Introduction: the stuff of African cities

What kind of stuff makes cities? What sorts of relations between humans, materials, infrastructures, animals, plans, substances, climates, machines, imaginaries, labours, foodstuffs – things – are mobilized to produce the dense, vibrant, provisional assemblage that we call a city? What happens when such relational flows become blocked, broken or otherwise constrained? What is distinctive, if anything, about the substance of African cities? These are a few of the questions that lie behind our preoccupation with urban materialities in Africa, and the promise of stuff for thinking through what makes African cities work – and, conversely, for unravelling what happens when things fall apart. This special issue brings together six articles examining the contested materialities of African cities, building on an emerging focus on the stuff and substance of urban Africa (e.g. Hoffman 2017; Melly 2017; Smith 2019; Archambault 2018). This recent work constitutes a turn away from prevailing themes in the scholarship of African cities. Such themes have, until recently, been dominated by the invisible, informal and ephemeral as defining features of African urbanism (De Boeck and Plissart 2004; Guyer 2004; Simone 2004a; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008). The longevity of such themes is in some ways surprising given the earlier ‘materiality turn’ in anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography and cognate disciplines, which generated a wealth of influential, materially minded research (Miller 2005; Brown 2001; Latour 2000; Pinney 1997; Tilley 1994; Appadurai 1986). Such studies have variously explored sensory, affective, experiential and material engagements with objects, technologies, substances, infrastructures and other tangible and material stuff, in the ongoing constitution of landscapes, cities and lives. The contributions brought together here are in conversation with such approaches, examining urban life in Africa through the diverse ways in which substances and materials, technologies and things, bodies and even animals are imbricated in the becoming and (re)making of urban geographies, socialities and subjectivities in contexts across East, West and Southern Africa, including Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Mozambique and South Africa. The particular kinds of materials examined range from sand (Dawson) and concrete (Choplin) to foodstuffs, animals and bodies (Rahier and Fontein) and dangerous contaminants (Fontein), as well as buildings (Smith) and their plans, designs and regulations (Smith and Nielsen).