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the Introduction, there is a rapidly growing literature on the nature of suburbs, peri-urban areas, urban frontiers, extended urbanisation, edge spaces and margins. Indeed, one might ask what room there is for further conceptual generativity and analytical novelty on this topic. Yet the nature of urban peripheries in Africa is even more diverse, and evolving even more quickly, than the literature itself
rendered more complex by the emergence of extended urban conurbations, ‘megalopolis spaces’ and ‘new centralities’ that reconstitute the idea of the periphery (Lang and Knox, 2013 ; Keil, 2018 ; Bloch et al ., 2022 ) – and, relatedly, by recent interest in forms of ‘extended urbanisation’ that challenge conventional ways in which urban space is defined and delimited (Brenner and Schmid, 2015 ; Wu and Keil, 2022
as ‘a form of planetary and extended urbanization … that is sensitive to historical temporality and geographical contingencies’ (Wu and Keil, 2022 : 12). The ‘planetary urbanisation’ concept itself, and associated projects drawing on the Lefebvrian idea of ‘extended urbanisation’, generated diverse concepts to think about specific forms of urban transformation on the