What do outdated horse-carts; latest BMW’s; sheep grazing by the road; Samsung buildings, sellers of peanuts, clothes, pillows, phone-charges, plates; car rapide buses; motor bikers with no helmets; and drumming parties all have in common? They occupy, persistently and seemingly without any conflict, the sand-covered streets of Dakar—Senegal’s capital and largest city. Here I offer impressions of the contradictory and surprising ways in which Dakar functions as a cosmopolitan city despite the many “country” elements one finds there. I attempt to capture the essence of the city, as a stranger walking and driving through its streets, in the hope of figuring out how fluidity and stasis, innovation and history, progress and delay exist side by side.
About the presenterBlagovesta Momchedjikova
Dr. Blagovesta Momchedjikova, NYU, edited Captured by the City: Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies (2013) and Urban Feel (2010); and co-edited From Above: The Practice of Verticality (2019), The Panorama Handbook (2018), and Public Space: Between Spectacle and Resistance (2016). Her work appears in the International Panorama Council Journal, Streetnotes, The Everyday of Memory, Robert Moses and the Modern City, ISO Magazine, The Journal of American Culture, Tourist Studies, Genre: Imagined Cities, PIERS.