This course explores cities in contemporary Africa through the lens of architecture and the built environment, informal economies and survivalist strategies, art and culture, social justice and citizenship. There is an unfortunate tendency in journalistic, scholarly accounts to portray cities in Africa as examples of distressed, distorted, truncated, or failed urbanism. This view that “cities in Africa just don’t work” is a fairly widespread perception that has embedded itself in popular culture. Rather than treating cities in Africa as undifferentiated places of socio-economic malaise, famine and war, infrastructural failure, and service breakdown, the course seeks to understand the complexity of processes at work that produce cities in Africa today. The course focuses the multiple ways that cities actually do work in Africa, but perhaps in ways that are invisible to planners, experts, journalists, and travelers.