Living the Urban Periphery

This book greatly contributes to the reconceptualization of the urban peripheries discourse … bringing to the fore the lived experience of people. Studying cities such as Addis Ababa, where its periphery is under dynamic transformation, beyond lending a “fresh analytical perspective”, generates learning on new frontiers hitherto undetailed.
Dr. Elias Yitbarek Alemayehu, Addis Ababa University

Africa is poised to take the top spot in terms of the scale and pace of urbanisation globally. It must therefore be central to the urban conversation. In an engaging comparative study this book links the realities and experiences of three urban peripheries on the continent to a dynamic field of international debate. It is empirically rich and conceptually innovative.
Professor Phil Harrison, Wits University


Taking forward their innovative conceptualisation of the varied logics of peripheral urbanisation, this collaboratively written and collectively researched comparative analysis builds on a rich, personal engagement with the lived experiences of residents in peripheral areas of rapidly expanding urban regions in South Africa, Ethiopia and Ghana. The authors draw inspiration directly from personal diaries and the daily lives of people they worked closely with in each of the case study areas, eThekwini (Durban), the Gauteng City-Region (Johannesburg), Addis Ababa and Accra. The book works carefully through different aspects of peripheral areas, from governance to investment, housing and land markets, jobs, transport and economy. In doing so, it showcases the potential to build new insights and conceptualisations starting from these contexts, too often neglected in urban studies theorisations. In this reflective comparative analysis, South Africa, Ethiopia and Ghana are the starting points for theoretical insights which will inform and encourage researchers and practitioners in many different contexts who are grappling with the implications of newly emerging, highly contested urbanising territories, which can be very difficult to inhabit. Residents identify peripheries as often ‘boring’ places, emerging far from work, government and retail, with often unpredictable power relations, but also sometimes scope for co-operation. This poses significant challenges for residents and government. But these kinds of peripheral urban places will likely constitute a core element of global urbanism in an era increasingly characterised by dispersed, fragmented and often far-flung urbanising territories. This book therefore establishes what will surely be one of the pillars of an urban studies agenda, urgently needed for the twenty-first century, to understand the great diversity of rapidly urbanising areas across peripheries, whether relatively close to or remote from existing urban centralities.
Professor Jennifer Robinson, University College London