city, where most housing, work and transport happen outside the plan, and where Myers sees a real economy and politics that planning must recognise. The governed city, with weak states, international agencies and community organisations competing to decide. The wounded city, marked by war, AIDS and violence, as in Mogadishu or Kinshasa. And the cosmopolitan city, connected by migration, trade and culture to the world, as in Zanzibar or Dakar.

Comparing without hierarchy: gentrification and zoning, African style

His method is to compare African cities with one another and with those of other continents without hierarchy. Myers shows that gentrification and zoning, central concepts of Northern theory, have African versions, from the eviction of Nairobi's settlements for highways to the heritage conservation of Zanzibar that expels residents, but that they combine with dynamics of their own: collective land ownership, traditional authorities, churches and mosques as service providers, and a spatial creativity that Northern cities, with their housing and infrastructure crises, would do well to study.

Influence, criticism and Rethinking Urbanism

The book converses with Edgar Pieterse, Ananya Roy and Vanessa Watson, and belongs to the turn of urban theory toward the South. It has been criticised by those who see in the celebration of informality and resilience a risk of normalising precarity and excusing the states and elites that produce that condition; Myers replies that recognising residents' capacities does not mean accepting their conditions but demanding policies that start from them. His later work, Rethinking Urbanism (2020), extends the proposal to global urban theory.

The lesson of African Cities is that African cities are not incomplete cases of a model but laboratories of the urbanization to come, and that understanding them requires abandoning the deficit gaze and learning from how their residents build, organise and govern in conditions theory did not foresee. For global urbanism, that lesson is urgent: the twenty-first century is urbanising in Africa, and the ideas that work there will be the ones that work for the world.