Events

Vibrant urban centres in the region have long and changing histories of interconnectedness, innovation, hybridity, and place-making. The solutions to global concerns are being rethought at the city-scale, through smart technology, green cities, and new concepts of development or progress. The urbanities that emerge from everyday lives in cities like Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, or Nairobi articulate diverse identities, imaginaries, negotiations of living-in-the-world through time and space. A region home to many of the future megapolises of the world, Eastern African cities are thus places in and of our world-in-the-making. This seminar will think beyond development as a linear concept of progress to analyse hybridity, heterogeneity, and incompleteness. Analyses on global projects will be rescaled and the panelists will explore constellation of travelling ideas that the region’s cities attract, invite, create, and appropriate.  They will seek to recast the actors of urban life, explore youth as protagonists of city-making, and simultaneously recast the many configurations of Eastern African urbanity as global protagonists in reimagining and remaking our world.

This event is part of the BIEA’s “Eastern Africa in the World” seminar series. It invites scholars to think about Eastern Africa, broadly defined, as a distinctive yet plurally constituted area-in-the-world. A region too frequently essentialized or fragmented in outsiders’ contradictory and entwined narratives, Eastern Africa lurches between being synonymous with historical absence, calamity and failure, and redemptive visions of a techno-optimist “Silicon Savannah” and ever “emerging” promise. Too often, the region’s remarkability is penned reductively from perspectives elsewhere. Yet in its histories, imaginaries, agencies, and connectedness Eastern Africa is a region that has as often written the elsewheres of the world as been shaped by them. This series is an intellectual space to think the world from Eastern Africa, and center the scholarly significance of Eastern Africa as world-making through time and across multiple domains.