Who Is the City For? Neocolonial Urbanism in the 21st Century

In 1976, Nigeria’s military government announced an ambitious plan: the construction of a new capital city carved from the country’s geographic center as a symbol of national unity and postcolonial aspirations. Upon its completion, Abuja joined a lineage of 20th-century planned capitals, including Brasília, Chandigarh, and Islamabad, cities designed to embody national ambition through monumental architecture and rational planning. Master-planned sectors house government elites and expatriates, while satellite settlements absorb displaced populations priced out of the official city. Foreign consultants shape expansion, and infrastructure projects arrive bundled with external financing and contractors.

This trajectory is not unique to Abuja. Across the Global South, modern urban planning often functions as a form of neocolonialism—not through direct conquest, but through design paradigms, capital flows, and technical expertise that systematically privilege external visions over local realities. The question haunting these cities is simple but profound: Who is the modern city intended for?

Explaining why these dependencies and patterns exist requires a retrospective look. Colonial cities were laboratories of control, where urban planning became a tool of domination dressed in the language of hygiene and progress. The blueprint was strikingly consistent: European quarters occupied high ground with tree-lined streets and proper sanitation, while “native” quarters were relegated to low-lying, overcrowded areas with minimal infrastructure.

In Nairobi, Kenya, British colonial authorities instituted systematic racial segregation through urban planning and spatial control, partitioning the city into separate zones for Europeans, Asians, and Africans. When disease outbreaks occurred, officials framed Africans as sources of infection—a convenient justification for policies that directed sanitary infrastructure and municipal services exclusively to European neighbourhoods. French colonial authorities deployed rigid grid planning across West African settlements, imposing geometric order that made territories legible and controllable.

Independence did not erase these spatial logics. Newly sovereign nations, eager to announce their arrival on the world stage, often adopted the very planning models that had structured their subordination. Abuja was supposed to “undo everything the colonials had done wrong in Lagos,” yet its master plan was designed by American firms and Japanese architect Kenzo Tange rather than Nigerian planners. The plan’s enforcement displaced existing settlements and created new hierarchies, physically separating the urban poor from the city center.

Money talks, and it speaks with an accent. When African governments seek to build or redesign major urban centers, they turn to international consultants—the same dynamic that produced Abuja in the 1980s. The average Abuja citizen simply cannot afford inner-city living; inflated rents and lack of transport keep workers physically severed from the spaces they maintain. Development banks such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank finance roads, power grids, and water systems across sub-Saharan Africa. But this financing rarely comes without strings. Projects must follow “international best practices,” adopt specific governance models, and often contract with foreign firms. The results are often cities that look modern on paper but fail the people who live in them. More recently, China has entered the game aggressively. Chinese state banks offer loans 30 to 40 per cent cheaper than Western alternatives, but with a catch: Beijing requires borrowers to use Chinese suppliers, steadily building tech dominance across the continent. From Dodoma to Kinshasa, master plans designed by overseas urbanists reflect foreign values and experiences rather than responding to actual local conditions. 

The newest frontier is the so-called smart city. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis promises to be Africa’s Silicon Valley, a high-tech hub backed by Chinese investment with $1.3 billion USD already spent. Similar projects dot the continent, selling a vision of urban life optimized by sensors, data, and artificial intelligence. Yet these smart cities come equipped with surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology supplied by foreign firms, primarily from China, operating with minimal oversight. The concern is not just about privacy but about cities becoming dependent on foreign technology companies for their basic functions, with authoritarian digital governance models potentially undermining democratic institutions.

It would be a mistake to treat Global South governments as passive actors duped by foreign powers. Leaders operate under severe structural constraints. Decades of debt servicing, volatile commodity markets, and unequal integration into the global economy have limited public resources and state capacity. Large-scale infrastructure and urban development are expensive, and domestic technical expertise is often unevenly distributed. Leaders pursue high-profile projects to signal global modernity and competitiveness. Developing countries engage in grandiose infrastructure projects, usually sponsored by foreign countries, to enhance national or international recognition. For instance, Egypt’s new administrative capital—complete with a theme park four times larger than Disneyland—projects ambition to both domestic and international audiences. 

The deeper issue is dependence. Many developing states simply lack the capital and technical capacity to undertake large-scale urban development independently. African rulers strategize among available options to ensure the state receives foreign finance and services on the most favourable terms, instrumentalizing foreign-sponsored projects to demonstrate performance legitimacy and sustain patronage networks. The calculus is complex; foreign financing enables visible infrastructure that strengthens political standing, even as it embeds external influence into urban form. What looks like dependence from the outside can be strategic maneuvering from the inside, turning structural constraints into rational choices in cost-benefit analyses.

These patterns generate predictable consequences. When informal settlements occupy land desired for redevelopment, residents are often evicted to make way for infrastructure projects and developments. In one case in Zimbabwe, 700,000 people lost either their homes, their sources of livelihood, or both. Urban space gets reallocated upward, toward elites, foreign investors, and the globally mobile professional class. This is trickle-down urbanism in action: build infrastructure for those at the top, and surely the geographically fixed benefits will flow down to workers physically barred from living near their jobs. Decision-making shifts from local communities to external experts and private firms, rarely subject to meaningful public scrutiny. The paradox is stark; politicians prefer to focus on creating a “modern” city rather than upgrading informal settlements, projecting strength to foreign investors while potentially weakening legitimacy with the citizens who actually live there.

Urban planning is a mirror, reflecting not just what a society builds but what it believes is worth building. In too many cities across the Global South, that mirror still tilts toward distant horizons, catching the likeness of foreign investors, international consultants, and technocrats promising modernity while sidelining the people who inhabit these spaces. The result is an urban future that feels imported rather than lived in, imposed rather than negotiated.

Decolonizing urban planning is not a merely technocratic exercise. It is a political and intellectual reclaiming of authorship. It means recognizing informal settlements not as aberrations to be erased but as repositories of social knowledge and adaptive design. It means treating local expertise not as a liability to be corrected but as a foundation upon which a more grounded modernity can stand. Above all, it requires asking a deceptively simple question with radical implications—who is the city for?

A truly modern city is not the one that looks most legible to outsiders. It is the one that reflects the aspirations, memories, and agency of the people whose lives will unfold within it. Anything less is just a new map drawn with old hierarchies.

Edited by Liam Murphy.

Featured Image: “Housing Protest – Cape Town High Court – 2012 – 13” by Pierre F. Lombard is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0