Much of the rich recent scholarship on urban Africa focuses primarily on the city scale, prioritizing questions of municipal administration, governance, settlement and provision across urban geographies. However, taking a focus on and beyond the city has been central to earlier work on African cities, and can be key to unlocking the connections between the city and the political histories of the nation-state, as well as for examining urban relations transnationally. Without marginalizing the centrality of “cityness” (Pieterse 2010) and taking seriously urban politics in the African city as important in their own right, such a focus on more-than-urban geographies is salient in emphasizing a variety of urban studies themes articulated at various levels and scales.
In this panel we seek papers that engage with the politics of the city, taking as their focus the African city and moving through and beyond its bounds in their connections e.g. the study of ethnicity and its relation to the politics of urban land, questions of national citizenship or electoral politics and how these find space in the city, and the connections between urban and more-than-urban geographies that extend beyond the city (e.g. agrarian geographies, or regional geography). We are interested in a wide range of papers focusing on urban Africa — acknowledging that “urbanness” itself is an open-ended, contested concept.
Abstracts for this call for co-panelists should be sent via email to both David Pier (dpier@email.unc.edu ) and Shakirah Hudani (shudani@unc.edu) by March 6, 2026. Please include a 200-word abstract and a ~100 word biography.
