ABSTRACT
This volume reconfigures the margins of African cities by exploring the organization and politics of its informal transport sector. It does this from three major perspectives. Firstly, it considers informal transport as a contested field of relations between state (formal) and non-state (informal) actors with separate but overlapping logics. Secondly, it engages informal transport as a primary site of transgressive practices, which serves as context – a terrain of action and meaning. Thirdly, it interrogates the spaces of maneuver and multiple forms of agency through which Africa’s informal transport workers get by and get ahead in a business characterized by unpredictability, insecurity and chronic uncertainty. Through these interconnected perspectives, the volume rethinks popular narratives of disempowerment and chaos that tend to silence the voices, lived experiences and key interventions of informal transport workers, as well as their hybrid spaces of autonomy, sociality and political expectation.
