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. 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. Urbanity changed significantly from pre-colonial to colonial times, as slavery, Christianity, and a host of other forces caused a change in the population of indigenous urban dwellers.

As the term urban spatially implies the notion of density in human habitation, the term can also be applied then to indigenous nomadic African societies, like the San People of the Kalahari Desert, or the Aka, Efé and Mbuti people of central Africa. When considering the legitimacy of their relatively impermanent settlements, they are then revealed as some of the most well-planned urban areas in the world, as ephemeral as they may be. Their settlements require careful planning of three to thirty families, whose power is split relatively equally among one another. Different groups also adopt certain sets of planning standards. For example, the San People adopt an east axis from which older, then younger single men inhabit dwellings farther east from the main settlement.

Places like Benin City are striking examples of thriving pre-colonial cities. One explorer wrote in 1602 of the Yoruban city:

"The town seemeth to be great when you enter into it, you go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than Warmoes Street [the main shopping district at the time] in Amsterdam; which goeth right out and never crooks...; it is thought that the street is a mile long [about 4 British miles] besides the suburbs...when you are in the great street aforesaid, you see many great streets on the sides thereof, which also go right forth...The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other...The King's Court is very great, within it having many great four-square plains, which round about them have galleries, wherein there is always watch kept."

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