Filip De Boeck - Böcker

Presents a range of views on the lives of young people around Africa.This book contributes to a theoretical, ethnographic and historical understanding of issues concerning children, youth, agency, locality, globalization and identity from the past to the postcolony and beyond. As such the authors strive to achieve a better insight into what lives in the hearts and minds of African youngsters.Contributors include: Alcinda Honwana, Filip De Boeck, Jean & John Comaroff, Mats Utas, Pamela Reynolds, Tshikala Biaya,Deborah Durham, Nicolas Argenti, Ibrahim Abdullah & Mamadou DioufNorth America: Africa World Press; Senegal: Codesria

Cities are now on the front line of dangers associated with the climate crisis, health emergencies, uncontrolled artificial intelligence, escalating warfare, growing authoritarianism and capitalist profligacy. This is especially so for their unprotected populations who, in large numbers, now face a dire future of precarity as powerful elites seek to turn urban assets to their advantage in confronting an uncertain future. For the vast majority of people living in cities, the future is one of foreclosure – a future of dispossession and impoverishment that is lacking a horizon of hope.What pathways remain open for cities to avert a future of foreclosure for people leading modest lives in modest neighbourhoods? To answer this question, this book looks to the popular practices and knowledges that exist within urban communities and neighbourhoods, finding within them elements that are potentially reparative and curative. Here the engagement with time is different, involving repertoires of horizontal relations, affinities of place and restive knowledge capable of making something out of nothing, of bending adversity towards other goals. Here, rich yet neglected ecologies of urban inhabitation – with all their wiles and improvisations – emerge as the ground of future-making. The book offers a body of concepts to encapsulate this threatened yet resistant urbanism, exemplifies its workings in the streets of Kinshasa, Lagos, Mexico City and Naples, and outlines an infrastructural and aesthetic politics to bring out its potential, thereby enabling another future to shine through urban foreclosure.

Cities are now on the front line of dangers associated with the climate crisis, health emergencies, uncontrolled artificial intelligence, escalating warfare, growing authoritarianism and capitalist profligacy. This is especially so for their unprotected populations who, in large numbers, now face a dire future of precarity as powerful elites seek to turn urban assets to their advantage in confronting an uncertain future. For the vast majority of people living in cities, the future is one of foreclosure – a future of dispossession and impoverishment that is lacking a horizon of hope.What pathways remain open for cities to avert a future of foreclosure for people leading modest lives in modest neighbourhoods? To answer this question, this book looks to the popular practices and knowledges that exist within urban communities and neighbourhoods, finding within them elements that are potentially reparative and curative. Here the engagement with time is different, involving repertoires of horizontal relations, affinities of place and restive knowledge capable of making something out of nothing, of bending adversity towards other goals. Here, rich yet neglected ecologies of urban inhabitation – with all their wiles and improvisations – emerge as the ground of future-making. The book offers a body of concepts to encapsulate this threatened yet resistant urbanism, exemplifies its workings in the streets of Kinshasa, Lagos, Mexico City and Naples, and outlines an infrastructural and aesthetic politics to bring out its potential, thereby enabling another future to shine through urban foreclosure.