For the City Yet to Come : una riflessione sul futuro delle città africane

African cities are often represented as chaotic, violent and dysfunctional. This vision is supportive of urban plans that aim to 'order' urban spaces, expelling the informal or confining it to peripheral areas. Recent studies question this type of approach, endorsing a focus on daily practices and strategies through which city dwellers build relationships and implement forms of cooperation. This article suggests to give centrality to the study of these urban processes framed from below, and to consider African urban contexts as relevant cases for (re)thinking future cities. [Publisher's text].