Anthropology and HumanismEarly View BOOK REVIEW City of men: Masculinities and everyday morality on public transport By Romit Chowdhury. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 205 pp. $27.95 (paperback) Jacob Doherty, Corresponding Author Jacob Doherty [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-9745 Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Jacob Doherty, Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal MacMillan Building, 15a George Sq, Edinburgh EH89LD, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Jacob Doherty, Corresponding Author Jacob Doherty [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-9745 Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Jacob Doherty, Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal MacMillan Building, 15a George Sq, Edinburgh EH89LD, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 26 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12513Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

"They eat our sweat: Transport labor, corruption, and everyday survival in urban Nigeria, by Daniel Agbiboa." Journal of Urban Affairs, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Popular transport is the most significant form of urban mobility in the majority urban world and will continue to play an important role even as cities around the world overhaul and upgrade their transport systems. Since January 2019 a new type of popular transport, taxi-tricycles locally named "salonis," has taken root at the peripheries of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. This article offers an initial description of this new mode of mobility, the service it offers, the labor force it draws on, the forms of regulation that govern it, the spatial practices it has engendered, and its implications for sustainable urban mobility. We show that this new transport option has evolved from within the existing norms and practices of the city's existing popular transport sector. Arguing that salonis have emerged at the intersection of multiple overlapping marginality – spatial, infrastructural, socio-economic, legal, and regulatory – we contribute to multi-disciplinary conceptualization of urban margins as a site of infrastructural creation and the production of space. Based on our analysis, we posit three possible future trajectories for salonis: illegality, expulsion, and experimentation.

This article examines the everyday mobilities of mothers in Yopougon, Côte d’Ivoire to analytically center mobility in the study of social reproduction. Yopougon, Abidjan’s largest commune, is on the cusp of a major overhaul of its transportation network intended to better integrate it into the city. Planned through a conventional vision of economic productivity that privileges commuting over other forms of travel, this restructuring risks deepening gendered exclusions in urban mobility. Mothers of young children, a sub-category of passengers who perform the bulk of the work of social reproduction and who experience multiple competing demands on their time that structure their mobilities in particularly illustrative ways, have been overlooked in transport planning. Drawing on mobility diaries and visual research methods, I illustrate how urban transport systems are implicated in the everyday practices of intergenerational care and social reproduction and how, in turn, these practices themselves become forms of urban infrastructure. These mobile practices of social reproduction disclose critical affordances and barriers in existing popular transport systems and reveal the breadth of gendered practices, relations, and materialities that are constitutive of mobility infrastructures but marginalized by a narrow policy focus on the transport sector.

Les transports populaires constituent la forme de mobilité urbaine la plus importante dans les villes des pays du sud et continueront à jouer un rôle important, même quand ces villes repensent et modernisent leurs systèmes de transport. Depuis janvier 2019, un nouveau type de transport populaire a pris racine en périphérie de la ville d'Abidjan en Côte d'Ivoire : les taxi-tricycles nommés localement "salonis". Cet article présente une première description de ce nouveau mode de mobilité, les services qu’ils offrent, la main-d’œuvre qu’ils utilisent, les formes de réglementation qui la régissent, les pratiques spatiales qu’ils ont engendrés et ses implications pour la mobilité urbaine durable. Nous montrons que cette nouvelle option de transport a évolué à partir des normes et pratiques existantes du système du secteur des transports populaires de la ville. En soutenant que les salonis ont émergé à l'intersection de multiples genres de marginalités imbriquées (spatiale, infrastructurelle, socio-économique, juridique et réglementaire), notre contribution est une conceptualisation multidisciplinaire des marges urbaines en tant que site de création d'infrastructures et de production d'espace. Il propose trois trajectoires futures possibles pour les salonis : l’illégalité, l’expulsion et l’expérimentation.Mots clés : mobilité urbaine, marginalité, émergence, innovation, développement urbain durable

•Personhood is critical for understanding how informal mobility is embedded in cities.•Boda boda stages embody and reproduce a distinctive mode of personhood.•Drivers navigate between multiple spatial institutions and forms of personhood.•Digital mobility platforms rely on and supplement existing spatial-moral practices.•State efforts to govern Boda bodas fail if they don’t recognize drivers’ institutions.

In the name of cleaning up Kampala’s political institutions and public space, a new municipal body, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), was established in 2010, replacing an elected city council with a presidentially appointed executive director. To legitimize its highly contested and explicitly antipolitical authority, the KCCA made garbage collection and beautification its top priority, promising to deliver routine urban repair and mundane maintenance work in exchange for suspending the norms of electoral democracy in Uganda’s capital city. This article argues that the exceptional space of the repair site is paradigmatic of municipal power over the city as a whole. Based on an ethnography of municipal waste management infrastructure and an analysis of the KCCA’s visual account of itself, it elaborates the concept of maintenance space to theorize how the entanglement of sovereign and governmental power produces the city as a particular kind of territory. Because the work of maintenance and repair is continuous and ongoing, maintenance space endures. Far from a short-lived inconvenience, its exception becomes the foundational norm of technocratic authority. Not limited to Kampala, the enduring exception of maintenance space, I conclude, identifies a widespread mode of urban spatial production and depoliticization.

Biomass briquettes have emerged as a development silver bullet, supposedly converting waste to wealth and tackling crises of unemployment, urban waste management, and rural deforestation. Briquettes have captured the imagination of international environmental NGOs operating in many African cities who promote briquette production, partnering with local Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) to improve urban livelihoods and sanitation. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Kampala, Uganda, this article examines the entanglement of material and immaterial labor in the production of briquettes. The outcome of these production processes is to capitalize Community, transforming everyday socio-spatial relations into an agential entrepreneurial subject fit to receive aid and carry out development. This has the additional effect of exacerbating differences of gender and education within the CBO, alienating the CBO from the rest of Bwaise, and reproducing the racial hierarchies of the development economy.

Thousands of marabou storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city’s green spaces and eating up to 2 kilos of organic matter daily, mostly rotting garbage found in the city’s open dumps. Weedy birds, they flourish amid Kampala’s garbage crisis. Storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, and cast out from the imaginary of a clean, green, urban future. Theorizing animal and informal infrastructures together as “para-sites,” this paper follows marabou storks through Kampala’s ever-shifting waste frontier: the postconsumer equivalent to the extractive frontier that subtends the capitalist fantasy of endless growth. Kampala’s topography, hydrology, and class structure ensure that trash flows downhill, accumulating in slums where it leads to flooding and outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses as well as to endemic malaria. Waste with wings, marabou storks remake the urban waste landscape, undermining efforts to stabilize the city’s ultimate sinks in landfills, slums, and wetlands as they flourish in filth and defecate in the heart of greenness.