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This book provides readers with a wide overview of place-based planning and design experiments addressing such powerful transformations in the African built environment. This continent is currently undergoing fast paced urban, institutional and environmental changes, which have stimulated an increasing interest for alternative architectural solutions, urban designs and comprehensive planning experiments.
The international and balanced array of the collected contributions explore emerging research concepts for understanding urban and peri-urban processes in Africa, discuss bottom-up planning and design practices, and present inspirational and innovative co-design methods and participatory tools for steering such change through public spaces, sustainable services and infrastructures.
The book is intended for students, researchers, decision-makers and practitioners engaged in planning and design for the built environment in Africa and the Global South at large.
List of contents
Five points for conceptualizing place-based approaches to African urban planning: An introduction.- Re-inscribing the communal: Towards decolonial urban futures.- Urbanisation without urbanity, modernity without modernisation. Recording "biographical trajectories of houses" in the Dendi rural region (North Benin).- Designing the diaspora: Expressing African heritage in historic Charleston.- Nature-based solutions for public green spaces in Sub-saharan Africa - Integrating place-making and green infrastructure.- Slums as opportunities? Spatial organisation, microeconomy and self-made infrastructures in freetown informal settlements.- Divergent practice: Architecture as a multidimensional impact tool in rural Lesotho.- Teaching design in a post-rainbow nation: A South African reflection on the limits and opportunities of design praxis.- Urban resilience and the question of food in Ethiopian urbanisation: The case of a small town in Ethiopia - Amdework.- Transnational urban spaces. Production locations of the global clothing industry in Ethiopia.- Learning from Selembao: An alternative approach to Kinshasa's urbanization, using the concept of Mboka Bilanga.- Households' and community initiatives toward city resilience: The case of flood resilience in Dar Es Salaam.- Motivations to co-produce water, hygiene and sanitation services in the peri-urban area of Kinshasa.- The government systems-trust-collective action Nexus: The case of Amdework.- Local solid waste management practices in the city of Zinder in Niger.
