Stephanie Terreni Brown's urban Africa suggestions
- One of my favourite books that discusses inequalities in African cities is AbdouMaliq Simone's For the City Yet To Come (published by Duke University Press, 2004). This is a wonderfully rich and evocative book that challenges the view that African cities are 'failed' cities; he interweaves case studies with urban theory to argue that the informal should not be overlooked when thinking about planning and development in urban areas. On the contrary, Simone is passionate about acknowledging the work that is done by and in marginalised areas of African cities.
- Particularly relevant to those interested in Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani's seminal work Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (published in 1996 by Princeton University Press) shows how the colonial practice of divide and rule has had a lasting impact on civil society and citizenship.
- James Ferguson's Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Univ. of California Press, 1999) is a wonderful ethnography of social and cultural change in the Zambian capital after the decline of urban economy in the 1970s.
- For a perspectives about marginality that are, in many ways, marginalised themselves, see Lorraine van Blerk's work. She has written about children's socio-spatial experiences of living on the streets in cities in Uganda and South Africa, and has done some fascinating research with sex workers in Addis Ababa.