ABSTRACT
Over the past several decades, large-scale property developers have initiated an increasing number of urban redevelopment schemes designed to reshape the existing spatial landscapes of a growing number of cities in Africa. If these ambitious approaches to city building successfully move beyond the design phase and reach the stage of actual implementation, many large metropolises in Africa will be fundamentally reconfigured to more explicitly serve the aims and interests of large-scale transnational corporate investors, local business coalitions, and affluent consumers wanting to be plugged into the global economy. What makes these novel approaches to city building different from previous attempts at urban regeneration is that they involve building entirely new cities out of whole cloth rather than incrementally rehabilitating physical landscapes already in place. Dispensing with the arduous task of refurbishing the built environment of existing cities, these large-scale real estate developers – sometimes acting on their own initiative and other times operating in partnership with public authorities – have simply started over, constructing entirely new cities that are built entirely from scratch.1
