Spring 2022, CairoLab
The Space Lab: Navigating the Larger African Urban World
Course details
- Cycle
- Spring 2022, Cairo
- Length
- 11 sessions
- Format
- In person
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
What kind of urban lives are in Africa? The question, on the face of it, is a poignant one. The common assumptions prevail that Africa is a rural continent. African cities exemplify a truncated modernization. This Space Lab engages debates in urban studies with a focus on African cities. It questions the colonially-mediated modern conceptual frameworks that undergird mainstream imaginations of urban life. It invites participants to investigate the intimate connection that emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. Through navigating the larger African urban world, we will explore the ongoing reconfigurations in urban Africa as a social laboratory: the production of gendered, raced, classed subjectivities, housing, land, infrastructure, sound and street life, violence, and social movements.
Who teaches it
Shan Yang is a Post-MA Fellow for the 2019-2020 academic year at HUSSLab after obtaining an MA at the American University in Cairo. Her MA Comprehensive Examination covered three domains: political economy, time and temporality and the urban. She is currently working on a research project-Being and Living in Spaces of Global Capitalism: Time, Gender and Lifeworlds of Rural Migrant Laborers. She obtained her Bachelor's degree (2012) and first MA (2015) at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Course flow
Sessions without a date
- “Cairo has started to become ugly”: why Egypt is building a new capital cityMichaelson, R. (2018, May 8). The Guardian.
- Tale of two cities: the origins of modern CairoAbu-Lughod, Janet. Comparative Studies in Society and History 7.4 (1965): 429-457.
- Understanding Cairo: The logic of a city out of controlSims, D. (2012). Oxford University Press.
- Egypt’s Housing Crisis. The Shaping of Urban SpaceShawkat, Yahia, and David Sims. (2020). American University in Cairo Press.
- High Class Shanty Towns (Dakar, Senegal)African Cities Reader III, pp 22-26.
- Urban Sahara from the Sky: how Global Capitalism Fixes the Dunes (Nouakchott, Muaritania)African Cities Reader III, pp 19-21.
- This Sea Shall Be Uprooted (Lagos, Nigeria)African Cities Reader III, pp 27-35.
- City Building in Post-Conflict, Post-Socialist Luanda: Burying the past with phantasmagorias of the future (Luanda, Angola)African Cities Reader III, pp 121-133.
- Dispossessed Vigils: Mourning and Regeneration in Inner-City Johannesburg (Johannesburg, South Africa)African Cities Reader III, pp 134-147.
- Invisible Urbanism in AfricaRao, V., DeBoeck, F., and Simone, A. (2007). Perspecta, 39, 78-91.
- The Right to the CityHarvey, D. (2008). New Left Review 53: 23-53.
- Social Space, in The Production of Space, ch. 2, pp 68-168Lefebvre, H (1991).
- Urban neoliberalism, urban insecurity and urban violence: Exploring the gender dimensionsKern, L. and Mullings, B. (2013). In Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the (citation as printed in the flow; the entry is cut off in the source).
- Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern EgyptFahmy, Z. (2020). Stanford University Press.
- The street and ‘the slum’: Political form and urban life in Egypt’s revoltAbourahme, N. (2013). City 17.6: 716-728.
- Ruinous city, ruinous time future suspended and the science fiction of the presentAbourahme, N. (2014). City, 18(4-5), 577-582.
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