Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City

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Filip de Boeck

Marie-Françoise Plissart

Leuven University Press, Ghent, Belgium, 2004, English

Nonfiction, Photography; Nonfiction, Urban Design

ISBN: 9789055445288

From the Publisher. In their internationally acclaimed book, Kinshasa, 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. 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.

This beautifully illustrated publication is now again made available. Based on lengthy field research, it provides insight into 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.

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A remarkable research over many years, and an analysis of the Democratic Republic of Congo capital city, into the nature of physical urban reality but also that invisible city of the mind and the imagination and how cultural strategies help overcome the breakdown in the city’s infrastructures.

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