The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown: A Critical History of the Bidonville

This book, The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown: A Critical History of the Bidonville, offers a new account of colonial urbanism and its continuing afterlives in North Africa by excavating the sedimented histories and multi-vocal lives of the bidonville, the Francophone equivalent of shantytown. Countering entrenched perceptions of these spaces as marginal, ephemeral, and unauthorized developments, the book excavates the layered histories and plural lives of the bidonville, demonstrating that these built landscapes were potent artifacts of colonialism, even as they became formative sites for anticolonial thinking and action.

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