Search

This paper interrogates what has and has not changed in 100 years of professional planning in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The geographical focus is on the area of the historic core of the city known as Ng'ambo (a KiSwahili place-name meaning 'the Other Side'). The gap between formal plans for infrastructure, housing, or neighbourhood development, and their implementation, is examined in its evolution over this century. The central focus of the empirical examination resides with the most recent planning initiatives, since 2011, which present a strongly inclusive and participatory emphasis for planning on the Other Side. The key research question is this: has this new era of inclusive planning strengthened the urban poor majority's citizenship, or has it continued the long run of state planning failures for Ng'ambo's residents? This essay argues that, despite progressive ambitions, in implementation there are a number of continuities with both colonial and post-independence planning, where outside powers and elite interests have predominated. The paper is built from more than thirty years of the author's research on urban planning in Ng'ambo and engagement with the literature of urban planning studies in Africa and the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Master plans have long been criticized by critical planners who have argued in favour of more strategic, collaborative and relational forms of spatial planning that can more adequately respond to local needs and realities, especially in the context of the global South. Rather than critiquing master planning, this paper seeks to interrogate its recent rise in urban Africa. Building on a review of international planning trajectories, the paper seeks to challenge dominant narratives in the Western literature around the rise and decline of master planning. Planning experiences from across the African continent illustrate how master planning was a limited practice under colonialism and emerged more strongly in early post-colonial years, while persisting through a quiet period of planning and proliferating in recent times. By exploring the diversity in the influences and approaches to master planning for new and existing cities in Africa over time, the paper positions master planning as the product of a complex array of transnational circuits and multiple local actors and ambitions which intersect across different scales. The study of master planning should therefore be considered as an important entry point into understanding and rethinking the contemporary politics of urban planning, implementation, and development in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well acknowledged that most African cities are inheritors of colonial systems of administration, legislation, policy and plans. In most of them, this inheritance has not changed, even though it is several decades after gaining independence. As a result, many scholars have tended to overemphasize the influence of the colonizers, precluding an analysis of the ability of indigenous populations to resist, reimagine and remake colonial visions of urban life. Invariably, customary tenure and traditional authority have been treated with some ambivalence in the literature on land in Africa and are often seen respectively as unregulated capital or associated with colonial repression holding back the ability of poor people to prosper. Based on archival and desktop research, this paper examines the ways in which indigenous expressions of urban life have both subverted and been subverted by the British colonial project in Eswatini since the colonial period. The paper argues that while many of the categories and divisions of (settler) colonial rule are still visible in Eswatini, the Swazis have engaged neo-customary practices through kukhonta system centred on the role of the chiefs to reimagine and remake urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the role played by hypochondria, defined as the preoccupation with fears of having, or the idea that one has, a serious disease based on the person's misinterpretation of bodily symptoms, in the definition of buildings and urban spaces throughout the history of British presence in the tropics, with a special regard to the African continent. From the medical and hygiene experts to the army engineers and the establishment of Tropical Architecture the relationship with the climatic and health conditions of the tropical belt has triggered fears and anxieties that have often prevented the definition of solutions. This paper shows how the scientific attitude that has characterized the exploration and settlement of tropical areas has not been a steady process but rather a complex mix of fears, false truths, wrong beliefs and slow improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on September 2013 conference on urban planning in Africa held at the University of Lisbon in Lisbon, Portugal. It discusses papers presented at the conference on topics including international networks involved in colonial urban planning, the impact of neoliberal economic policies on post-colonial urban planning, and urban planning in Lusophone African countries.

This contribution offers a new perspective on the planning of post-colonial Africa focusing on the role of Italy. Weak and underdeveloped due to significant war losses, Italy could not rely on the investment potential of its Atlantic allies. Moreover, after WWII, its political influence across the continent had substantially reduced to zero. Yet, it emerged as an unexpected outsider whose eccentric – and somehow contradictory – position has been often largely underestimated. The peculiarity of the Italian condition, in fact, has been crucial to implement and put the Atlantic developmental vision in practice. To some extents, Italy has been the veritable builder of post-colonial Africa, first as a free-lance actor and then as a partner of the global agencies (IBRD, UNESCO) involved in the re-making of the continent. How could a nation substantially underdeveloped like Italy emerge as one of the leaders in implementing development planning actions abroad, although not being directly involved in decision-making process? This paper aims at answering these questions focusing on logistical, organizational and planning competences deployed by Italian corporates and technicians during the construction of four African major dams, between 1956 and 1966. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the connection between colonial administrative policies, its urban planning strategies and contemporary conflicts in an African city. Urban design can shed light on the socio-political processes in the evolution of the city in Africa. Apart from the master-servant relationship that characterized Euro-African relationship in the built environment, colonial regularization, and rationalization of urban space foregrounded power relations between different African groups in the city. This promoted struggles for space between different African groups – indigenes and settlers. Relying on interviews, focus group discussions and archival sources, this article discusses the ways in which historical forces and colonialism, in this case, colonial administrative policies and urban planning ethos, promoted a certain spatial ordering and power relations among disparate racial, ethnic and religious groups and the grievances they invigorated underlie nascent ethno-religious conflicts in Jos. It does so because conventional explanations in the mushrooming literature on urban conflicts and violence in Nigeria have all too often presented the conflicts as though they are recent developments, inspired by the consequences of structural adjustment programme, resurgence of identity politics and the politics of local government creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines historical and contemporary processes of urban (re-)development and displacement in Uganda. Particular focus concerns the often conflicting strategies employed by urban managers and residents to plan, govern and live in both the late-colonial and early twenty-first century city. Both eras can be considered significant, even momentous, for the prominence of strategic projects of socio-spatial urban reconfiguration that incorporate(d) powerful discourses fusing land and housing development with societal progress and national development. The former project putatively centred on orchestrating African development and welfare, the latter on the more ambiguous project of re-development. The ‘Good City’ and the ‘Good Citizen’ are used as heuristic devices to examine the planning ideals and rationalities that inform(ed) these projects and the conflict of rationalities they provoke(d), particularly in terms of competing visions of the good city and good citizen. The paper emphasizes that current projects of redevelopmentalism do not take place in politically inert or historically benign space. Rather, it is shown how historical and place-based specificities articulate with and mediate the process of redevelopmentalism in Kampala and Jinja. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While there is an abundance of published literature on the diffusion of planning modes and garden city notions in the western world, the corresponding literature on colonial (sub-Saharan) Africa is rather sparse. This brief paper, dealing with major historiographic trends in urban space and segregation in light of garden city literature proposes new directions for critical research on garden cities in colonial Africa. Both thematically and methodologically, the paper will highlight the importance of studying the influences of garden city ideas beyond the global North–West, and understanding the channels through which they were passed on to various colonial contexts in Africa, the circumstances of their application and the political interests they were meant to serve. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the European metropolises were on the tortuous path to decolonialization in a complex relationship of power and culture, Spain, a country whose colonial interests in Africa had never been on the scale of those of other European countries, made one last attempt to control the territory with an administrative change, embarking on ambitious urban planning processes and new forms of social housing through a modern architecture which took into consideration the contemporary discourse present in the rest of the continent at the time. Specifically, from 1961 onwards, the National Institute of Housing executed several projects; this paper examines those directed by the architect Ramón Estalella y Mansó de Zúñiga in the city of Sidi Ifni (Morocco) and the two most important cities of Western Sahara, Laayoune and Dakhla. The complex power relationships, the political atmosphere and cultural interferences prompted a series of projects which attempted to provide unique and exceptionally creative urban and architectural solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to understand the complexity of the colonial city in Africa, this article suggests a comparative study on two levels, corresponding with two important phenomena in the planning process of African cities. The first level can be described as the diffusion of planning models to the colonies, and the second as the actual implementation of these planning models on the colonial terrain. Each level requires different scales of research and frames of analysis. They are particularly valuable when examined together. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]