Book Review | Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa

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Maren Larsen
Planning Perspectives, 2023

Despite its distance from the urbanizing coastal strip between Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire where Armelle Choplin begins her analysis, the neighbourhood of Misra in Saint-Louis, Senegal is a burgeoning version of what she might call a ‘Low-Cost City’ – a grey landscape under construction and underpinned (perhaps later to be undermined) by the production, sale, circulation, and stacking of blocks of concrete. A group of old friends of mine recently moved there to pursue their latest business venture of short-term subletting. The dynamics of concrete that make Misra at once habitable and uninhabitable without cooling are precisely those illustrated in this book: the life of concrete is bound up with individual life goals, West African urbanization, the advance of capitalism in Africa, and the energy-intensive practices that jeopardize planetary habitability.