In West Africa, concrete is increasingly taking hold of physical landscapes, popular consciousness, and everyday conversations. Ubiquitous and pervasive, concrete is now an integral part of West African urban materiality and cultural identity. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, I consider this material as both a product and a producer of urban space. By tracing flows of building materials across the West African urban corridor linking the cities of Abidjan, Accra, Lomé, Cotonou, Porto-Novo and Lagos, this article proposes to understand how cement and concrete (re)shape African built environments, human lives and urban futures. It examines three dimensions of this concrete urban materiality: its links with capital, its social meanings for inhabitants-builders and its ecological impacts. I conclude by highlighting the potentials, limits and contradictions raised by this now contested material, thus shedding light on the complexity of the production of urban spaces in West Africa.

This article deploys sand as a potential way of engaging with contemporary livelihoods in the Ghanaian city of Accra – one of many metropolitan nodes in an urbanizing region of West Africa. Both as a very real material at the heart of concrete urbanization and as metaphorically indicative of the shifting landscapes of opportunity and income on which lives and livelihoods are marked out, sand is offered as a way of seeing and writing about the city. The article brings these two facets of urban sand together in more concrete ways, considering how the material production of the city becomes the uneven, uncertain ground of urban life-making. Drawing from fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, the article engages with the movements of sand across the city, as it travels from extraction zones (or pits) to lorries and then to places of consumption. By honing in on the material behaviours and temporal junctures of sand as it shifts its shape, form and directions, the article draws out the ways in which sand emerges as a platform for exchange, negotiation and ultimately income for different people across the city region. In turn, it offers a share in the sands as a tentative holding space for the kinds of claims made on and through sand, positioning them as indicative of a dweller-led, emergent politics that claims a share of an income, livelihood and urban future.

Kiamaiko in Nairobi hosts one of the largest goat markets in East Africa. The goats come from across Kenya and the region, as do many of the people there, illustrating how regional movements of human and animal bodies are part of Nairobi’s becoming, and making Kiamaiko an extremely diverse part of the city. Through a discussion of the working lives of people involved in Kiamaiko’s goat meat industry, this article explores the material flows and blockages, and processes of containment and transformation, that entangle lives and livelihoods in Kiamaiko with those of the city as a whole. These flows and processes are marked by uncertainties and contingencies that can be both full of potentiality for (re)forging regimes of order, social relations, subjectivities, mobility and livelihood aspirations, and entrench inequalities, social hierarchies and exclusions, as well as undermine the safe containment of material forms essential for liveable lives. Since the mid-2000s, city authorities have repeatedly failed to impose planning and public health-related regulations and relocation on Kiamaiko’s goat industry. These efforts and their repeated failure reflect the emergent but productive excessivities of the material, corporeal and bodily flows that constitute cities, which both demand and yet often defy formal mechanisms of regulation, containment and order.

In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, the city’s future is explored multi-sensorially. In this article, I argue that Nakuru residents explore urban futures through the taste of different kinds of foods. I examine how the relational power of taste not only triggers visceral imaginaries of greener and ‘cooler’ futures in which bodies and landscapes grow more ample, lush and healthy but also invokes memories of, and nostalgia for, pasts in which the entanglements of foods were configured differently, often explained as more ‘authentic’ and ‘clean’ (safi). I argue against vision as the most important sense-making tool to look back at lost pasts and to ‘imagine’ healthier urban futures. Instead, I demonstrate how futures in Nakuru are experienced and given shape by engaging in critical gustatory explorations of the real, tangible materialities of different kinds of food that flow through the city.

This article considers the materiality and substance of the built environment in Nairobi in light of concerns about surface, depth and the power of the unseen. Taking Nairobi’s high-rise construction boom and a recent spate of collapsed buildings as its starting point, it examines how longstanding ideas about the hidden and invisible dynamics of African cities do not operate in a realm distinct from the material world, but often stem from it: the stuff from which the city is made generates thought and action. High-rise buildings are sometimes described as ‘icebergs’ (structures where much of what is going on is under the surface) or as ‘fakes’ (buildings that superficially promise something, but that are qualitatively and morally suspect). Exploring Nairobi’s construction industry from sites of building collapse, I show how an emerging vertical materiality in the city’s built environment drives debates about deception, (im)moral economies and popular suspicions of power, complicating discourses about the relationship of surface to underneath. I examine how Nairobi’s frail buildings induce anxieties about the seen and the unseen, illuminating how the materials of verticality are entangled in economies of deception.

It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly chaotic cities expand beyond their social and material capacities. The question is, however, whether weak – and even absent – systems of urban management can be taken to signify a lack of coordination and planning of urban development. Might it not be, for instance, that cities organize and model themselves through means other than those afforded by formal urban planning schemes? Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores the shifting material forms of what are locally described as ‘bedroom drawer blueprints’ as an acutely potent type of urban modelling. Current and prospective house builders in Maputo exchange and share blueprints and physical and virtual models of houses that they plan to eventually build. Considered by residents as valuable social and material assets, such blueprints and models also offer an opportunity for experimenting with new forms of aesthetic organization of the city. Comparing the ongoing transactions and sharing of bedroom drawer blueprints with the increasing global circulation of middle-class architectural urban models, in this article I argue that it is the capacity of the former to move between different material forms and modalities that gives them their particular aesthetic potency and drive.

Changing practices of motorized mobility in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have given rise to what residents call the ‘accidenté’: a victim of a traffic accident, often involving the city’s increasingly ubiquitous motorcycles. This article explores the significance of the accidenté in Kikwit’s social universe and considers how everyday urban mobilities are imbued with a sense of bodily exposure, risk and the threat of broken bones, so much so that ‘fracture’ has come to be seen as an urban condition. This entanglement of perceptions of mobility, risk, fracture and urbanity represents both a particular spatialization of risk in relation to city life and a critique of how corporeal vulnerability is tied into other vulnerabilities in the daily lives of urbanites. By analysing how one can become an accidenté and what trajectories of care transpire after the moment of injury, this article reveals how this new patient subjectivity necessitates a confrontation with potentially enduring motility limitations and risky navigations of the city long after the accident.

In studies of Southern Africa, ancestors and possessing spirits have received far greater attention than ghosts. It is only in recent years that fragmentary references to ghosts have begun to appear in the ethnographic record. In this article, I seek to redress this imbalance by documenting stories and accounts of encounters with ghosts in the South African lowveld. I turn to studies of ghosts in Asia and elsewhere as an analytical starting point for interpreting their social and cosmological significance. A widespread theory in this literature is that narratives of ghosts are a means of emplacement, connecting people to places. But the theory does not capture the way in which narratives in the South African lowveld depict ghosts as essentially mobile beings. This is most evident in accounts of vanishing hitchhikers on the highways and of a ghost called sauwe, which captures people’s minds and forces them to walk in the direction of graveyards. These narratives speak of displacement, of spectral journeys and of routes rather than stable locations. The apparitions serve as reminders of the failure to take care of the spirits of those who suffered violent deaths and bring them home. But we can also see them as traces of past injustices and of violence in a haunted landscape, and as mirrors of villagers’ own historical experiences of displacement, experiences that were a hallmark of forced removals and of the migrant labour system during the apartheid era.