Short Abstract

This panel welcomes contributions that advance current theorizations of the politics of urban time and transformation, while recognizing that African cities represent ‘entangled landscapes’ in which multiple spatialities, temporalities and power relations combine.

Long Abstract

The scholarship on contemporary African urban transformation has highlighted the speed at which African cities are changing, turning acceleration into important idiom of urbanization. Often viewed through the lens of Africa’s growing number of urban megaprojects, such accounts tend to emphasize the spectacle of speed, modernity and change. This panel welcomes contributions that advance current theorizations of the politics of urban time and transformation, while recognizing that African cities represent ‘entangled landscapes’ in which multiple spatialities, temporalities and power relations combine (Moore, 2005). This includes studies of the different socio-cultural and political rhythms and temporalities that shape the urban every day, to those that interrogate the more-than human layers or time-scales through which the city takes form. How do such temporal orders co-exist or intersect? What does this tell us about the ways in which time is refracted across urban space? And what opportunities do African cities offer for new ways of thinking and making time?

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