Death and the City

Much has been written about the death of cities but far less about death as producer of the city, or as the motor of global contemporary urban transformations that shape up around what Martin Murray (2017) has recently termed ‘urbanisms of exception’, i.e. wide array of ‘landscapes of accumulation’ (Searle 2016) that form zones of exclusion allowing wealthy elites, whether linked to political power centers or large corporate entities, to carve out new urban zones in which urban life can unfold in ways that separate and set apart these elites from the vast majority of people who reside in the city and will never be able to access these new urban enclaves.This contribution seeks to analyze how current urban transformations and the way in which they are financed across large parts of Central Africa and beyond are to a significant extent conceived and operationalized around what Eyal Weizman (2011), in the different context of the Palestinian question, has termed ‘thanato-tactics’, i.e. a particular form of necropolitical governance of life and death that is part of the historical DNA, or the vibrations of the nervous condition of capitalism and its historical trajectories in Central Africastatus: publishe