In the launch issue of African Cities Reader, Rustum Kozain muses over the cultural and alternative relations built, negotiations and dealings made as a resident of Cape Town (South Africa); Jean-Christophe Lanquetin‘s SAPE Project is captured in a pictorial narrative; Gabeba Baderoon and Karen Press poetically expound on the daily traversing of the personal and the (institutional) impersonal; James Yuma investigates the intersection between religion and national narrative in the Democratic Republic of the Congo whilst Valentine Cascarino asks how would a recontextualisation of Kinshasa in Johannesburg (South Africa) fare. Annie Paul explores the practice of death and burial rituals in postcolonial Jamaica; and Vyjayanthi Rao, Filip de Boeck and Abdou Maliq Simone discuss Kinshasa’s Invisible City and other African cities.

Other contributors include Chris Abani, Akin Adesokan, Leslie Lokko, Achal Prabhala, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Marcus Neustetter, Jyoti Mistry, Ashraf Jamal and many more.

The African Cities Reader is a collaboration between the Africa Center for Cities and Chimurenga, and was was edited by Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse.