Over the past couple of decades a burgeoning literature has focused on architecture and urbanism in African cities, ranging from straightforward descriptions of colonial styles to analyses that show how the built environment shapes lived experience. For example, a recent volume, Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories, edited by Fassil Demissie, covers this broad range, attempting to tease out how architecture and urbanism controlled and negotiated complicated relationships between colonizer and colonized.1
Kinshasa falls neatly into the set of concerns articulated in the Demissie anthology (to which Johan Lagae contributed an essay); it aims to detail the city’s architectural and urban history for general readers. Given that Kinshasa, a city of nine million people, is the third largest on the African continent and, with the exception of Paris, has the largest Francophone metropolitan area in the world, this book is a welcome addition to the...
University of California Press