Africa Drawn - by Gary White & Marguerite Pienaar & Bouwer Serfontein (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Africa is certainly not only a continent of small villages in the jungle and savannah. The urbanisation of the continent is advancing rapidly, while African cities and metropolitan regions are among the fastest growing in the world. Africa Drawn presents one hundred of the most connected and important cities of the continent. The approach of this book is an effort to map the urban form and structure of African cities, and to describe and illustrate how these different places were formed. Therefore, it presents the historic character of African locations as a valuable resource for imagining the future of the continent's cities. A visual feast of 300 images and masterfully drawn plans illustrate contemporary and historical place-making actions in Africa. The result is a fascinating documentation of African urban space and at the same time a convincing analysis of its structure and morphology. The drawings are accompanied by introductory texts and, for the first time, render possible a comparison of diversity of -urban form on the continent.

Review Quotes

"A unique and timely contribution to African and urban studies, this beautiful and readable volume created through the collaboration of architects and urban planners explores the wide range of urban forms extant on the continent and analyzes them using the typology developed by Anthony O'Connor in his 1983 work The African City. The categories of indigenous cities, Islamic cities, colonial cities, European cities, dual cities, and hybrid cities are discussed and defined in the introduction. Each entry carries the date founded (if known), urban area, population, urban area density, and the GPS coordinates. Maps of significant features such as markets are also included. Drawings of prominent structures are included for some cities, an example being the Medina of Fez, Morocco. The "Resources" section covers all online research reports and conference papers, books, journals (print only), exhibition catalogs, and websites referred to in the annotations of individual cities. Much of the recent scholarship on African cities has focused either on specific issues such as sustainability or the formation and development of individual urban centers, so the breadth of the present volume's continent-wide coverage provides a useful comparative data set."
--R. B. Ridinger, Northern Illinois University, CHOICE Magazine

"A unique and timely contribution to African and urban studies, this beautiful and readable volume created through the collaboration of architects and urban planners explores the wide range of urban forms extant on the continent and analyzes them using the typology developed by Anthony O'Connor in his 1983 work The African City. " --R. B. Ridinger, Northern Illinois University, Choice