This volume is a study of the dynamics of human survival in African cities today.

Amidst emergent cultural formations in Dakar, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Kisangani, Jos, Zaria, Cairo, and Marakesh, this collection focuses on diverse ways Africans negotiate novel spatial practices, political economic processes, and social relations that entangle place, identity and power in urban sites. While historically familiar patterns linking the country and city remain, these sedimentations are reworked through the incessant remaking of virtual, real, and moral economies where African agency animates diverse urban formations. African cities are made meaningful through the geographically uneven dynamics of globalization that articulate with locally specific histories, cultural practices, and political contingencies. Is urban life in Africa exceptional or is it another expression and reworking of universal urban modernity remolded and appropriated by Africans making their own lives in relation to and in spite of the myriad of structural and other constraints they face? This powerfully insightful book edited by Abdoumaliq Simone successfully brings out the rich and diverse complexity, ambivalence, resilience and variety of African urban lives and experiences. The book shows that there can be no simple, naive and monolithic explanations and interpretations. This is an important book that re-affirms the agency of ordinary African urban dwellers, while recognizing the often very difficult conditions of their existence but at the same time expressing the optimism and resilience that define African urban life.