Rapid growth, unmanageable cities, urban crisis - the cities of West Africa are no longer plannable, at least not by using traditional urban development tools.

Without negating the importance of participatory approaches for making the city, it nonetheless seems crucial to return to city plans and models, to what they convey and how they are built. But in order to understand the city in all its depth, we must also hit the streets.

The West African City proposes a dual perspective. At the urban scale, it analyzes historical trajectories, spatial...

This book deals with slums as a specific question and a central focus in urban planning. It radically reverses the official version of the history of world cities as narrated during decades: slums are not at the margin of the contemporary process of urbanization; they are an integral part of it. Taking slums as its central focus and regarding them as symptomatic of the ongoing transformations of the city, the book moves to the very heart of the problem in urban planning. The book presents 16 case studies that form the basis for a theory of the slum and a concrete development manual for the...