ABSTRACT
Urban agglomeration has not figured prominently as a theme in African development thinking until recently. Quite the contrary, the dominant discourse, and the one that prevailed throughout the twentieth century, depicted sub-Saharan Africa 1 as an overwhelmingly rural continent with a low-density population trapped in an impoverished, stagnating subsistence agricultural sector. From the outset of colonialism, this perception permeated government and academic circles. Post-colonial African development policy continued to be wary of urbanization. Urban growth and agglomeration in sub-Saharan Africa was deemed undesirable and detrimental — a curse rather than a blessing. Deeply etched in the design and implementation of international donor aid strategies, wave after wave of rural development programme experimentation aimed at forestalling urban growth, in the name of maximizing national development and welfare for the majority rather than for a privileged urban elite.
