City Fabrics and Time: Landscapes, Typologies, and Trajectories in Congolese Cities

Congolese urban landscapes bear witness to complex forces, both formal and informal, which occurred over long periods of time, often originating already in precolonial times, but accelerating in intensity of growth during the colonial and postcolonial eras. Today these city fabrics constitute intriguing patchworks and palimpsests, including buildings dating from various time frames, that continue to function regardless of their physical state or transformation over time. While some scholars have argued that, because of the decay and failure of urban infrastructures, the urbanity of a city like Kinshasa exists “beyond its architecture” and thus require investigating the imaginary, “invisible” city, I argue that the analysis of material urban landscapes and urban form offers a powerful means to unveil “urban processes” through which these cities were being made and shaped. Tackling a variety of scales (from the city’s hinterland to the interior of the house) and paying equal attention to landmark buildings and mundane infrastructures, I aim to investigate evolutions in top-down strategies of political representation, social engineering, and (racial) segregation, as well as highlight particular episodes of everyday tactics of re-appropriation and contestation, thus producing innovative forms of historical narration, mapping and visualization.