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Sustainable Cities
But re-theorising planning is unlikely to have sufficient
impact on the impending urban crisis in Africa: other
initiatives are necessary. Given the paucity of urban and
policy research on the continent, Professor Watson formed
part of the cross-faculty team that collaborated to establish
the African Centre for Cities in 2007. The Centre has
flourished and in 2013 will take the significant step of
co-ordinating a meeting of the 16 most prominent urban-
research centres on the continent, together with major
donors, to collaboratively shape an urban research agenda
for Africa.
A longer-term strategy has been to shift the nature of
planning education at universities on the continent,
given that many curricula are still strongly shaped
by post-World War British planning ideas. Hence
planning professionals are being produced who have
little understanding of the real challenges of African
urbanisation and are equipped only with planning
ideas from a very different time and place. The ACC-
hosted Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS)
has grown significantly, and this network of 50 urban
planning schools is now a recognised influence on
planning education and practice in Africa, and has
generated significant educational research amongst its
members.
One reason why it is hard to shift planning curricula is
that national planning laws in many African countries
were inherited from British (and French) colonial
administrations and persist to the present day. This
binds planning schools to producing planners trained
to operate these outdated legal systems, but the
planning laws themselves are also unable to recognise
or respond to the current drivers of African urban
change. It has therefore been necessary to initiate a
research project aimed at revealing the weaknesses of
this legislation across the continent and developing
both processes and outcomes to bring about planning-
law reform