Short Abstract

Bringing history, architecture and anthropology into dialogue, this panel explores vertical informality as a prism for understanding African cities, asking how building upwards reshapes housing, authority and belonging and whose perspectives define these transformations.

Long Abstract

African cities are being remade upwards through rooftop dwellings, incremental extensions and contested high-rise developments. Viewed through planning regulations, architectural forms or residents’ everyday practices, these transformations reveal different and sometimes conflicting understandings of urban development.

Responding to “African Prisms”, this panel explores vertical informality as both a material process and an analytical lens. It brings history, architecture and anthropology into dialogue to examine how building upwards reconfigures housing, authority and social life. Rather than approaching informality as a deviation from planned development, we investigate how residents, officials, builders and developers negotiate rules, adapt buildings and establish claims to urban space.

How do colonial and postcolonial histories shape contemporary forms of vertical living? What becomes visible through archival research, spatial analysis or ethnography, and what escapes each perspective? Whose knowledge determines whether a rooftop extension is understood as a home, an investment or an illegal structure? How do these classifications shape inequality and belonging?

We invite empirically grounded contributions on rooftop housing, incremental construction, speculative development, selective enforcement, infrastructure, maintenance and everyday negotiations of tenure. Comparative contributions and reflections on methods that connect historical, spatial and lived perspectives are particularly welcome.

By examining vertical transformations across African cities, the panel questions familiar divisions between formal and informal, planned and unplanned, and elite and subaltern urbanism. It places African experiences and situated knowledge at the centre of theorizing how cities are built, inhabited and understood.

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