The Urbanity of Movement: Dynamic Frontiers in Contemporary Africa

The economies of Africa’s largest metropolitan regions reflect a contested intersection of orientations, practices, demands, values, and articulations to the larger world. While rural to urban migration may have substantially decreased, the circulation of populations within metropolitan regions, across primary and secondary cities, and along increasingly elaborated transnational circuits of movement and exchange raise important questions about conventional notions of population movement. As planning mechanisms tend to assume certain stability in the relationship of population to place, what kinds of understanding of movements may be necessary to engage the variegated ways that cities are articulated through these movements?