Fragile Cities: Fundamentals of Urban Life in East and Southern Africa

Abstract

Too often the ambiguities of early European urbanization are overlooked and early modern city growth is portrayed as the embodiment of Western economic and political progress and a model for the developing world today. It is in this light that Western donors have viewed the combination of urban demographic growth with economic malaise in Sub-Saharan Africa as perverse and attributable to urban political elites’ misguided policies and practices. Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanization trend, amidst the doldrums of the last quarter of a century, is indeed puzzling. This book seeks to disentangle and contextualize the tenuous character of urban African economic life over the last half of the 20th century. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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