In a series of talks, articles and a documentary film, global ‘starchitect’ Rem Koolhaas did a good deal of thinking with Lagos's famed traffic jams. The blockages were not, or not just, the failure of the city's infrastructure, Koolhaas argued. They were opportunities for Lagosians to engage with one another and to invent new modes of urban participation. Lagos, he contended, was the city of the future.

While crediting Koolhaas for his focus on the productive aspects of Lagos city life, African urbanists were generally quite critical of Koolhaas's preoccupation with Nigeria's largest city. Among a number of criticisms, the Lagos project was faulted for being ethnographically thin, overly celebratory, and for all but ignoring city, state and national institutions of governance.

Some 15 years later, Caroline Melly's Bottleneck shows just how much richer an analysis of African urban blockages can be. In five concise chapters and bookending introduction and conclusion, Melly makes embouteillage (the term employed by French and Wolof speaking urban Senegalese) the organising principle and primary heuristic device for this compelling ethnography. Dakar may not be the city of the future, but it is a city in which futurity matters. From traffic jams to transnational migration rumours; from student protests to parastatal investment schemes; from presidential speeches to house building aesthetics – everything is defined by an imperative to move from the frustrating present to the imagined future. But in the ‘structurally adjusted’ city of today, blockages of all kinds stand in the way and there are no clear or predictable paths forward. It is through navigating those blockages that both urban residents and state institutions come into being.

Bottleneck originated, in Melly's accounting, with an internship at APIX, a ‘quasi-state body’ in Dakar ‘that is charged both with promoting large-scale investment and with overseeing major public works projects’ (1). There Melly found bureaucrats struggling to work around the perceived inefficiencies of other bureaucracies, the frustrating choices that Dakarois make with their money, and the ever-elusive figure of the wealthy Senegalese expatriate who might be enticed to invest ‘back home'. It is a fascinating look at what structural adjustment and neoliberal governance have wrought in post-colonial Africa: a state that measures success largely by how effectively it stymies its own basic functions and invents work-arounds for largely non-existent investors.

In the final product, however, that fieldwork is the explicit subject of only one chapter of the book. The rest emerge from Melly's keen observation that the roadblocks she found at APIX were replicated on the literal roads, and that these defined the lives and futures of taxi drivers and their passengers. Embouteillages similarly dictated the ways some families built grand urban homes piecemeal, often knowing they would be unable to complete them but constantly exploring the possibilities created by a house in process. The many obstacles to migrating to Europe or the USA meant that men who attempted the journey frequently failed. But here, too, failed mobility could produce new possibilities, alternative routes toward the productive future that emigrants hoped for.

It is to Melly's credit as a writer and thinker that ‘bottleneck’ never feels like a stretched metaphor. Melly tells a very good ethnographic story, and her well chosen and well presented pictures of life in Dakar make the lived experience of the embouteillage palpable at multiple scales. As a result, Bottleneck is an ethnography that could effectively be taught in both an introductory cultural anthropology course and in an advanced seminar on African urbanism. Interestingly, Melly ends Bottleneck with a brief account of her own efforts to do the former, recounting how her students at a small American liberal arts college identified with the bottleneck as a global condition. It is the least developed application of Melly's core idea, but in some ways the most compelling. What we all have to learn from Dakar, contra Koolhaas's Lagos, is not the future of the city. It is how to think about the frustrating process of getting there.