Book,

The city in modern Africa

(Eds.)
Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 5 Cromwell Place, London, SW7, England, first edition edition, (1967)

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  • @estefaniasf
    10 years ago
    “The city in modern Africa” is a book published on 1967 by Horace Miller. The book is a collection of articles which were presented at a 1965 conference. Those articles were written by different social scientists such as anthropologists, economists, political scientists and sociologists. The book is structured in eleven chapters or articles, some of those articles are case studies about specifically issues in some cities, like for example, article 3, which is called “Motives and Methods: Reflections on a study in Lagos” signed by Peter Marris. The articles seems to be ordered from those who treat about general issues to those who treat about case studies. Those case studies allows us to extrapolate some ideas to other cities, but we have to consider that, like the book explains in the first articles, cities in Africa are very plural, and it’s very difficult to extrapolate certain ideas. For urban planning, there is not only necessary to know about technical issues, we also have to consider social aspects, such as social context, traditions, economic, environmental, historical growing… so the book offers us the vision about those social aspects which often are ignored by architects or engineers. When reading this book we have to consider that it was written on 1967, the social context has changed a lot, on 1967 the world was controlled by two superpowers: the USA and the URSS, that means that most of the aspects of growing, are considered looking at those two superpowers. The article reflects all those aspects and relates them to urban growing, and mobility. In the first article “The city and Modernisation: An introduction” the author gives us some clues about what means in our days (remember that we are in 1967) for a city to start developing itself in a coherent way. We can read, at page 13 the affirmation “"Mobility" has been called "a one-word" summary of the institutional requirements of economic development"”. This is a hard but true affirmation. We have to consider that nowadays every kind of city growing is very related to mobility. Public and private transport are the way that people uses to move around the city, so when a city increases its population, mobility has to become more and more important. When this article was written, public transport was less used than today, there was a boom of private transport, to own a car was a symbol of luxury, and of liberty. Nowadays, we can see that the importance of public transport has increased in most cities, as far as the city grows up, going from one way to the other with private transport becomes more expensive, so people started to use public transport, which in general is cheaper and more respectful with the environment. Some of those ideas are exposed on chapter 4: “Africa and the Theory of Optimum Size” written by Joseph J. Spengler. Environment and urban mobility is also treat considering rural exodus, people go from fields to the city to find a job, to find more opportunities and to get outside their own society role. If you grown up on a farm, helping your family with the family business you will probably end owning this business, without any options of studying or doing whatever you really want to do. So poor people, often moves to cities, just to offer their children more opportunities than what they had. Some of these questions are considered on study cases and on chapter 2: “Comparatives Analysis of Processes of Modernisation” written by Daniel Lerner. “What is to be done with the 60% or more of the labor force displaced from agriculture? They have to be re-employed in the industrial service sectors. Again, if one says this fast, it is possible to overlook the enormous transformation in people's lives that this process requires. Transport must be built to move them, homes to house them, schools to trail them, factories and offices to employ them, and the array of urban facilities to service them.” This paragraph on page 30 explains exactly the problem of this exodus. The book also considers more anthropological aspects just as in chapter 6: “Structural Discontinuities in African Towns: Some aspects of racial pluralism”. We have to consider, in this kind of articles, that they were written on 1967, and that between 1948 and the 1990’s some cities began to carry out about apartheid. Nowadays this won’t be a problem, but we have to consider racial pluralism in the same way that we have to consider it in all the cities of the world. As a conclusions we can say that this book aims to show the idea that considering that Africa is a non-built continent, society must do things right. So, just as Karl Marx said on his preface of The Capital: “The more developed society presents to the less developed society a picture of its own future" that means that, actually, when planning African cities growth we must look at how has our cities grown, considering everything that went wrong and right in the past, and adapting that to a different kind of growing never considered before.
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