Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City - Softcover

"This is an important book, extraordinarily rich in ethnographic detail about Kinshasa. Scholars and graduate students will find this book very useful in understanding the urban realities of Kinshasa and more broadly the impact of globalization on African cities."

--Urban Affairs Review

Through the lens of the photographer and through the author's gaze, the complex urban landscape of Kinshasa is carefully brought into the picture in this book. The Congolese capital city appears to be difficult to tame, and impossible to capture in one master narrative. With the exhibition that accompanied the release of their Kinshasa book, the authors won a Golden Lion at the 11th International Architecture Bienniale in Venice, 2004. In their internationally acclaimed publication Kinshasa : Tales of the Invisible City, anthropologist Filip De Boeck and photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart provide a history not only of the physical and visible urban reality that Kinshasa presents today, but also of a second, invisible city as it exists in the mind and imagination of its inhabitants. They bring to light a mirroring reality lurking underneath the surface of the visible world and explore the constant transactions that take place between these two levels in Kinshasa's urban scape. This beautifully illustrated publication is now again made available. Based on longstanding field research, it provides insight into local social and cultural imaginaries, and thus in the imaginative ways in which local urban subjects continue to make sense of their worlds and invent cultural strategies to cope with the breakdown of urban infrastructure.