ABSTRACT
The literature on colonial urban planning in Africa shows how planning models and tools developed in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were extensively used in the African colonies by all European colonial empires (Silva, 2015). Despite the radically different challenges urban planning now faces in Africa, in particular those associated with urban transition (UN, 2014), the globalization of economic relations (Briggs and Yeboah, 2001) and climate change (UN, 2011), some of the models and planning laws introduced during the colonial period are still, half a century after independence, being applied in most African countries (Njoh, 2009; 2012; Attahi et al., 2009; Okpala, 2009; Silva, 2015). Colonial urban planning in Africa was influenced from the 1920s up to the 1940s and 1950s by the principles of the Garden City planning model and after the Second World War by the CIAM discourse on urbanism and the rational planning theory, a discourse that remained dominant in the first years after independence. More recently, in the last two decades, the collaborative discourse on urban planning, the principles of New Urbanism and the concept of sustainable urban development emerged, although timidly in most cases, as a theoretical and methodological reference.
