The Unbearable Lightness of African Cities

As elsewhere, cities in Africa exist as ensembles of houses, streets, social events, and practices and at the same time as objects in the minds of their inhabitants and visitors. Cities always have an imagined double as nobody can experience a city in all its parts and cultural dimensions. Urbanity as a way of living is intimately connected with partial, often contradictory, "uncanny" experiences of the city - but as imagined objects and communities, cities are most often seen as entities. Imagining the city thus means to accommodate idiosyncratic as well as collective views in one image, creatively mediating between one and many. As a practice, imagining calls for an analysis of how urbanites in Africa situate themselves in their cities as social spaces and how they build on their shared everyday experience. This contribution thus conceives urbanity as social practice that binds town dwellers to their cities as social spaces. Urban imagination transforms everyday experience into a sedimented image of the city as an object that town dwellers can relate to in meaningful ways.