African Renaissance
In the African context where political realities make equity a critical variable for new economic and spatial entities, the theory of African renaissance provides the object for planning and the mission for cities. African renaissance is up against a new
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African Renaissance The Subject of Planning (in Africa)
Abstract In the African context where political realities make equity a critical variable for new economic and spatial entities, the theory of African renaissance provides the object for planning and the mission for cities. African renaissance is up against a new agenda of sharing African market for Euro-American goods and services. Hence this theory seeks the primary objective of integrated regional development, which connects with sourcing enhanced productivity through the introversion of the economy of urban Africa. It demands the restructuring of the urban form through territorial planning and in so doing hopes to generate communities of African renaissance of the twenty-first century with capacity to surmount contemporary urban crisis in Africa. Hitherto communities of African renaissance of the Middle Ages, with diverse systems of behaviour and belief bound with spiritual values, who ousted the backward Bushmen and Pygmies, overcame similar obstacles and founded cities and built states and empires. Keywords Africa Colonialism
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Renaissance Euro-American Productivity Dependency
African Renaissance—a Theory of Development
The pedigree of African renaissance as a concept of blossoming Africa dates back to the tenth century when Empire and Kingdom building, particularly Sudanese Empires, pioneered tropical civilization. The African communities, with diverse systems of behaviour and belief bound with spiritual values, who ousted the backward Bushmen and Pygmies, overcame obstacles posed by harsh environmental setting in the sub-region and founded cities and built states and empires. Prior to this period, memories of Greek colonialism in North Africa dating from the fourth century witnessed the emergence of flourishing ports, such as Carthage and Alexandria. The modernization theory, the movement of 1950–1960s rooted in capitalism, intercepted the African renaissance of earlier epoch. Modernization, which ensued, impoverished Africa through colonialism and imperialism by the West and this trend © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 D. Okeke, Integrated Productivity in Urban Africa, The Urban Book Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41830-8_8
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African Renaissance—the Subject of Planning (in Africa)
is with us today as the East takes its turn to deplete the continent’s resources such as oil and minerals (Matunhu 2011: 67). Matunhu further states that the ‘ideas of modernization impoverished Africa. The theory failed to recognize the creativity and initiative of Africans’. Discontentment with the modernization theory in the 1950s precipitated new strands of thinking which resulted in the dependency theory. The dependency theory positioned Africa to specialize in marketing raw material while the developed world market finished products. The theory engineered Africa’s poverty position and ultimately, according to Matunhu, ‘Africa lost its right to determine its way to development’. Indeed social anthropologists consider the de
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