Africa

Reviews

Dakar, Portrait of a Capital City

Armelle Choplin - 12 September 2025
Dakar, métamorphoses d’une capitale, by architects Carole Diop and Xavier Ricou, takes readers on a journey through...
From the Field

Large-Scale Farming in the Face of Competing Land Uses in Abidjan District, Côte d’Ivoire

Adjoba Marthe Koffi-Didia & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 March 2025
To the west of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s largest city, large farming operations—owned by multinational companies...
From the Field

Digital Technology and the City: New Forms of Urban Segregation in Cape Town?

Julien Migozzi & translated by Oliver Waine - 23 June 2023
In the age of platform capitalism, how is digital technology reconfiguring real-estate markets and access to housing?...
From the Field

Arrests of People Smugglers in Niger: A Criminalization of Mutual-Aid Practices in Migration Situations

Alizée Dauchy & translated by Oliver Waine - 8 July 2022
From the point of view of the Northern states, international migration from the South now has its designated leaders,...
Reviews

Disposability in the City: A Review of Waste Worlds

Lily Baum Pollans - 5 July 2022
Lily Pollans reviews Jacob Doherty’s Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability, which shows...
From the Field

The Professionalization of Migrant Assistance in Tunisia

Camille Cassarini & translated by Oliver Waine - 15 April 2022
In Tunisia, the management of sub-Saharan migration has in recent years become a new sector of employment. Camille...
Essays

Fablabs in Africa: Digital Innovation for Sustainable Cities?

Armelle Choplin & Martin Lozivit & translated by Oliver Waine - 16 April 2021
In a context where “smart cities” are being promoted in urban projects in Africa, Armelle Choplin and Martin Lozivit...
From the Field

Algeria’s Hirak: When a Social Movement Puts Citizenship Under the Microscope

Islam Amine Derradji & Amel Gherbi & translated by Oliver Waine - 26 March 2021
The popular mobilization that rose up in Algeria in 2019 was not only a revolt against living conditions that had...
From the Field

Made in China, Sold in West Africa

Anne Bouhali & Nora Mareï & Mamadou Dimé & translated by Oliver Waine - 31 May 2019
From a small border post between Senegal and Mauritania, Anne Bouahli, Nora Mareï and Mamadou Dimé follow the journey...
Debates

Can the Commons Pave the Way to Greater Land Security?

Irène Salenson & Claire Simonneau & translated by Oliver Waine - 22 June 2018
Experiences of collective forms of ownership, based on the concept of the commons, have flourished throughout the...
From the Field

Land Insecurity in Khartoum: When Land Titles Fail to Protect Against Public Predation

Alice Franck & translated by Oliver Waine - 6 June 2018
The unstable economic and political context in Sudan has encouraged people to invest massively in land in urban...
From the Field

Land Titling: A Tool, not a Panacea

Kareem Ibrahim & Deena Khalil - 20 December 2016
The government of Egypt has long relied on land titling to limit the growth of informal urban residential...
From the Field

Securing Land Tenure in Egypt: Who Needs Registered Titles?

David Sims - 14 June 2016
David Sims challenges popular wisdom on property-rights regimes in non-Western nations by questioning the relevance...
Debates

Social housing in Africa: a model to be (re)invented?

Alexandra Biehler & Armelle Choplin & Marie Morelle & translated by Oliver Waine - 16 October 2015
While the question of housing for working-class populations remains a recurrent issue in sub‑Saharan African cities,...
Essays

A Right to the City in the Global South?

Marianne Morange & Amandine Spire & translated by Oliver Waine - 17 April 2015
The idea of the right to the city has been the subject of strongly renewed interest in academic milieux, activist...
From the Field

Bypassing the city: divisions and divergences in Antananarivo

Catherine Fournet-Guérin & translated by Oliver Waine - 4 December 2014
In a context of global competition, major projects are the order of the day, including in the global South. The new...
Reviews

De-Westernising Urban Theory

Armelle Choplin & translated by Oliver Waine - 5 December 2012
Three recent publications share a common aim: to move beyond the dichotomies of Western vs Third-World cities,...

Series

Horizons in the Housing Struggle
Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces
Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of New...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who patrol...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...

Other resources online

“Our hallway’s big enough to play football in!” The council housing...

The Guardian
Boasting two-sink kitchens, Tower Court in north London is tailored for the Haredi Jewish community – but its...

Saudi Arabia: How is Mobility Being Transformed in the Oil Kingdom?

Mobile Lives Forum
04 April 2025, by Aniss Mouad Mezoued The launch of the Riyadh metro in late November 2024 once again highlighted...

Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age (Paul Mees)

Mobile Lives Forum
27 March 2025, by Javier Caletrío Can suburbia avoid car dependence? Can low-density areas enjoy first-rate public...

Geopolitics and Electric Vehicles: The Rise of Climate Protectionism

Mobile Lives Forum
17 February 2025, by Xabier Gangoiti and Graham Parkhurst The electric vehicle (EV) revolution is not just a...

One Way to Fight Rising Food Prices: Public Grocery Stores

The New Republic
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has proposed opening government-owned grocery stores as a solution to...

The Quiet Power of Car-Free Neighborhoods

CityLab
Restricting or banning vehicles in congested city centers pays off with cleaner air and safer streets. We need to...
Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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