[Extract …] Although many people have an image of Africa as predominately rural, it is now the fastest urbanizing continent in the world. Since World War II, a number of African metropolises have developed, including four that have over eight million inhabitants: Cairo (Egypt), Lagos (Nigeria), Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Johannesburg (South Africa). Because of this growing urbanisation, the cities of Africa have attracted new, and renewed, interest within many disciplines. While the explosive growth of cities in African countries was initially greeted with reports about failing infrastructure, corrupt governments, insecurity, ethnic conflicts and humanitarian disasters, another discourse on the African city has recently developed that highlights the creativity and vitality of the urban cultures within this vast continent. However, although African cities are now receiving more positive attention, understanding African urban space remains highly problematic and vague. We believe that one of the keys to a better understanding of contemporary urban conditions in Africa is through an in-depth look into the history of its development. This PhD thesis aims to contribute to the research in this area.

The goal of this thesis is to build a bridge between two fields that study the historical development of African cities: the broad field of urban history and the sub-field of the history of urban planning. Until now, these fields, although highly complementary, have developed quite separately from each other. Instead of seeing urban history and urban planning history as two ways of looking at the African city, we explicitly apply an interdisciplinary approach that combines both perspectives. We believe that our understanding of urban spaces in Africa will be greatly enhanced by this cross-fertilization.

The thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach to compare the historical development that took place between 1920 and 1980 in three cities in sub-Saharan Africa: Dakar (Senegal), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Kinshasa (Congo). An important consideration for selecting these cities is their different colonial backgrounds, which are French, British and Belgian, respectively. We have chosen to examine this period in order to look beyond the classical endpoints of historical research into African cities, such as the independence of the former African colonies.