Milo Gough examines the transformation of Freetown during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the colonial state attempted to reinvent the city. Making extensive use of maps, photographs and other visual archival material, he argues that Freetown was an unstable entity produced by the entanglements and frictions of a diverse array of urban agents, including itinerant African photographers, sickly colonial surveyors, malarial mosquitoes, caustic newspapermen and Freetonian missionaries. In describing this contested colonial urbanism, Freetown Unstable also reflects on some of the surprising ways in which coloniality is re-emerging in contemporary urban West Africa.

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City-Heat breaks with temperature-based understandings of heat and delves into a richer, more emic exploration of its socio-cultural and sensory dimensions. The chapters cover a range of topics explored through interactions with a diverse group of interlocutors in the Kenyan city of Nakuru, spanning from the daily struggles of hustling youths to the work of geothermal engineers, spiritual warfare, pervasive issues of toxicity and pollution confronted by herbalists, and the medicinal practices to which the interlocutors turned in their efforts to forge more viable pathways into the future.

Through these ethnographic terrains, the book traces how the interlocutors sense, and make sense of, what remains viable in a city undergoing rapid change across infrastructural, spiritual, metabolic and moral registers. Nick Rahier argues that hotter conditions shape how people move, work, relate and forge viable pathways toward ‘cooler’ horizons.

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Relying on more than a decade of empirical research, the book also interrogates the concept of ‘spatial dialectics’ proposed by Henri Lefebvre. Through deep insight into the practices and experiences of everyday life, Lindsay Blair Howe shows how cities and regions like greater Johannesburg are more than just a sum of their parts. Individuals, and the collectives they forge, influence processes of urbanization and capital accumulation. Extra/ordinary Johannesburg reveals how Lefebvre’s assertions about the production of space remain relevant today, but also where they reach their limits, and how theories on the production of space can be further developed by a stronger understanding of this African urban region. What we can learn from how people are able to navigate the urban fabric of centralities, peripheries, and the spaces between matter greatly in productively reimagining ways to encounter urban Africa.

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Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market explores what happens at ‘the end’ of urban displacement, when it is all over, so to speak – when the dust has settled and people find themselves scattered in sometimes unfamiliar surroundings, trying to pick up the pieces and create something meaningful.

This book argues that rupture and ensuing displacement do not produce a clean slate where identities, networks and histories must be produced from scratch. Traders and their markets do not simply vanish into thin air when they are evicted. The book examines not only what is lost but what emerges when a dense node, such as the terminus, is dissolved and fragmented. The ethnography of the traders reveals that the aftermath of eviction in cities may lead to diasporic forms of consciousness and identity formations. Displacement, whether on a local or global scale, demands difficult adjustments and people’s capacities to adapt to new circumstances and environments vary. This book uncovers some of these different capacities and variations in traders’ reactions to displacement.

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