Garth Myers

Garth Myers is professor of Urban International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and one of the leading Anglophone specialists on the cities of Africa. A geographer trained at the University of California, Los Angeles, he has researched for three decades in Zanzibar, Lusaka, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and his first books, such as Verandahs of Power (2003), studied how British colonialism organised the space of East African cities and what remained of that order after independence.

African Cities (2011) is his central work. Against the dominant gaze that sees in African cities only chaos, informal settlements and the failure of planning, Myers proposes reading them as places where forms of urban life, government and economy are invented that urban theory, written from Chicago, Los Angeles or London, cannot see. He follows here Jennifer Robinson, AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, and his contribution is a comparative method that takes seriously the informal city, the postcolonial city and the everyday city.

Urban Environments in Africa (2016) addresses the political ecology of those cities, and Rethinking Urbanism (2020) takes the next step: using the lessons of the Global South to rethink urbanism everywhere, including in Hartford, the impoverished American city where he teaches. His work is a reference in postcolonial urban studies and comparative urban geography.

In Disposable Cities (2005) he studied waste management in Zanzibar, Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, where collection programmes funded by international aid were presented as participatory governance. Myers showed that they often shifted the work and the cost onto poor neighbourhoods themselves, while wealthier areas received the public service. Rubbish, on his reading, reveals who counts as a citizen and who is treated as a population to be managed.