The City Reader

Abstract

In this selection, from Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne’s Urban Theory Beyond the West (2011) urban anthropologist Filip De Boeck questions the way Western planning has been imposed on the populations of the colonized underdeveloped world. He argues that colonial and post-colonial cities take on a ghostly quality, both in the generic modernism of the administrative city centers and even more in the peripheral, often semi-rural shantytowns inhabited by the indigenous populations. One such city is Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. De Boeck notes that, first in the colonial period and later under the conditions of post-colonialism, Kinshasa developed as two cities: la Ville, the modern European-style city, and la Cité, the communal and semi-rural peripheral city of the indigenous communities. And Kinshasa is still two cities: one, the city of high-rise office buildings and major housing developments expressing the Western ideals of modernism and progress; the other, a rambling, seemingly unplanned collection of settlements expressing the traditional African values and seemingly “invisible” systems of communal order that not so much defy as merely surround and contain the European-imposed urban ideals. In the end, the two cities exist separately but also mirror each other, adding what De Boeck calls a “spectral dimension” that reveals “the shadow-side” of a global urbanization defined by poverty and cultural separation. But there is a curious sense of unity here as well. He reports that both the city’s leaders and its inhabitants share, in some sense, “the same dream of what the city should look like.” This is not the fatalism of the defeated, he argues, but the recognition of a new kind of urban space where the real and the unreal, the visible and the invisible, interact in a way that “conjures up the marvelous through its appeal to the imagination.”

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