Goodfellow, Tom: Politics and the Urban Frontier : Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa. Oxford, 2022

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Rezension von: Goodfellow, Tom: Politics and the Urban Frontier : Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa. Oxford, 2022.
In: African Affairs. Bd. 122 (2023) Heft 489 . - S. 621-623.
ISSN 1468-2621
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adad032

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Abstract

Africa’s cities are rapidly expanding. Many governments attempt to actively shape the livelihoods of their urban citizens through a range of political directives and infrastructural investments. Goodfellow’s ‘Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa’ makes sense of these dynamics through a theoretically innovative and empirically rich analysis of why Kampala, Kigali, and Addis Ababa have developed along different trajectories. Based on more than a decade of research on the world’s ‘least urbanized but most rapidly urbanizing region’ (p.4), the book is a trans-disciplinary tour-de-force straddling urban studies, development studies, African studies, comparative politics, and even debates in international relations and history.

The book’s central premise is that dominant paradigms in urban studies, such as variegated capitalism, late urbanization, and southern urbanism, cannot explain why the planning visions, property and housing dynamics, marketplaces, and modes of urban protest differ so significantly in Addis, Kampala, and Kigali. Goodfellow argues that the answer lies in politics, which he delineates along four explanatory factors in Chapter 2: the distribution of ‘associational power’ (p.34), the pursuit of social legitimacy, the modalities of political informality, and the material and political effects of infrastructure.