Urban Planning Housing And Spatial Structures In Sub Saharan Africa

Breaking with tradition, this volume identifies the causes of underdevelopment in sub–Saharan Africa by linking historical experience of colonial development policies with their current development problems. This book analyzes the impact of urban and regional planning schemes with (European) colonial roots, for contemporary socio-economic development efforts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are unequally confronted with social, economic and environmental challenges, particularly those related with population growth, urban sprawl, and informality. This complex and uneven African urban condition requires an open discussion of past and current urban planning practices and future reforms. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa gives a broad perspective of the history of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa and a critical view of issues, problems, challenges and opportunities confronting urban policy makers. The book examines the rich variety of planning cultures in Africa, offers a unique view on the introduction and development of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa, and makes a significant contribution against the tendency to over-generalize Africa’s urban problems and Africa’s urban planning practices. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa is written for postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates, researchers, planners and other policy makers in the multidisciplinary field of Urban Planning, in particular for those working in Spatial Planning, Architecture, Geography, and History.

Urban planning on the five Lusophone African countries - Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Príncipe - has so far been relatively overlooked in planning literature. Bringing together a team of leading scholars, this book fills the gap by providing an in-depth analysis of key issues in the history of urban planning and discussing the key challenges confronting contemporary urban planning in these countries. The book argues that urban planning is a non-neutral and non-value free kind of public action and, therefore, ideology, planning theories, urban models and the ideological role urban planning has played are some of the key issues addressed. For that reason, the practice of Urban Planning is also seen as the outcome of a complex interrelationship between structure and agency, with the role of key planers being examined in some of the chapters. The findings and insights presented by the contributing authors confirm previous research on urban planning in the colonial and postcolonial periods in Lusophone African countries and at the same time break fresh ground and offer additional insights as new evidence has been collected from archives and in fieldwork carried out by a new generation of researchers. In addition, it outlines possible directions for future research.

Why do authorities in post-colonial African states continue to employ European or Western planning models? What are the implications for different societal groups of adopting such models? Several decades following independence, this outstanding volume provides in-depth empirical research to uncover the answers to such questions. The book focuses in particular on Cameroon, the only African country to have been colonized by three different European powers: Germany, Britain and France. It discusses the nature of the state in peripheral capitalist countries and sets current planning and land use policies in their historical, colonial and post-colonial contexts. The author then proceeds to examine key planning issues such as housing, land ownership, sustainable development, environmental and waste management, transportation, infrastructure and gender. In addition to analyzing the impact of colonialism and imperialism on the built environment in Cameroon in particular and sub-Saharan Africa in general, the book also addresses global issues about urbanism and will be particularly relevant to those interested in planning, regional studies and development, and development geography.

Urban development in sub-Saharan Africa has posed more challenges in recent decades, shifting the focus from rural poverty to urbanised poverty. Because of a rapidly urbanising sub-Saharan Africa coupled with failures in urban management, urban economies have grown slower than correspondent population increase, slum growth has increased and poverty has urbanised. Of all urban challenges, housing has posed serious challenges in sub-Saharan Africa, yet the prime basis of urban housing is land. Land management is key to urban development due to its influences on the social, economic development and urban environmental management. Land and housing are important sectors as urbanisation and urban development accelerate. This book examines the relationship between operations of informal land markets and housing development for planning policies that are responsive to the land market conditions.

Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are unequally confronted with social, economic and environmental challenges, particularly those related with population growth, urban sprawl, and informality. This complex and uneven African urban condition requires an open discussion of past and current urban planning practices and future reforms. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa gives a broad perspective of the history of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa and a critical view of issues, problems, challenges and opportunities confronting urban policy makers. The book examines the rich variety of planning cultures in Africa, offers a unique view on the introduction and development of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa, and makes a significant contribution against the tendency to over-generalize Africa’s urban problems and Africa’s urban planning practices. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa is written for postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates, researchers, planners and other policy makers in the multidisciplinary field of Urban Planning, in particular for those working in Spatial Planning, Architecture, Geography, and History.

This book focuses on peri-urban development processes in Africa, with special emphasis on Zimbabwe. The debates included highlight a number of issues in the peri-urban context, such as access to water, appropriate technologies and land management, political economy in the peri-urban space, peri-urban agriculture, and place marketing in peri-urban development, among others. The debates raised by the authors in this book revolve around locating the peri-urban space within the context of sustainability, in which key issues are addressed. The book essentially examines peri-urban development processes from various angles in an effort to understand how peri-urban areas develop, function, and how their residents survive. Per-urban dwellers currently face numerous challenges, including land tenure insecurity, poor infrastructure and services, land use conflicts, stringent planning law and land use planning regulations. This work seeks to address the “knowledge gap” on peri-urban development processes in Africa, and is also intended to inform urban policy practice in the African Cities and beyond. Offering policy makers valuable insights on the peri-urban space, it provides guidance for decision-making in the contexts of service delivery, land management, housing, new town development and place marketing, among others.