Research Publications

Informal settlements in African cities are faced with a combination of severe economic, infrastructural, and health-related challenges, which we hypothesize are linked to historical urban planning processes. During the early 20th century, British colonial spatial policies in Anglophone Africa used disease management as a spatial planning tool to promote urban marginality and reinforce spatial and racial segregation. This paper interrogates the relationships between historical urban spatial policies and contemporary infectious disease risk in African cities. We expand on the recently developed term ‘pandemic urbanization’ to ask how: a) unequal colonial urban planning policies in Freetown, Accra, and Nairobi exposed their residents to illness and infectious disease, and assess if b) infectious disease outcomes have historically been used to ‘justify’ residential segregation, particularly on racialized lines. Using a critical literature review, our analysis shows that urban planning's capacity to manage health crises in African cities remains inadequate, particularly in informal settlements. This paper provides important insights into how such neglect has created ‘pandemic urbanization’ across the continent's major cities and argues that urban planning works in tandem with public health crises - such as the COVID-19 pandemic - to spatially produce urban marginality. We argue for a refocusing of urban planning on the central livelihood and survival issues confronting African cities to address pandemic urbanization and move beyond colonial imprints in contemporary planning practice and theory.