Routledge Handbook of Urban Planning in Africa

Carlos Nunes Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351271820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This handbook contributes with new evidence and new insights to the on-going debate on the de-colonization of knowledge on urban planning in Africa.

African cities grew rapidly since the mid-20th century, in part due to rising rural migration and rapid internal demographic growth that followed the independence in most African countries. This rapid urbanization is commonly seen as a primary cause of the current urban management challenges with which African cities are confronted. This importance given to rapid urbanization prevented the due consideration of other dimensions of the current urban problems, challenges and changes in African cities. The contributions to this handbook explore these other dimensions, looking in particular to the nature and capacity of local self-government and to the role of urban governance and urban planning in the poor urban conditions found in most African cities. It deals with current and contemporary urban challenges and urban policy responses, but also offers an historical overview of local governance and urban policies during the colonial period in the late 19th and 20th centuries, offering ample evidence of common features, and divergent features as well, on a number of facets, from intra-urban racial segregation solutions to the relationships between the colonial power and the natives, to the assimilation policy, as practiced by the French and Portuguese and the Indirect Rule put in place by Britain in some or in part of its colonies.

Using innovative approaches to the challenges confronting the governance of African cities, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of Urban Africa, urban planning in Africa and African Development.

1

Ancient, colonial, and post-colonial urban planning in Africa

An introduction

Carlos Nunes Silva

The rate of urban population growth in Africa has been consistently high since the 1950s, according to UN demographic statistics (UN, 2018; ECA et al., 2018). Even so, the continent continues to be the least urbanized with just 43% of its population living in urban areas in 2018, the majority of which are still living in poverty and with insufficient urban services. This population increase is the result of a rapid natural demographic growth and a continued high rural migration in the post-independence period. It is expected to continue to be high, at least until 2050, since almost 90% of the total world urban population growth, estimated to be 2.5 billion new inhabitants in 2050, is expected to occur in Africa and Asia. In most of these countries, the urban expansion was not followed by an equal economic growth in the first decades post-independence (Fay & Opal, 2000) and even less by the necessary investment in infrastructures. Even if recent studies suggest a more complex population dynamic in some countries or cities than that portrayed in the description of a continent that experienced a rapid population growth (Potts, 2012; UN-Habitat, 2014; 2018; Crankshaw & Borel-Saladin, 2018), the rapid urbanization and the lack of economic and financial capacity are generally seen as primary causes of the current urban governance challenges with which cities in Africa are confronted, namely those associated with social exclusion, poverty, slums, sanitation deficiencies, urban transport insufficiency, environmental degradation, and food insecurity. The overemphasis given by policy-makers, researchers, and public opinion to rapid urbanization as the main cause of the social, economic, and environmental problems in Africa, and the overemphasis given in the post-independence period to rural development policies, prevented for a long time the due consideration of other dimensions, namely issues of local and urban governance.

This book explores some of these other dimensions, looking in particular at the nature and capacity of local self-government and the role of urban governance in Africa, expanding the evidence and insights provided in recent research on urban planning in Africa (Silva, 2012; 2014; 2015; 2016; 2016a). Thus, the aim of the book is to understand how local political, social, and economic contexts and external forces interacted, in colonial and post-colonial periods, to produce the kind of urban planning that Africa experienced in the last century. In doing this, this book analytically examines different planning cultures and spatial planning systems, in particular the institutional arrangements that have been put in place, the transnational flow of planning ideas, or the role of key planners, in colonial and post-colonial periods. The book also deals with the decentralization trends and the gradual shift from traditional modes of governing cities, towns, and other human settlements to forms of networked urban governance, an expanding mode of local governance also in some countries and cities in Africa since the early 1990s, as in the case examined in Tomlinson and Harrison (2018). This is done through single-country case studies or through the comparison of several countries. It is based on original research and follows a pluralist methodological approach. It is structured into two main parts. The first part, “Colonial urban planning and pre-colonial urban heritage in Africa” – has 7 chapters focused on ancient or pre-colonial and colonial urban planning. The second – “Post-colonial urban planning in Africa”, has 14 chapters focused on the role of local government in urban planning, the nature of the planning profession, the transnational flow of planning ideas, different planning approaches, informal housing, urban transport, and urban food systems.

The first part of the book starts with two chapters that challenge the long-held view that urban planning was introduced in Africa during the colonial period. As Domenico Cristofaro and Abdou Kailou Djibo show, this is not the case. On the contrary, the evidence provided confirms the existence of pre-colonial indigenous local planning practices responsible for the spatial configuration of different types of human settlements, as well as ancient indigenous architectural principles and practices. The following chapters also show how those ancient indigenous principles continue to be present in contemporary practices and how they should be considered in the planning of cities in Africa, now and in the future, providing lessons and policy guidance for other cities in the continent.

In Chapter 2, “The birth of a town: Indigenous planning and colonial intervention in Bolgatanga, northern territories of the Gold Coast”, Domenico Cristofaro explores the development of the city of Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region of Ghana, from its first contacts with European explorers to the implementation of British colonial rule in the region. Domenico Cristofaro shows how the development and planning of this town in the first decades of the 20th century were not entirely the product of colonial rule, but rather the result of several other factors, namely the pre-colonial indigenous planning and socio-political organization, the centralization of local political power, and the local response to British urban policies. In doing this, the author argues that neither a village nor even the concept of it existed in the area at the beginning of the 20th century. The development of these new forms of human settlements was, as the evidence provided suggests, the product of local and foreign influences.

This confront with long-held views on urban planning in Africa continues in Chapter 3, “History of the urban planning of the city of Zinder in the Niger Republic”, in which Abdou Kailou Djibo also challenges the widely expressed view that urban planning dates only from the colonial period, arguing that before that cities had always played an important political and economic role, as is confirmed by the urban morphological characteristics of cities such as Agadez and Zinder in Niger. This is further corroborated, as the author shows, through the comparison of the constructive models of the old or pre-colonial city and the colonial city, and by the analysis of how the new urban structure superimposed on the old urban form.

The next five chapters deal more specifically with urban planning in the colonial period in Africa. The first of these five chapters highlights or exemplifies the importance some key planners and architects had in the colonial period, namely the role they played in the transnational transfer and the dissemination of planning cultures from Europe to Africa and between colonies. The following two chapters examine and discuss the urban development associated with colonial infrastructural planning, specifically harbours and the role they played in the respective colonial spatial strategies, through one example in North Africa, in Algeria, and another in sub-Saharan Africa, in Mozambique, in this case highlighting the sanitation and health issues associated with the rapid urban expansion allowed and stimulated by the new harbour infrastructure. The remaining two chapters of this first part also deal with spatial planning in the colonial period: one focused on the planning process of a colonial rural settlement and the other focused on the planning of an industrial area associated with the mining industry in an area not occupied before by the colonizer, both cases in Angola.

Michele Tenzon, in Chapter 4, “Mise en valeur and repopulation in colonial rural development in French Morocco”, deals with the role played by the colonial planning department in the French Protectorate in Morocco just after the end of the Second World War and the kind of planning developed in the late years of the colonial period. This is a good example of similar structures created in other parts of the continent by France, Britain, and Portugal. Besides the extensive planning work developed in Casablanca, Rabat, and other cities in Morocco, the Service de l’Urbanisme prepared, as Michele Tenzon shows, a series of ambitious rural resettlement schemes in the fertile Gharb Valley. The plan comprised a network of rural and industrial villages whose aim was not only to control the rural migration, but also to establish a frontier settlement. The chapter, through the analysis of these plans, which have been responsible for the development of one of Morocco’s main agricultural areas, shows how a modernist large-scale planning scheme has been implemented in Africa and how it increased social inequality by promoting the separation between the modern city sectors, occupied by the colonial and local elites, and the areas occupied by the local members of the lower social classes. The evidence provided also shows how these rural plans in Morocco represented to some extent an experimental field for subsequent planning works in other part of Francophone Africa.

In Chapter 5, “Infrastructure and urban planning: The port and city of Algiers under French colonial rule, 19th–20th century”, Souha Salhi explores the strategic role played by harbours in the European colonial expansion in the 19th century by analyzing the port of Algiers, which was the main economic centre of French colonization in Algeria. As Souha Salhi shows, the colonial harbour led to significant urban reorganization in Algiers through the multiple interactions between port infrastructure and urban planning. This case illustrates well the influence that planning experiments in the colonies had in the colonial metropole, as was the case with the innovative port technology developed in Algeria and later used in France, in other European ports, and in other colonial territories too.

Sanitation and water supply, and sanitation-related health risks, were major issues with which urban governance in Africa was confronted at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. Thus, the preparation of sanitation plans marked urban planning in that period, in most, if not in all, colonies in Africa, in association with the alleged medical and scientific justification for racial segregation. In Chapter 6, “Living in Lourenço Marques in the early 20th century: Urban planning, development, and well-being”, Ana Cristina Roque addresses the planning and development of Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, namely the articulation between local conditions and the basic sanitation and health needs of the inhabitants of the new capital of this Portuguese colony. At the end of the 19th century, the new harbour became essential for trade in the region, which led to a rapid increase of its population whose living and working conditions were, in general, inadequate. As a result of this, and beyond numerous other problems, sanitation and health were among the major challenges confronting urban planning in the city. The chapter addresses the different ways of designing and organizing the city space at the turn of the 19th–20th century, a city that grew based on social and economic inequalities, and on racial segregation, in this case following the already-mentioned medical and scientific recommendations, reproducing to a large extent the relationship between colonizer and colonized found also in the other African colonies at that time. The intricacy of these processes leads Ana Roque to emphasize, as other chapters in the book also do, the need for an interdisciplinary approach, if the complexity of the colonial urban past is to be understood.

The last two chapters in this first part of the book offer new empirical evidence and new insights on two kinds of challenges with which the colonial powers were confronted with in the decades that followed the Conference of Berlin. One of these challenges was the need for an effective physical occupation of the colonial territory and the other was the need to find appropriate conditions for a white colonization of the vast rural areas. In the first of these two chapters, Chapter 7, “Colonizing and infrastructuring the Angolan territory through colonist settlements: The case of the Cela settlement”, Filipa Fiúza and Ana Vaz Milheiro address the theme of colonial settlements, seen as part of the territorial infrastructuring of Angola, which took place between 1875 and 1975, the year in which Angola became independent. The chapter deals in particular with the Cela agricultural settlement, one of the largest of its kind in the Portuguese colonial empire. This policy of colonization through planned agricultural settlements had, to some extent, some similar or convergent aspects with attempts made by other colonial powers in the respective colonies, as Michele Tenzon shows in Chapter 4. In the case of the Portuguese African colonies, this concept can be found in policy documents since the early 1900s. In the 1950s, the Portuguese authoritarian political regime, in power since 1926, initiated a new colonization policy, and the Cela settlement was set up in the then district, now province, of Cuanza Sul, starting its activity in 1952.

As with other spatial plans prepared in the Portuguese colonies, the plan of Cela was elaborated by the Colonial Public Works Agency. The Cela settlement declined when the white colons abandoned the area due to the independence of Angola in November 1975, a process made worse by the civil war that hit the area after the independence. In the early 2000s, after the end of the civil war in 2002, the settlement was somehow reconstructed and reequipped; this time with international aid, namely through the Israeli cooperation. With this case study, the book offers new insights on the reuse of past colonial infrastructures by the newly independent countries and shows how a colonial collective rural experiment, intended for white colonization, has been reworked with the aid of international cooperation and presented in the post-independence official discourse as a progressive experience, as a rural settlement and as model for community organization. With this case, the book also offers additional empirical evidence on the enduring persistence of colonial spatial infrastructures built with a different political rationale.

More or less in the same period, the Portuguese colonial project also included plans for industrial settlements, namely associated with major mining projects. This feature of the Portuguese colonial planning culture is well illustrated by the case of the mining cities in the North of Angola, namely the case of Diamang, the company responsible for the exploration of diamonds in Angola. In Chapter 8, “Diamang’s urban project: Between the Peace of Versailles and the Colonial Act”, Ana Vaz Milheiro and Beatriz Serrazina explore the early stages of urban development in the Lunda region, in North-East Angola, as a result of the settlement network implemented by Diamang–Angola Diamond Company since 1917. The Portuguese colonial presence in the area was still very limited at that time and for that reason the planning and implementation of new urban settlements was critical for the survival and for the success of the mining company.

As the authors show, the housing typologies and the collective programmes in the new settlements built in the region reveal a rigid hierarchical social system that replicated to some extent what existed in the colonial homeland, although with the incorporation of elements of the pre-existing indigenous culture. The case of Diamang illustrates well the role private companies played in the effective occupation of the colonial territories. The evidence also raises the issue of the transnational flow of planning ideas in the colonial period, in particular among colonies of different countries, as seems to have been the case between Angola and Congo, and between large mining companies on bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• 1 Ancient, colonial, and post-colonial urban planning in Africa: An introduction
• PART I Colonial urban planning and pre-colonial urban heritage in Africa
• PART II Post-colonial urban planning in Africa
• Index