African Cities and the Development Conundrum

This 10th thematic volume of International Development Policy presents a collection of articles exploring some of the complex development challenges associated with Africa’s recent but extremely rapid pace of urbanisation that challenges still predominant but misleading images of Africa as a rural continent. Analysing urban settings through the diverse experiences and perspectives of inhabitants and stakeholders in cities across the continent, the authors consider the evolution of international development policy responses amidst the unique historical, social, economic and political contexts of Africa’s urban development.

Contributors include: Carole Ammann, Claudia Baez Camargo, Claire Bénit-Gbaffou, Karen Büscher, Aba Obrumah Crentsil, Sascha Delz, Ton Dietz, Till Förster, Lucy Koechlin, Lalli Metsola, Garth Myers, George Owusu, Edgar Pieterse, Sebastian Prothmann, Warren Smit, and Florian Stoll.

Carole Ammann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern and at the Institute of Sociology, University of Fribourg. She recently completed her dissertation―entitled Silent Politics. Gender, Imagination and the State in Kankan, Guinea―at the University of Basel. Carole Ammann is interested in questions of urbanity, secondary cities, transformations of the state, political participation, everyday life, and gender in West Africa and France.

Till Förster is an anthropologist. He holds a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2001 he has been Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Till Förster has specialised in art, visual culture and political transformations in West and Central Africa. Since 1979, he has conducted field research in Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon. His recent publications focus on visual culture, social creativity and the postcolonial state, as well as on politics and governance in African cities.