Under Siege, Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos: Documenta 11, Platform 4

Today the procedural mechanisms of urban studies are working to interpret new urban paradigms that a century ago were largely absent in a great many cities around the world. African cities are becoming the exemplars for the emergence of new urban formations that are of great interest to many researchers working in the social sciences. This interest has brought into critical light how new urban agglomerations, arrangements, and institutions are emerging from the inadequacies of the public sector, proposing a modernizing cultural revision and a rearrangement of many of the essential elements of familial identification and authority. Out of these transformations, many of which are improvisatory, new types of relations and exchanges, survival and subsistence, forms of solidarity and resistance are produced. It is in the polymorphous and apparently chaotic logic of the postcolonial city that we may find the signs and new codes of expression of new urban identities in formation. Under Siege: Four African Cities underlines a central paradox that seems to rule the view of African cities, namely their inherent dynamism and obsolescence, and engages different kinds of understanding of subjectivity and the cultural, political, social sphere of present day African urban conditions.