Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa
本书通过分析坎帕拉、基加利和亚的斯亚贝巴三个东非城市的不同发展轨迹，提出政治因素（如权力分配、社会合法性追求、政治非正式性和基础设施效应）是解释其差异的关键，适合关注非洲城市化与政治互动的学者。
Africa's cities are rapidly expanding.Many governments attempt to actively shape the livelihoods of their urban citizens through a range of political directives and infrastructural investments.Goodfellow's 'Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa' makes sense of these dynamics through a theoretically innovative and empirically rich analysis of why Kampala, Kigali, and Addis Ababa have developed along different trajectories.Based on more than a decade of research on the world's 'least urbanized but most rapidly urbanizing region' (p.4), the book is a trans-disciplinary tour-de-force straddling urban studies, development studies, African studies, comparative politics, and even debates in international relations and history.The book's central premise is that dominant paradigms in urban studies, such as variegated capitalism, late urbanization, and southern urbanism, cannot explain why the planning visions, property and housing dynamics, marketplaces, and modes of urban protest differ so significantly in Addis, Kampala, and Kigali.Goodfellow argues that the answer lies in politics, which he delineates along four explanatory factors in Chapter 2: the distribution of 'associational power' (p.34), the pursuit of social legitimacy, the modalities of political informality, and the material and political effects of infrastructure.Goodfellow traces the history of urban land and property regimes, as well as early patterns of trade and infrastructural connectivity in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively.The empirical analysis of contemporary dynamics begins in Chapter 5 with the urban planning visions of the three regimes whose 'urban appetites' had significantly grown by the mid-2000s (p.143).Addis Ababa's Light-Rail Transit System, Kigali's Convention Center, and Kampala's Entebbe Expressway were not only flagship projects, but political responses to the 'particular forms of legitimacy' that these regimes sought (p.165).This becomes even more evident in the subsequent analysis of urban property development in Chapter 6, characterized by mass-housing in Addis, oversupply of high-end real estate in Kigali, and housing inertia in Kampala.