Paper short abstract:

We are interested in the analysis and comparison of two locally distinctive modes of city-making and cityness in Sub-Sahara Africa choosing Accra and Mombasa as prime cases.

Paper long abstract:

Emanating from the 'double existence' of every city as a built and as an 'imagined environment' (Donald 1999) our research is directed at the symbolic universe of a city, to its overall cultural code including the multiple cultures within the city, in short, the urban imaginaries of Accra and Mombasa. In a nutshell, the urban imaginary of every city comes with a particular symbolic surplus, is much more than the sum of its cultural representations. With reference to the tradition of 'Gestalttheory' the notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, will be used as a heuristical device for conceptualising "the whole of the city". The making and becoming of a city can be approached through the notion of "cumulative texture" (Suttles 1984; Lindner 2008, the canvas where conceptions of the 'whole of the city' is being produced, consolidated and represented over time. In our paper we present how we intend to approach this subject, namely through the reconstruction of crisis related historical snapshots of the cities to identify central motives and classifications within the cumulative texture so as to arrive at first inroads into a comparison of Accra and Mombasa with respect to analyse the local modes of cityness. The project keeps with the theoretical framework of our ongoing studies on the intrinsic logic of cities in Europe (Germany and Great Britain) aiming to discover differences and/or similarities in the constitution of African and European cities.