ABSTRACT
In December 1933, after being repeatedly thwarted in ambitious planning work in Silesia (1919-25), Frankfurt (1925-30) and the Soviet Union (1930-33), the German modernist planner Ernst May surprised even his closest friends when he announced that he would “withdraw to the African bush in order to think about it [all] in peace”.1 Using monies he had earned from lucrative contracts to build vast cities in the Soviet Union, he purchased a 160-hectare coffee plantation near Arusha, in the British colony of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania). He took his family from Moscow, through Zurich, to Genoa, by boat to Mombasa, and up to a pastoral farm in the shadows of Kilimanjaro. For the next three years he concentrated all his efforts on growing coffee and fruit in the temperate highlands of British East Africa.2
