Short Abstract

How is the ground of African cities made? This panel takes ground as a prism for understanding how extraction, ecology and urbanism are linked, and asks what reckoning with its afterlives demands.

Long Abstract

Extraction has long framed Africa's relations with the wider world. It also names the material processes that have shaped African built environments and restructured land and life. The mine and the plantation, two archetypes of extraction, have produced distinct ecologies, modes of governance, and urban economies. Their afterlives persist not only in logistics corridors and regimes of land ownership, but also in stone quarried for construction, in wetlands filled to make land for construction, and in soils contaminated by agrochemicals.

This panel asks how urban ground in Africa is made, how planned interventions meet unruly ecologies, and how material substrates are bound to life in political and ecological relations. Taking ground as a prism for examining African urbanism, its salience is refracted across several registers: as material substance for accumulation, site of knowing and embodiment, as archive of history and power, and as instrument through which people remake life in precarious conditions. What does it mean to reckon with the toxic grounds of accumulation in African cities and sites, and what does restitution involve ecologically as well as politically?

Welcoming contributions from any discipline, the panel seeks to build on scholarship that conceptualizes colonialism in ecological terms (Ferdinand, 2022; Hecht, 2023; Yusoff, 2024), extends environmental history into African cities (Adelusi-Adeluyi, 2025), foregrounds African environmental technologies (Mavhunga, 2014), and approaches land and the city as outcomes of specific ways of building and unbuilding earthly and watery environments (Smith et. al., 2025; Cupers, 2025).

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