Illustrations  xiii
Preface  xvii
Acknowledgments  xxiii
Introduction  1
1. Live Dangerously, My Brothers: Ex-Combatants and the Political Economy of Space  33
2. The Ministry of Defense: Excessive Architecture  61
3. E. J. Roye: The Corporate (Post)Modern  91
4. Hotel Africa: The Uncritical Ruin  115
5. Liberia Broadcasting System: Three Utopias  143
6. Finding Urban Form: A Coda  175
Notes  183
References  189
Index  203

"Urban modernity was always about inhabiting the interstices concretized by the tensions between political imaginations and built forms. Monrovia is replete with forms that impose or elude, often arbitrarily without narrative. Danny Hoffman engages lives that treat the city’s ruining and remaking of modernity as bookends for an incessant hesitation, perhaps inability, to commit to invented futures of any stripe. In this hesitation there can only be a politics of lives enduring inexplicable, fragile yet stalwart orders persisting beyond their material ruin." — AbdouMaliq Simone, author of, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities

“In this adventurous and provocative book, Danny Hoffman sets out on new theoretical and methodological paths to capture ‘urbanity’ within the modernist ruins of postwar Monrovia. Stepping away from the lenses of poverty, corruption, and infrastructural decay through which the African city is so often viewed, Hoffman takes Monrovia’s inhabitants’ lives seriously on their own terms and in light of the impossible possibilities imposed upon them by the liberating dreams of modernist architecture.” — Filip de Boeck, author of, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City

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