Exploring Cityscapes: Kinshasa and Johannesburg

One of the greatest challenges facing contemporary urban studies is how to account for the explosive growth of cities in Africa that are large in population and territorially expansive yet do not have the capacity to absorb expectant work-seekers into the formal economy or to provide basic services to their residents. The difficulties that scholars often encounter in trying to understand the complexities of these cities stem from undue reliance upon ideal-typical models of urban development, based on the salient features of key Western cities as the defining characteristics of a paradigmatic urbanism. Viewed through the distorting lens of classical Western modernity, the development of cities in Africa always appears as the outcome of flawed, distorted, or unfinished urbanism. (For more on these concepts, see Myers and Murray 2007, and Robinson 2006.)

The three works under review provide important insights that help us make sense of cities in Africa on their own terms instead of looking at them primarily in terms of what they lack, be it good governance, efficient management, a working infrastructure, or job-generating growth. In Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City, Keith Beavon painstakingly charts the historical patterns of urbanization that have shaped the spatial contours of Johannesburg from its turbulent early years as a frontier mining town in the late nineteenth century to its present incarnation as a sprawling megalopolis with "world-class" aspirations. Beavon's book complements two earlier works that set high standards for innovative scholarship on Johannesburg: Charles van Onselen's Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand (1981) marked a watershed in historical research on the early days of Johannesburg, while Clive Chipkin's Johannesburg Style (1993) represented a remarkable achievement in linking the construction of the built environment of the city with evolving social policies.

The meticulous effort to capture the shifting patterns of urban living in Johannesburg and their diverse effects on different populations is the real strength of Beavon's work. As the city boundaries pushed ever outward over the course of the twentieth century, urban residents—black as well as white—experienced dislocation and displacement. The contours of resettlement were consistent with the economic booms and busts associated with gold mining and the entrenchment of segregationist policies on separate housing, work, shopping areas, and urban rights for whites and blacks. By the time apartheid officially ended in 1994, Johannesburg's spatial landscape reflected nearly a century of conscious efforts on the part of white administrators to structure the city in accordance with their own racial prejudices and economic preferences. As an urban geographer, Beavon is particularly sensitive to the materiality of cities. For example, he drives home the point that cities originate, grow, and develop in direct relation to their natural environment; in an illuminating appendix he explores the physical geography of deep-level gold mining on the Witwatersrand.

In contrast to Beavon's stress on urban form and the built environment of Johannesburg, the contributors to Theodore Trefon's edited volume, Reinventing Order in the Congo, and of Filip de Boeck and Marie-Françoise Plissart's Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, go beyond the materiality of the city to focus on the worlds of ordinary people and their everyday routines. With a population of more than seven million residents, Kinshasa has ballooned into a huge megalopolis where resourceful, determined residents find innovative ways to navigate the perils of everyday life, muddling through the daily struggle for income, food, shelter, and services without a...