Resilient Cities for New Regionalism in Africa

Abstract

Since neo-liberal planning theory gained reception as planning orthodoxy from the 1980s to mid-2000, urban planning scholarship has engaged the reinvention of planning. It has also redefined the city as an engine of growth. Within this period, attention conceptually withdrew from the city and focused on the people. At the turn of the twenty-first century, post-modernist planning sparked off renewed interest in the city driven by factors of growth and environmental determinism. By 2009, the concern for spatial justice anchored on city development was the vogue. Sequentially the resilient city concept emerged followed by the idea of charter cities. The latest vogue is new regionalism which repositions the city as a functional element of the global political economy. It is therefore necessary to explain the ways imperial practices, unleashed by development ideologies, impact on city restructuring, forcing cities to adopt informal strategies to manage productivity. This paper opens this dimension in resilient city studies with the intent to properly diagnose the stakes of imperial cities as an element of new regionalism in Africa.