3. African Cities: Planning Ambitions and Planning Realities

This chapter indicates the kind of impact which context-less planning ideas have had on Sub-Saharan African cities, using the continent as an example of impacts and processes which are echoed in many other parts of the global South. In Africa an earlier wave of colonial and postcolonial planning fundamentally shaped the urban built environment, planning laws and institutional processes which still persist today. These planning ideas, with origins in older British and European concepts of what a well-functioning and ‘orderly’ city should look like, are completely at odds with the ‘on the ground’ reality of African cities which have experienced rapid jobless growth under conditions of weak and resource-deprived local government institutions. A more recent wave of context-less planning ideas is attempting to impose visions of cities such as Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore on cities which are largely informal and poor. This new era of planning (using terms such as eco-cities, smart cities and world-class cities) is again imposing a concept of ‘good cities’ derived from other and very different contexts. Again the impact of these interventions, driven in part this time by the international property development sector, has highly negative impacts on African cities. The conflict of rationalities emerging between this new grouping of urban actors and those attempting to survive in rapidly growing and impoverished cities in Africa is stark. Yet there is little in the way of theoretical resources in the planning field to suggest how these conflicts can be explained or the kind of positioning needed to address them.