DOI: 10.4324/9781003168621-10 83 Introduction What can anthropology ofer practitioners undertaking urban design projects and how can the discipline’s methods be used to support the communities that will live with the outcomes of these projects? Urban Africa is a fruitful context to think with when approaching these questions—not least because of its long history of design projects that eschewed engagement with local populations in favor of prioritizing European settlers and their colonial infrastruc- ture (Nunes Silva 2015). One legacy of this history is that inequities remain inscribed in the built environment and continue to infuence urbanites’ daily lives (Demissie 2017) and their sense of themselves as stewards of their own cities. At the same time, rapid urbanization, sprawling informal economies, high population growth rates, limited oversight of construc- tion industries, and the capriciousness of state agencies have, among other things, shaped how people respond to urban design projects. We propose that anthropology can productively contribute to such initiatives—particularly projects undertaken in complex and precarious environments such as those found in some African cities. In this chapter, we treat anthropology as a way of working that highlights the source, inner workings, and relations of power that shape and sustain agency—or, as Isabelle Doucet and Kenny Cupers describe it, the “drive to create alternative worlds” (2009). As such, the discipline uses methods that engender a togetherness in conversation that can help designers account for the agency of di ferent participants involved in a project. This is a disciplinary strength that design scholars have begun to acknowledge in their support for qualitative approaches to design research (Cranz 2016). Such approaches, as we highlight below, can illuminate the diverse capacities that everyone brings to the table—as well as the power relations shaping those capabilities. They can also help designers understand the long-term impacts of their interventions on local populations—while simultaneously enabling commu- nity members to grasp the constraints that designers face in their work. We begin this chapter by taking the reader into the feld with two, frst-person vignettes exploring design activities in Cairo and Dakar. We lead with these immersive narratives to highlight dynamics shaping formal and informal design interventions in urban Africa—a space that is rarely approached as a context for lessons learned or best practices regarding 1.8 An anthropological way of working with urban design Examples from Africa Claire Panetta and Suzanne Scheld