This chapter attempts to provide an overview of the field of African urban studies and to present some of the central issues in the urbanization of West Africa. After outlining the important urban developments from the pre-colonial period to recent times, the chapter looks specifically at colonial efforts to order urban space and African strategies to find a place within that new urban order. Moreover, it focuses on urban land, landowners and conflict as tools with which to explore broader issues of urban society and economy.

Urbanization in West Africa: developments and issues

Of all the major regions in the world today, Africa is still one of the least urbanized. During the twentieth century, however, rapid urbanization ‘has been the most significant and pervasive socioeconomic trend across the African continent’. It is widely held that the colonial experience had the greatest effect in urban formation and function south of the Sahara. Although dramatic urban growth is a relatively recent phenomenon, which dates back only to the post-Second World War period, West Africa's urban history covers a far longer period of time. Archaeological evidence and a variety of other sources, such as travel accounts, suggest complex pre-colonial urban settings. Many West African ‘trading towns’ developed rapidly from the fifteenth century onwards in response to the economic stimuli of overseas trade. It is important to note that these towns, such as Ouidah, Bonny and Calabar, were not mere reflections of the contemporary European urban order, but were always characterized by the African inhabitants’ own conceptions of urban space.

The transition from slave trade to ‘legitimate’ commerce in the nineteenth century brought to West Africa both a greater European influence on urban designs and settlement patterns and the rise of some commercial centers such as Dakar, Douala, Freetown and Lagos, at the expense of hitherto important centers such as Ouidah. The population of Lagos, for instance, grew from about 5,000 inhabitants in 1800 to 25,000 people in 1850. At this time, however, Ibadan, the largest Yoruba town, had more than twice as many inhabitants. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the scale of West African cities was certainly not comparable to European or North American metropolises.