Doing the City: Socio-Spatial Navigation in Urban Africa

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katja Werthmann, since 10/2020
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 362727015

In the wake of postcolonial critiques of urban studies as still being dominated by Northern perspectives, scholars have recently argued against modernist, developmentalist and ultimately normative thinking about the urban in non-Northern parts of the world, and called for alternative approaches based on Southern Theory. Southern cities should be studied in their own right as ordinary cities. This project responds to such propositions by applying an ethnographic approach to urban Africa. Our project departs from recent characterizations of cities in Africa as invisible, elusive and unknowable. We assume, on the contrary, that city dwellers dispose of a range of skills such as embodied knowledge, routinized sense-making procedures and verbal and non-verbal strategies that enable them to create coherence in their everyday movements through the city and thereby do the city. Through studying socio-spatial practices of doing the city in urban Africa and comparing these with similar practices in a Northern city, this project contributes to the epistemological renewal of urban studies that uses comparison across the usual north-south divide. Empirically we focus on actors that are knowledgeable about their cities in both a quotidian and a professional way: taxi drivers and tourist guides in the cities of Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso), Zanzibar (Tanzania), and Leipzig (Germany).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Professorin Dr. Rose Marie Beck, from 10/2019 until 9/2020