Introduction to Urban Life Itself

摘要

The entitling of this special issue of Debates and Developments, Urban Life Itself, is homage to one of the great urban thinkers to have emerged from African cities, Tshikala Kayembe Biaya. From the streets to the academies Biaya was a beloved figure because he knew Kinshasa, Abidjan, Dakar, Addis Ababa, Mombasa and Lubumbashi — the place of his birth — up and down, in and out; because he could engage practically everyone and they were all his 'people'. Urban Life Itself— or something like this — was to be the title of an immense book, part theory, part conversations with traders, mystics, bureaucrats, soldiers, prostitutes, nurses and teachers, and part their conversations with each other. But it was never finished before his death, and now it is for all purposes lost, held back by wrangling among siblings. Whatever institution he passed through as an employee, from research councils, the United Nations and universities, they always 'turned him loose'; they always figured out that no sector, no job description, no assignment of specific responsibilities could match the resourcefulness he brought in making it possible for them to reach deep and extensively across the cities in which they worked. Even today, nearly a decade since his passing, ordinary residents in scores of neighborhoods still have Biaya stories to tell.