Sub-Saharan Africa's informal hybrid city today, caught between the colonial legacy of 'curse' and 'exotification'.

Abstract

The colonialism implemented by the European powers in Sub-Saharan Africa, from the late 19^th century until the middle to later 20^th century, would fracture its history and its urban territory, leaving a mark that is still visible today in the great regional differences resulting from the macrocephalic organization of the European colonies, and in the urban layouts of some of its cities where racial segregation has given rise to a socioeconomic segregation that is enhanced by colonized thinking and knowledge that resort to European models to conceptualize and codify the city. A codification that the colonizers deployed in their colonial cities in such a way that everything that escaped their understanding and 'ways of doing' city was assigned the code of 'informal'.

These 'informal' urban structures in which Africans were confined would become arenas of social, technical and cultural creation and innovation: hybrid urban forms that integrated western and traditional influences. These hybrid cities build today more than half of the urban fabric in some African countries, they are places of experimentation and learning —border thinking incubators— that, however, remain trapped in an inadequate conceptual framework that materializes spatially and mentally between two extremes: the 'curse' and the 'exotification'.