“Spectral Kinshasa: Building the City through an Architecture of Words”: from Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne, eds., Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities (2012)

In this selection, from Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne’s Urban Theory Beyond the West (2011) urban anthropologist Filip De Boeck questions the way Western planning has been imposed on the populations of the colonized underdeveloped world. He argues that colonial and post-colonial cities take on a ghostly quality, both in the generic modernism of the administrative city centers and even more in the peripheral, often semi-rural shantytowns inhabited by the indigenous populations. One such city is Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. De Boeck notes that, first in the colonial period and later under the conditions of post-colonialism, Kinshasa developed as two cities: la Ville, the modern European-style city, and la Cité, the communal and semi-rural peripheral city of the indigenous communities. And Kinshasa is still two cities: one, the city of high-rise office buildings and major housing developments expressing the Western ideals of modernism and progress; the other, a rambling, seemingly unplanned collection of settlements expressing the traditional African values and seemingly “invisible” systems of communal order that not so much defy as merely surround and contain the European-imposed urban ideals. In the end, the two cities exist separately but also mirror each other, adding what De Boeck calls a “spectral dimension” that reveals “the shadow-side” of a global urbanization defined by poverty and cultural separation. But there is a curious sense of unity here as well. He reports that both the city’s leaders and its inhabitants share, in some sense, “the same dream of what the city should look like.” This is not the fatalism of the defeated, he argues, but the recognition of a new kind of urban space where the real and the unreal, the visible and the invisible, interact in a way that “conjures up the marvelous through its appeal to the imagination.”The seventh edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the city. Sixty-three selections are included: forty-five from the sixth edition and eighteen new selections, including three newly written exclusively for The City Reader. The anthology features a Prologue essay on "How to Study Cities", eight part introductions as well as individual introductions to each of the selected articles. The new edition has been extensively updated and expanded to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary and topical areas included, such as sustainable urban development, globalization, the impact of technology on cities, resilient cities, and urban theory. The seventh edition places greater emphasis on cities in the developing world, the global city system, and the future of cities in the digital transformation age. While retaining classic writings from authors such as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and Louis Wirth, this edition also includes the best contemporary writings of, among others, Peter Hall, Manuel Castells, and Saskia Sassen. New material has been added on compact cities, urban history, placemaking, climate change, the world city network, smart cities, the new social exclusion, ordinary cities, gentrification, gender perspectives, regime theory, comparative urbanization, and the impact of technology on cities.edition: 7thstatus: publishe