Introduction

The majority of urban residents already live in the global south and urbanization rates in southern cities outpace their northern counterparts. 2013 manifesto consolidated many arguments, evidence of a common cause amongst a growing collective of southern and south-aligned urbanists. The political critique of Things Fall Apart is rather straightforward. Achebe provided a counter-narrative to prevailing literary representations of Africans as “in need of colonial rescue” through his presentation of Umuofia as a reasonable moral universe predating colonialism. Despite a growing awareness of the theoretical and empirical importance of understanding southern cities, as a scholarly community we remain uncertain and ambivalent about how to proceed. Unlearning means turning unease into an examination of the construction of individual and social gazes. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.