ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the centrality of rural-based visions in Africa’s postcolonial development and architectural/planning histories. It casts the spotlight on a rural planning project by Doxiadis Associates in mid-1960s Zambia to investigate the firm’s attempts to respond to various demands emanating from the rural theater as the locus of postcolonial aspirations and dynamics of nation-building; South–South economic agendas; as well as epistemological contestations around rural development rooted within colonial legacies and emerging global critiques on state-led planning. Attempting to align with new empirical realizations and changing epistemological paradigms, the firm’s approach thus went from the reorganization of the rural population within “stable” community patterns and regional networks to, eventually, the infrastructural modification of the countryside to facilitate incoming and outgoing “flows” of services, state power, capital, labor, and agricultural surplus. These strategies, the chapter further shows, derived from the firm’s system-based and spatio-economic planning approach, tracing the shaping of developmental expertise beyond merely visual explorations of cultural identity through architectural forms and urban planning projects. In doing so, the chapter questions dominant views that link urbanization and urban planning with development and nation-building, highlighting underexplored architectural/planning perspectives in the genealogies of rural development in the Global South.
