Rethinking urban planning for sub-Saharan African cities

Development of the city of Yaoundé, Cameroon, from 1984 to 2016. Public thesis defense of Armel Kemajou - For his thesis project at EPFL, Armel Kemajou studied the peri-urban areas of Lomé, Togo, and Yaoundé, Cameroon, where populations are expected to double in 20 years. He observed construction strategies that reflected coherent individual and collective approaches to planning, although they lay outside existing legal frameworks. Kemajou gives proposals for incorporating such an approach to construction, parting ways with urban planning patterned on European cities, which is unsuitable for these countries. Africa's increasingly urban populations are expected to double by 2050. This is leading to cities' exponential growth, something that is exceptionally difficult for many countries to manage. Most of these urban areas, such as the sprawling city of Lagos in Nigeria, are so vast that their boundaries are hard to identify.