Across the African continent, the pursuit for clean energy sources to accelerate the transition to net-zero carbon growth, has cast a perplexing spotlight on the politics and imaginaries of the region’s cityscapes. From the groundswell of resistance that met the introduction of emissions levy in Ghana to the animated court challenges mounted by South African NGOs like Earth Life against corporate and state actors, African cities have become the hotbed for the contentious bargains, articulations, and dilemmas around sustainable and inclusive transitions from fossil fuels towards clean energy.
This panel considers the intersections of energy and cities as the entry point into the interlocking imaginaries, power enactments, and socio-economic trade-offs that would define Africa’s response to the planetary climate crisis. Closer attention to the nexus of energy-based urban transformations in the region calls for a deeper interrogation of various lines of inquiry that lie at the heart this panel; Theoretically, how does various iterations of energy, in its cleaner or dirty form, ignite distinctive temporalities and imaginaries? In other words, how do energy forms frame the past, present, and future the cityscape, and what specific teleologies do such time reckonings proffer for how the cityscape is rendered at multiple scales in the form of nostalgia, hope, anxiety, spontaneity, or inclusivity? Equally relevant is the more empirical question of how can we best capture the ways various energy sources cohabit in the aesthetic, technological, governance, socio-economic and political milieu of Africa’s cities, and the pathways they offer for (re)imagining the problems and solutions for sustainable energy transitions?
The convenors thereby invite papers that offer a refreshing theoretical and empirical take on the region’s vexing issues associated with sustainable energy transitions and urbanization. Topics of relevance include not only the histories and futures of the city’s-built environment like architecture, technologies, and transport systems, but also the mobilities, rhetorics, innovations, networks, and tensions that are shaping governance and politics of energy-based energy transformations. We are particularly interested in abstracts that have publication potential, drawing from varied interdisciplinary works on cities and energy, while applying innovative methodologies to unpack the material and temporal spaces and contestations that are shaping imaginaries of Africa’s urbanscapes. The panel is part of a broader project “Fuming Cities: African Network for Ideas on Cities and Energy (Africa-NICE),” which is funded by the research collaboration grant by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
This panel is part of a broader funded project that I led with 2 other colleagues: Mohammad Amir Anwar, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh & Pius Siakwah, Institute of African Studies University of Ghana.
Please email your abstracts to Nelson Oppong at nelson.oppong@ed.ac.uk by March 14.
