ABSTRACT
The New Urban Agenda (NUA) is the document agreed upon at the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2016. It seeks to guide efforts to foster urban transformation by a wide range of actors for the next 20 years. This chapter adopts deconstruction as a method of analysis for the NUA. Using examples from cities on the African continent, the chapter explores the “interiority” and “exteriority” of African cities in relation to the NUA and highlights the dangers of the agenda’s rhetoric, essentialism, and “organismic” approach. It is critical of its “urban” focus and urban-centrism and views this as a discursive means for legitimating specific meanings and representations that do not work in favour of urban dynamics on the African continent. The chapter disrupts and unsettles the NUA by arguing that it remains no more than rhetorical in terms of many of the developments embedded in the geographic locales of African cities.
