From 2009-11, Abdul Maliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, with Tau Tavengwa, convened about 30 urbanists of all stripes — historians, artists, musicians, critics, architects and writers — to take part in a series of unstructured encounters for week-long stretches while they explored a different city on the continent each year. The project resulted in the publication of Rogue Urbanism, an 800-page book on their different practices. Rogue Urbanism became an influential text that exposed the diversity of practices and multiple African urbanists were using to think about urban Africa at a time when the world was just beginning to acknowledge Africa as more than a place of safaris, but instead, the fastest urbanising region in the world.
