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Whereas religious practice has conventionally been associated with the stabilization of urban processes through social anchorage and the mobilization of common identity, it does also entail a sense of continuously shifting perspectives. Urbanity is seen and experienced through multiple prisms and possibilities, something that Islamic concepts related to circulation, displacement and intersection have long emphasized. Currently a politics of mobilizing religious practices is key to understanding how the social fabric of cities is remade, and this essay discusses its limits and possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates trans-local trade circuits related to African cities, arguing that, while Africans have tried to embed themselves as part of the citizenry in various urban territories, it is difficult to identify the African city as a diasporic site.

Institutions across many cities in Africa lack sufficient authority to instil any overarching matrix of definitions and spatial framework capable of holding residents in stable articulations with infrastructure, territory and urban resources of all kinds. The resultant dispersion of ways of operating in cities does not necessarily mean that regularities are impossible to attain. Rather, an increasingly generalized practice of converting bodies, infrastructure and urban objects into mutltiplex and unstable uses can give rise to particular forms of sociality which in turn cultivate a certain flexibility in how highly volatile urban situations are appropriated and lived. By examining various modalities of circulation u through disparate spatial and symbolic economies u engaged in by youth in various situations and quarters in Douala, Cameroon, this article attempts to explore the elaboration of specific urban political practices. These practices are aimed at countering marginalization and reappropriating the city as a platform for more diverse engagements with a larger world.

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Yangon is a city where the now predominant modalities of urban transformation arrived late, and after a prolonged period of political repression. As the urban system has been “set loose” to articulate itself to a broader range of inputs and dispositions, many residents attempt to remake long‐honed yet fragile mechanisms of social interchange in provisional forms. This ethos and practice of provisionality emphasizes ensemble work aimed at recomposing the character of local district life in various locations across Yangon. Most importantly, it raises questions of how an urban majority—as a confluence of heterogeneous ways of life that has long been critical to making viable urban lives in the postcolony—have endured and can continue to endure in changing circumstances. The article draws from critical black thought as a means of generating heuristic concepts to explore the ways in which residents of several Yangon districts make productive use of the simultaneity of seemingly contradictory inclinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the "humanistic" core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. First, we synthesize urban environmentalism debates and their embattled relationship with humanistic concerns; second, we illuminate everyday creative interventions that urban youth themselves are generating in their continual negotiations between individual and social, old and new, vernacular and technical; and third, we deflect the linear projection of a "Capitalocene" future by exhibiting contingent practices of southern urbanism. Accordingly, we propose new ways of reinventing urban environmentalism that see humans as a part of its divergent future landscapes. Our version of humanistic city frames the urban as a provisional space in which youth socialities and sensibilities are seen as emerging potentialities calibrating the pace of spatial transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities at increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logics of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, of movement and settlement, of centre and periphery, of time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which certain kinds of people are inundated with toxins, pollutants, bacteria, viruses, violence, and disaster is well documented. The various ways in which the extension of urbanization as a planetary phenomenon has refigured geographies of sustenance is also well established. This article focuses, instead, on exploring the interfacial oscillations among that which is experienced as habitable or uninhabitable, as a kind of regionalizing of relationships between life and nonlife. It looks at how possibilities of living disappear and reappear, often in the least expected situations and circumstances, and at how inhabitation itself becomes increasingly precarious through various devices and calculations deployed in order to guarantee it. Drawing upon decades of research and program development in urban Africa and Southeast Asia, the article explores some of ways in which the habitable and uninhabitable are redescribed in terms of each other and considers how this redescription could be used to formulate more judicious modalities of viable urban development, as urbanization itself seems to posit increased dangers to the viability of many lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long a site for incessant worry, revision or redemption, it is unclear what the 'city' is today. Yet, in face of the near-apocalyptic readjustments potentiated by human-engineered global warming, there is an exigency about getting cities to function right. It is no wonder, then, that contemporary theories of cities and urbanization attempt to restore some common sense, to get to the heart of critical matters in a world where urbanization disrupts once-normative assumptions about the nature of territory, scale and politics. But what is the nature of that 'common sense'? How does one engage the very concrete efforts that constructed the city, with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover up, and all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about? Invoking blackness as an analytical method, these questions are addressed through thinking about how long histories of urban practices deployed by black residents of cities across the world might challenge and reinvent the sense of an urban commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00936.x Byline: AbdouMaliq Simone (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Editor, Debates and Developments

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00928.x Byline: ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE