ABSTRACT
Urban analysis has privileged notions of urban mobility—people and things on the move, circulating, crossing frontiers and sectors of all kinds as frontiers become more proliferate. Clearly cities have been penetrated in perhaps unprecedented ways by diasporas and restless cognitions. Particularly across Africa, the predominant stories that get told in cities concern those on the move, or at least trying to move, as the impediments and surveillance are more proficient, and thus the tactics applied to getting somewhere become more desperate. Of course, the vast majority of people trying to make ends meet in the now highly urbanized Global South do not move, would never be able to mobilize the resources necessary in order to move even if the tightening of borders and transportation hadn't taken place. This stasis doesn't necessarily mean that their aspirations to move are any less than those who do; it simply means that they have to put together a way to wait. We tend to know little about such processes of waiting. Given the scrutiny to which any place or any person can be increasingly subjected to, and the associated apparatuses of confinement that grow up around such scrutiny, waiting increasingly becomes a modality of living in cities that needs to be enacted in new ways as a site of possibility.
