The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in its history. With the half of the world’s population living today in urban centers, urbanization (and rurbanization) has become one of the mayor challenges of this century. The fastest urban growth is taking place in sub-Sahara Africa. It is estimated that between 2005 and 2030, the urban population of sub-Saharan Africa will double. In this context, development programs have increasingly shifted their focus from the rural to the urban setting. For example, where ‘poverty’ has long been perceived as a mainly ‘rural’ phenomenon, development programs today have taken into account the fact that the majority of Africa’s poor people live in cities. Further, also academic research on Africa in general has gained an increasing urban focus, in all kinds of disciplines. The African city has become the scene of extensive anthropological literature, socio-political analyses and economic studies.

This conference takes the African city as its central focus and seeks to approach this African urban context from a wide range of thematic domains: political sciences and anthropology, linguistics and agriculture, urban planning and development, history and medicine, etc…

For information and registration, see http://www.gap.ugent.be/GAPSYM5_en. The detailed programme will be available from 7 November onwards.