African cities : towards a new paradigm - 'chameleonic' urbanism for hybrid cities

Abstract

African cities demand growing a network-type articulation between their formal centres and the vast, informal polymorphic suburban housing areas surrounding them. A new urban paradigm should be proclaimed: urban proposals that aim to consolidate an improved and adapted adjustment between regular patterns (attached to macro scale planning) and plural configurations of a self-organized city, based on micro stratagems that are developed by indigent citizens in their everyday life. This new urban paradigm relies on nature and collective/public spaces as major elements in the reassembly of fragmented African urban spaces: [re]develop wide, and [re]distribute social services, public services and civic infrastructure in the extension of African City – urban progress, articulated through improvement of human living conditions, needs to be combined with overall sustainability. The new urban paradigm points to flexible and regenerative morphologies in urban space, that are sensible and capable of adapting to multi-contexts – a ‘chameleonic’ urbanism, that is based on multiple – and mixed – visions of micro-units inherent to the African City, that propose derivate forms from themselves.