Few published studies have thoroughly treated the history of European planning practices in the overseas colonial territories. This is especially true regarding the African continent in general and sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Interest in the indigenous response to the formal organisation of the colonial settlement has only been manifest in the last few decades. In addition, French and British colonial policies and practices in West Africa, particularly with regard to town planning, have rarely been analysed together within the same intellectual framework. This book contains eleven black and white photographs and two color photographs.

History of Urban Planning in Two West African Colonial Capitals : Resdential Segregation in British Lagos and French Dakar (1850-1930)

This book is the first to trace the genealogy of an indigenous grid-pattern settlement design practice in Africa, and more specifically in Senegal. It does so by analyzing how the precolonial grid-plan design tradition of this country has become entangled with French colonial urban grid-planning, and with present-day, hybrid, planning cultures. By thus, it transcends the classic precolonial-colonial-postcolonial metahistorical divides. This properly illustrated book consists of five chapters, including an introductory chapter (historiography, theory and context) and a concluding chapter. The chapters’ text has both a chronological and thematic rationale, aimed at enhancing Islamic Studies by situating sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanism within mainstream research on the Muslim World; and at contributing directly to the wider project of de-Eurocentrizing urban planning history by developing a more inclusive, truly global, urban history.

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.

A comprehensive overview of the architectural and urban transformations that took place across the British Empire between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries, exploring the built heritage of Britain's former colonial empire as a fundamental part of how we negotiate our postcolonial identities.

This collection is a study of the process by which European planning concepts and practices were transmitted, diffused and diverted in various colonial territories and situations. The socio-political, geographical and cultural implications are analysed here through case studies from the global South, namely from French and British colonial territories in Africa as well as from Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. The book focuses on the transnational aspects of the garden city, taking into account frameworks and documentation that extend beyond national borders, and includes contributions from an international network of specialists. Their comparative views and geographical focus challenge the conventional, Eurocentric approach to garden cities, and will interest students and scholars of planning history and colonial history.

Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

The renaissance in urban theory draws directly from a fresh focus on the neglected realities of cities beyond the west and embraces the global south as the epicentre of urbanism. This Handbook engages the complex ways in which cities of the global south and the global north are rapidly shifting, the imperative for multiple genealogies of knowledge production, as well as a diversity of empirical entry points to understand contemporary urban dynamics. The Handbook works towards a geographical realignment in urban studies, bringing into conversation a wide array of cities across the global south – the ‘ordinary’, ‘mega’, ‘global’ and ‘peripheral’. With interdisciplinary contributions from a range of leading international experts, it profiles an emergent and geographically diverse body of work. The contributions draw on conflicting and divergent debates to open up discussion on the meaning of the city in, or of, the global south; arguments that are fluid and increasingly contested geographically and conceptually. It reflects on critical urbanism, the macro- and micro-scale forces that shape cities, including ideological, demographic and technological shifts, and constantly changing global and regional economic dynamics. Working with southern reference points, the chapters present themes in urban politics, identity and environment in ways that (re)frame our thinking about cities. The Handbook engages the twenty-first-century city through a ‘southern urban’ lens to stimulate scholarly, professional and activist engagements with the city.

This book is the first edited collection to bring together classic and contemporary writings on the urban grid in a single volume. The contributions showcased in this book examine the spatial histories of the grid from multiple perspectives in a variety of urban contexts. They explore the grid as both an indigenous urban form and a colonial imposition, a symbol of Confucian ideals and a spatial manifestation of the Protestant ethic, a replicable model for real estate speculation within capitalist societies and a spatial framework for the design of socialist cities. By examining the entangled histories of the grid, Gridded Worlds considers the variegated associations of gridded urban space with different political ideologies, economic systems, and cosmological orientations in comparative historical perspective. In doing so, this interdisciplinary anthology seeks to inspire new avenues of research on the past, present, and future of the gridded worlds of urban life. Gridded Worlds is primarily tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban history, world history, urban historical geography, architectural history, urban design, and the history of urban planning, and it will also be of interest to art historians, area studies scholars, and the urban studies community more generally.

In the twenty-first century, Senegalese hip hop--"Rap Galsen"--has reverberated throughout the world as an exemplar of hip hop resistance in its mobilization against government corruption during a series of tumultuous presidential elections. Yet Senegalese hip hop's story goes beyond resistance; it is a story of globalization, of diasporic movement and memory, of imagined African pasts and contemporary African realities, and of urbanization and the banality of socio-economic struggle. At particular moments in Rap Galsen's history, origin narratives linked hip hop to a mythologized Africa through the sounds of indigenous oralities. At other times, contrasting narratives highlighted hip hop's equally mythologized roots in the postindustrial U.S. inner city and African American experience. As Senegalese youth engage these globally circulating narratives, hip hop performance and its stories negotiate their place in a rapidly changing world. In Hip Hop Time explores this relationship between popular music and social change, framing Senegalese hip hop as a musical movement deeply tied to both indigenous performance practices and changing social norms in urban Africa. Author Catherine Appert takes us from Senegalese hip hop's beginnings among cosmopolitan youth in Dakar's affluent neighborhoods in the 1980s, to its spread throughout the city's ghettoized working class neighborhoods in the mid- to late-'90s, and into the present day, where political activism and hip hop musicality vie for position in local and global arenas. An ethnography of the inextricability of musical and social meaning in hip hop practice, In Hip Hop Time charts new intellectual territory in the scholarship of African and global hip hop.