WHAT IS URBAN STUDIES?: A View from Oxford Street, Accra
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- čas přidán 23. 01. 2021
- In this episode we will be looking at the interdisciplinary field of urban studies to find out what we might learn about ideas pertaining to cities and urban evolution. We will be doing this from the perspective of the city of Accra, the capital of Ghana in West Africa. This is partly to counter the general tendency to adopt Western cities as the automatic sites for generating spatial theory. The central question we are going to explore here is whether it is possible to rethink urban studies and the concepts of space that come with it from the perspective of a Global South city. Insights will then be drawn from this for re-thinking spatial relations in other locations such as New York, London, and Singapore, and, among many others.
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Suggested Reading
Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
Lindesy Green-Simms, Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017).
Jesse Weaver Shipley, Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013)
John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra, (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000).
Nat Nuno Amarteifio, Visions of the City: Accra in the 21st Century, (Accra: Woeli Publishers, 2002).
Jenna Burrell, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
Martin Egblewogbe, Mr Happy and the Hammer of God and Other Stories, (Oxford: Ayebia Publishers, 2010).
Very insightful lecture on urban studies. What I'd love to see, is perhaps, the pedestrianisation of Osu Oxford Street or a dedicated side-walk to help improve traffic flow.
Theo, that is a great idea! I actually have a filmmaker friend who has said that if I get funding he will commit himself to doing a documentary on Accra. So if you have any ideas please share through the other channels we have in common. Will be in touch.
Thank you for the lecture on Urban Studies Prof. The genre of medical biography is now prevalent in Accra as well. People well dressed with details of sick people often join trotro vehicles to make the announcement to solicit for help. Similarly in Shanghai, you often come across people carted in wheelchairs hooked to Ahuja PA systems singing or with placards soliciting for help. There are stringent protocols in Singapore. The disruption is induced from/by the inbuilt infrastructure of the MRT and here the multilingual mix is brought to bear with announcements of next stops and others in English, Mandarin and Malay.
Kwame, you are right about the genre of medical biography being evident in Accra and in other parts of the world. The big difference between how it is articulated in New York and the other examples you give, is that in New York the person begging for alms does not need to demonstrate any signs of explicit physical disability, unlike say in Accra, where an explicit disability is necessary for generating sympathy. Thus, on the New York subway, it is the story and how it is told that guarantees sympathy and not any insignia of disability.
Thank you for a fantastic talk, Prof. Quayson. It reminded me of the local trains in Bombay (now Mumbai) that, owing to the pressures and time-constraints on the passengers, travelling long distances to their workplaces each day, have over the years made room for a certain 'homely', intimate kind of sociality. Women often chop vegetables, perched in a packet on their laps, for the evening meal they will cook on returning home, in seats they are squeezed into with many others on their journey back from their workplace. This would be impossible on the Delhi metro, which has been conceived as a much more regulated, sanitized space.
Thanks for your example from Mumbai's trains. In fact, I noticed this feature in the movie The Lunch Box, directed by Ritesh Batra. At one point in the film the character playing the supporting role just takes out a small chopping board and some vegetables and starts happily chopping them up while talking happily to his work colleague (played by the inimitable Irrfan Khan!), who sits across from him on the commuter train from work. No one seems to pay any attention to what would seem to an outside audience to be a peculiar practice. That movie is also really good on several other details about urban spatiality. I have watched it some four times already. Which means that you have food for thought (pun intended) right there in an everyday context you are familiar with. And the contrast with trains on the Delhi metro should make for fascinating insights.
Prof. as you were sharing your thoughts about the semioptics of streets in Accra and the functionality we Africans put such structures into, my mind also went to the use Africans put the forest into. Whites think of the forest as a place to wander around, Africans see is as a place of resource generation & survival. I think Ali Mazuri made such a connection with Oceans. Do you think functionality is the driving force for the alternative usage of side walks?
Hi Kole, I am afraid I am not quite able to follow the link you are making between African attitudes to forests and to sidewalks. At any rate, it is not entirely true that Africans view forests mainly as places of resource generation and survival. In African works such as Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Soyinka's Dance of the Forests, Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and to some degree even Coetzee's Waiting or the Barbarians, the forest (and the wilderness) represents a place of awe and wonder and acts as a counter to the civilizational implications of settlements (homesteads, villages, and towns). Thus, the forest can also act as a place of negations. The idea of the forest purely as a place of resources comes with the conversion by capitalism of spaces of enchantment to those of disenchantment; that is to say, the forest becomes a place that can be exploited for wealth and all its potential for wonder is rendered secondary to this primary function of resource accumulation.
thank you, prof. I think you left out how the street preachers on the oxford street of Osu and in the trotros compare with street preachers in New York. I was particularly amazed at seeing preachers in Bus 41 and 42 in the Bronx, also around Fordham plaza and Port Authority at the 34th street. Are these sights of street preachers common in London?
HI Agyeiwaa, you are perfectly right that there are street preachers in New York, as in many other cities in the world. They are particularly common in Times Square, which is where I commonly bumped into them. Once or twice on the subway too, but none of the fire-and-brimstone kind that you typically find in Accra. But I am sure there must be some of those too.
Insightful. Do you have transcripts of your videos?
Yes, but unfortunately I am not open to sharing the transcripts, since they are works-in-progress that I am likely to turn into articles and essays for publication in different venues.
I salute oh my one and only c-star, Miss Prempeh. Can you imagine that this "c-star" neologism of mine that has now become globalised, was a brainwave when I commented on ur fb picture? ;) ;) ;)