Crisis and Creativity

Piet Konings is a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden where he studies political change and regionalism in Cameroon and the role of civil society in Africa. His main fields of interest are labour, rural development, ethno-regionalism and civil society in West Africa, especially in Cameroon and Ghana.Dick Foeken is a human geographer and senior researcher at the African Studies Centre. Over the last five years his research has focused on urban agriculture, urban poverty and urban-rural links, mainly in East Africa.

• ContentsFigures viiMaps viiTables viiPhotographs viii1 The African neighbourhood: An introduction 1Piet Konings, Rijk van Dijk & Dick Foeken2 Surviving in the neighbourhoods of Nakuru town, Kenya 22Samuel Owuor & Dick Foeken3 ‘Bendskin’ drivers in Douala’s New Bell neighbourhood: Masters of the road and the city 46Piet Konings4 Intimate strangers: Neighbourhood, autochthony and the politics of belonging 66Basile Ndjio5 Neighbourhood formation process: Access to housing land in Kamwokya, Kampala, Uganda 88Emmanuel Nkurunziza6 Urban space, gender and identity: A neighbourhood of Muslim women in Kano, Nigeria 119Katja Werthmann7 Maps of what matters: Community colour 142Deborah Pellow8 Not quite the comforts of home: Searching for locality among street youth in Dar es Salaam 163Eileen Moyer9 Togolese cartographies: Re-mapping space in a post-Cold War city 197Charles Piot10 Neighbours on the fringes of a small city in post-war Chad 211Mirjam de Bruijn11 Neighbourhood (re)construction and changing identities in Mauritania from a small town perspective 230Kiky van TilList of authors 251