| Abstract |
"Making an African City follows up in many ways on John Parker's Making the Town, tracing the politics of urban development in Accra from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. Hart argues that regulation in Accra constituted a form of informalization-a historical process through which longstanding African social, economic, cultural, and political practices were increasingly marginalized through the categorizations, policies, and material interventions of technocratic experts and government officials. The book covers five major spheres of regulation in the city-sanitation, health, trade, mobility, and housing-and in doing so, explores how diverse groups of European and African agents shaped Accra as an "African city." In addressing and critiquing the way that scholars and practitioners use the idea of "informality" to describe the contemporary city, this book intervenes in scholarly conversations about the past, present, and future of cities in Africa and around the world. As such, it is part of an emerging critical scholarship on cities in the Global South which seeks to reshape debates about and understandings of "the city" that have historically been dominated by Western models. By placing African residents at the center of the debate about informalization, regulation, and urban governance, this book also challenges some of the overly simplistic characterizations of agency in the context of colonialism, which has dominated African history scholarship for decades"-- Provided by publisher. |
