Liora Bigon 
French colonial Dakar [PDF ebook] 
The Morphogenesis of an African Regional Capital

This book deals with the planning culture and architectural endeavours that shaped the model space of French colonial Dakar, a prominent city in West Africa. With a focus on the period from the establishment of the city in the mid-nineteenth century until the interwar years, our involvement with the design of Dakar as a regional capital reveals a multiplicity of ”top-down” and ”bottom-up” forces. These include a variety of urban politics, policies, practices and agencies, and complex negotiations on both the physical and conceptual levels. The study of the extra-European planning history of Europe has been a burgeoning field in scholarly literature, especially in the last few decades. There is a clear tendency within this literature, however, to focus on the more privileged colonies in the contemporary colonial order of preference, such as British India and the French colonies in North Africa. Colonial urban space in sub-Saharan Africa has thus been left relatively untreated. With a rich variety of historical material and visual evidence, the book incorporates both primary and secondary sources, collected from multilateral channels in Europe and Senegal. It includes an analysis of a variety of planning and architectural models, metropolitan-cum-indigenous. Of interest to scholars in history, geography, architecture, urban planning, African studies and Global South studies – this book is also one of the pioneers in attesting the connection between the French colonial doctrines of assimilation and association and French colonial planning and architectural policies in sub-Saharan Africa.