Urban planning in Africa

Urban planning in Africa results from indigenous aesthetics and conceptions of form and function as well as the changes brought on by industrialization, modernization, and colonialism.

[1] Before the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885, which formalized colonialism in many parts of Africa, indigenous African cities and villages had ordered structures that varied along ethnic and religious lines and according to geography.

All land-uses necessary for functioning––markets, religious sites, farms, communal assembly spaces––existed in ordered, rational ways, as did land property practices and laws, many of which changed under colonial control.

[4] While it is often thought that European colonization brought about the urban grid, which, with it, comes convenient provisioning of infrastructure and resources, some cities in what is modern day Senegal suggest otherwise.

[6] And while the capitals of these places received special attention given their grid systems, most towns in Senegambia contained some form of a public square in a centrally-located area.

Prior to Italian occupation, the Gebi, built by Addis Ababa's founder Menelik II, acted as the heart of the city.

[9] Similar to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's argument that demolishing much of Paris was necessary to create new boulevards that allowed for greater circulation and ensured public health, colonial planners in Africa argued that towns should segregate Europeans from Africans so as to ameliorate the "white man's grave" by combating tropical diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness.

However, at the same time, these offices are funded nationally and as such can encounter problems when it comes to organization and participation as there is a lack of clarity regarding which ministries govern which planning departments in which municipalities and regions.

Since the Rwandan genocide, President Paul Kagame has created ambitious plans to make Rwanda a middle-income country, as defined by the World Bank, by 2020.

Vision 2020 hopes to eliminate the informal settlements that currently exist, in a scheme similar in nature to that of urban renewal in America in the early twentieth century.

the townships of Soweto, KwaMashu, Botshabello, Madadeni, were all planned according to the British New Town model, which mandated specific lot sizes for free-standing houses.

[19] In the mid-1970s unplanned informal settlements began appearing outside the "white areas" of cities, further reinforcing and spatializing a racialized power differential.

However, insufficient government resources have been allocated to allow for these policies to affect smaller urban areas outside the major centers like Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma, and Mbeya.