Teaching (African) Cities Relationally

Sponsored by the African Urban Dynamics CRG under the auspices of AEGIS, this workshop series features scholars and teachers who focus on African cities.

This workshop focuses on two different strategies for a relational pedagogical approach to urban Africa. The first strategy derives from pedagogical frameworks and examples created by Calvin Masilela and Piers Blaikie and entails transforming the classroom into a theatre. Students develop a play – though it sometimes plays out more like a court case – built around urban development contexts in Africa, with students playing the roles of a wide variety of actors. The examples in the workshop come from Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam. The goal is for students to see, in an interactionist and relational approach to the material, that there are many angles on urban development questions, many possible outcomes, and many links from urban Africa to other contexts across the whole-world. The second strategy entails building comparisons and connections between cities without using the global North- or Western-based canon as the starting place. Example case studies pair the Zambian Copperbelt with Detroit and Paris with Nairobi, guiding students toward ways of seeing the connections and disconnections attendant with globalization in the deindustrializing urban realms for the first pairing and peripheral infrastructure development in the second. The module also uses interviews with scholars studying both contexts to give students a deeper means for relating to the cases personally.  

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