Le cours permet d'apprendre les bases de la planification urbaine à travers ses dimensions techniques, environnementales, sociales, économiques et symboliques. Le cours parle uniquement des villes africaines et même si celles-ci ont valeurs d'exemple pour les ville du Sud, voire toutes les villes, nous nous efforçons à remettre les problématiques dans un contexte africain.
Villes africaines (Partie 1)
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From the course by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Villes africaines I: Introduction à la planification urbaine
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École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
35 ratings
From the lesson
Urbanisation en Afrique
Un état des lieux de l'urbanisation en Afrique et dans le Monde. Quels sont le grands défis, les grands enjeux? Première approche de la planification urbaine
Meet the Instructors
Jérôme ChenalDr
Faculté de l'Environnement Naturel, Architectural et Construit - ENAC
Today we will talk about African cities,
from urbanisation to the city, the forms of urbanisation to the forms of cities.
Why African cities?
You will notice that the lesson
is called African cities and not African city,
simply because there is not only one type of city, or one city
that we would find from the Maghreb
to South Africa, but multiple ones.
What is interesting is to see the common points
between the cities which could represent a category,
the category of African cities.
So let's study these African cities
and some geographical features.
First, two thirds of them
are coastal cities.
So they are close to the sea.
Therefore, we will mainly study port cities.
Then, three spatial groups.
The first one is the North African cities,
the Arab-Muslim cities, from Casablanca to Cairo.
They are quite ancient cities
as most of them have existed since Antiquity.
So not colonial cities,
even though they all have a colonial past,
but they are cities that were built
before the colonial time.
The second spatial group
is what can be called the cities of the Gulf of Guinea,
in a broad sense, they are the cities
from Dakar to maybe Cameroon or even to Congo.
However it is a group and it is probably the most inhabited in Africa.
The third big group, which is of Dutch or English origin
is the South African cities,
namely at the southern point of Africa.
Today, some big cities are growing.
Some count on this front here
where there would be a new configuration with new cities growing.
But for now, we will consider only
the three major groups we just named.
Another feature is the emptiness of the continent.
Beyond the big cities we just saw,
there is more or less a continent relatively free and it is fine
because we get into the Sahara,
the Sahel, the Kalahari or Namib deserts.
However we realise that
the structure itself of the cities is coastal and not continental.
This stems also from the historical heritage
which is the colonial conquest that implemented in priority
port cities with railway
going further into the lands
in order to bring the raw materials
to Europe via the ports.
So, except a handful of cities which have become capital cities,
the cities with no access to the sea and the secluded areas,
if we want to characterise, we can say
that the continent is completely empty
while the cities break down all around the shoreline.
Initially, there are some forms of urbanisation growing into cities
or starting from the city to the form of urbanisation.
Today, we can say in short, even though
there are always exceptions
and some regional subtleties,
but, roughly, either we have isolated cities
or mega-regions, or lanes, or city-regions.
Meaning that apart from the isolated city,
the other cities are not isolated, but included in a network
with other cities or regions
to shape a huge region, a city-region.
Or as in some parts, like South Africa
or Nigeria, we find lanes,
which are a sort of succesion of cities
spread across the channels of communication,
sometimes the railway, but generally the road,
being the main means of transport or mobility between the cities.
The question concerns the driving forces of urbanisation.
What are the forces allowing this urbanisation
and ultimately our African cities to develop?
There are several forces.
First, we have what we call the "inputs".
What are the inputs?
The inputs are materials,
work force, transports, services,
water and power facilities.
It is everything coming into the city.
One of the driving forces is the concentration of inputs.
Simultaneously, it is the market.
This means that cities gather people
who are consumers, so there is a concentration of consumers in cities
which enables their development
and therefore represents urbanisation driving forces.
Next, between inputs and market,
we have service proximity,
by default compared to the countryside,
where business and administrative activities
are much larger.
Then, the possibilities are also much larger,
we call them "network" or "networks"
in this case as they are numerous, and they can be social or commercial,
but we have at the same time a proximity of the services
and a possibility of networking,
the inputs as well as the market
to sell the inputs.
There is a sort of symetry
between producers and consumers, between sellers and buyers,
but all this is happening within the city
and all this enables, unlike the countryside,
the development of urban areas.
Now, let's see some of the features.
We covered the stakes and the challenges
regarding urbanisation,
and can be true beyond the African borders.
Today, we will see the features of these African cities.
Even if they are many,
we can assume that there is an entity
or an identity of the African city
and we will study some of its features.
These are non-exhaustively, migration issues,
the labour forces of the cities,
the informality issue,
the actors, the same ones we find almost everywhere;
we also have the feature of urban macrocephaly,
which is a geographical criterion
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