This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.
Based on Cohen's fieldwork in the 1960s among the Hausa migrants, a people of the Yoruba area (then the western region of the Federation of Nigeria), Custom and Politics in Urban Africa looks at how ethnic groups use elements of tradition in jostling for power and privilege in new urban situations. This is a landmark work in urban anthropology and provides a comparative framework for studying political processes in African societies.
Africa is a continent of 54 countries and over a billion people. However, despite the rich diversity of the African experience, it is striking that continuations and themes seem to be reflected across the continent, particularly south of the Sahara. Questions of underdevelopment, outside exploitation, and misrule are characteristic of many - if not most-states in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this Very Short Introduction Ian Taylor explores how politics is practiced on the African continent, considering the nature of the state in Sub-Saharan Africa and why its state structures are generally weaker than elsewhere in the world. Exploring the historical and contemporary factors which account for Africa's underdevelopment, he also analyses why some African countries suffer from high levels of political violence while others are spared. Unveilling the ways in which African state and society actually function beyond the formal institutional façade, Taylor discusses how external factors - both inherited and contemporary - act upon the continent. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
This book explores the changing dynamics and challenges behind the rapid expanse of Africa’s urban population. Africa’s urban age is underway. With the world’s fastest growing urban population, the continent is rapidly transforming from one that is largely rural, to one that is largely urban. Often facing limited budgets, those tasked with managing African cities require empirical evidence on the nature of demands for infrastructure, escalating environmental hazards, and ever-expanding informal settlements. Drawing on the work of the African Urban Research Initiative, this book brings together contributions from local researchers investigating key themes and challenges within their own contexts. An important example of urban knowledge co-production, the book demonstrates the regional diversity that can be seen as the main feature of African urbanism, with even well-accepted concepts such as informality manifesting in markedly different ways from place to place. Providing an important nuanced perspective on the heterogeneity of African cities and the challenges they face, this book will be an important resource for researchers across development studies, African studies, and urban studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003008385, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Garth Andrew Myers' work makes a significant contribution to a long tradition of research on colonial cities and a multidisciplinary body of literature on urban legacies of colonialism. He examines both colonial rule and postcolonial inheritance in these cities, tracing the legacies of colonialism in different and divergent postcolonial settings—a revolutionary left-wing socialist state (Zanzibar) and a reactionary right-wing dictatorship (Malawi). In addition to the examination of urban plans and the African urban majority's responses to them, the book traces the experience of the urban planning process through three different "verandahs of power," or levels of class depiction: the colonial power, the colonized middle, and the urban majority. Interspersed with personal stories, this book illuminates our understanding of the workings of power in African cities by addressing human experiences of that power.
This handbook contributes with new evidence and new insights to the on-going debate on the de-colonization of knowledge on urban planning in Africa. African cities grew rapidly since the mid-20th century, in part due to rising rural migration and rapid internal demographic growth that followed the independence in most African countries. This rapid urbanization is commonly seen as a primary cause of the current urban management challenges with which African cities are confronted. This importance given to rapid urbanization prevented the due consideration of other dimensions of the current urban problems, challenges and changes in African cities. The contributions to this handbook explore these other dimensions, looking in particular to the nature and capacity of local self-government and to the role of urban governance and urban planning in the poor urban conditions found in most African cities. It deals with current and contemporary urban challenges and urban policy responses, but also offers an historical overview of local governance and urban policies during the colonial period in the late 19th and 20th centuries, offering ample evidence of common features, and divergent features as well, on a number of facets, from intra-urban racial segregation solutions to the relationships between the colonial power and the natives, to the assimilation policy, as practiced by the French and Portuguese and the Indirect Rule put in place by Britain in some or in part of its colonies. Using innovative approaches to the challenges confronting the governance of African cities, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of Urban Africa, urban planning in Africa and African Development.
The Oxford Handbook of Populism presents the state of the art of research on populism from the perspective of Political Science. The book features work from the leading experts in the field, and synthesizes the main strands of research in four compact sections: concepts, issues, regions, and normative debates. Due to its breath, The Oxford Handbook of Populism is an invaluable resource for those interested in the study of populism, but also forexperts in each of the topics discussed, who will benefit from accounts of current discussions and research gaps, as well as a map of new directions in the study of populism.
