KU: Department of Geography

My research concerns the political and cultural dimensions of development in Eastern Africa, with a primary but not exclusive emphasis on urban development in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. My research interests can be divided into projects that are related to: 1) the cultural-historical geography of development and chiefly focus on the legacy of British colonialism; or 2) the current development dynamics from more of a political-economic approach. Concerns for the language of development geography and for environmental planning carry over into both of these categories.

My Books:

Murray, M. and G. Myers (eds.), Cities in Contemporary Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2006)

.This book offers a broad range of scholarly interpretations of the evolving forms, the changing dynamics, and the unexpected surprises that characterize contemporary African cities. It wrestles with important questions concerning how large numbers of people without regular work nevertheless find ways to survive and even prosper. It balances investigations of particular cities in sub-Saharan Africa with considerations of a diversity of topics, themes and multi-city comparisons, including themes in: culture, imagination, place and space; political economy and work livelihoods; and urban planning and governance. The collection is both theoretically informed and empirically grounded. Aimed at mid-level undergraduate students, these essays, taken as a whole, provide an understanding of what is happening in African cities today, and why.

http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403970351

Myers, G.. Disposable Cities: Garbage, Governance, and Sustainable Development in Urban Africa(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2005).

Based on in-depth fieldwork in three cities, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Lusaka, this book provides a critical analysis of the United Nations Sustainable Cities Program in Africa (SCP). It also puts forward a historically grounded critique of neoliberalism, good governance and sustainable development discourses.
	Air Photo of the boundary between Ng’ombe Peri-Urban Areaand Roma Township, Lusaka, 2002

http://www.ashgate.com/subject_area/downloads/Geography_2006_catalog.pdf

Myers, G. Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

This work contributes to a long tradition of research on colonial cities and a multidisciplinary body of literature on urban legacies of colonialism. I examine both colonial rule and postcolonial inheritance in these cities, tracing the legacies of colonialism in different and divergent postcolonial settings

a revolutionary left-wing socialist state (Zanzibar) and a reactionary right-wing dictatorship (Malawi). In addition to the examination of urban plans and the African urban majority's responses to them, the book traces the experience of the urban planning process through three different "verandahs of power," or

levels of class depiction: the colonial power, the colonized middle, and the urban majority. Interspersed with personal stories, this book illuminates our understanding of the workings of power in African cities by addressing human experiences of that power.

http://www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/spring-2003-catalog/verandahs-power.html

My Grants:
National Science Foundation: “Peri-Urban Land Reform and Political-Economic Reform in Zanzibar, Tanzania,” 2006-2008 ($123,983).


Two photos from the edges of Zanzibar: a squatter home in Mwera Regezamwendoand an informal settlement in formation at Welezo, July 2006.

Fulbright Africa Regional Research Program: “Participatory Urban Planning and the Sustainable Cities Program in Lusaka, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar,” 2002-3 ($48,125),

This provided the research material for Disposable Cities.

A creek in Dar es Salaam.

Promoting African Studies on the Great Plains, National Resource Center and FLAS Fellowship Programs, US Department of Education, $1.4 million, 2006-2010.

I am Director of the Kansas African Studies Center, which is a National Resource Center. For more information on the Center, please see

http://www.kasc.ku.edu/

From Left: Brian Daldorph, Byron Caminero-Santangelo, me, Evaristo Kapungwe,
and Liz MacGonaglein an open pit copper mine on the Zambian Copperbelt, July 2004, as
part of theKU university affiliations grant with the University of Zambia funded by the State Department.