ABSTRACT
Large-scale property developers have recently embarked on far-reaching strategies designed to alter the existing spatial configuration of a growing number of cities in Africa. If these new approaches to city building are successfully implemented, many large metropolises in Africa will be fundamentally restructured to more explicitly serve the aims and interests of multinational corporate investors, local business elites, and affluent consumers. In seeking to fast-forward into the future, city builders have become mesmerized with the idea of fashioning self-sufficient, island-like enclosures outside of these existing cities. These self-enclosed, self-sustaining exurban islands are territorialized nodes, implanted in particular locations in order to specialize in specific functions that reflect the de-territorialized power of highly mobile corporate enterprise. These highly visible urban enclaves are the physical infrastructure of largely invisible globalized financial, political, and sociocultural networks. In conventional narratological theory, stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Stories about city doubles, however, remain unfinished. They have only beginnings, albeit incomplete partial, and truncated.
