Globalizing Senegal’s Grid-Plan Legacies in Light of Islamic Studies, World History and Urban Studies

This chapter examines the history of the grid-plan in the urban planning traditions of Senegal. The authors, an urban historian and an urban geographer, have approached the issue from a variety of methodological and conceptual angles not normally brought together in a single study. The question of historic urban design practices in Senegal requires synergy between a number of disciplines: African studies, Islamic studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, human geography, urban planning, urban history and art history. The chapter opens with a short overview of the place of sub-Saharan Africa and its urban traditions in the fields of Islamic Studies, World History, and Urban Studies. In particular, we review the current literature on grid planning and its conceptual and geographical scopes, bearing in mind sub-Saharan Africa’s traditions of settlement design. In this interdisciplinary historiography, Africa generally falls short of perceived norms. It appears to lack an urban past, an urban settlement-design culture, and particularly, an indigenous practice of grid-planning. It is against this background that indigenous grid-planned settlements in Senegal are analyzed. We tie historical developments to more recent colonial and post-colonial gridded configurations. We shall demonstrate that the urban grid-plan emerged independently in Senegal, before European colonization, and continued to be practiced alongside the various colonial-era grid-planned urban projects. We shift the discussion from one of morphological essentialism regarding the genealogy of the grid (e.g. contrasting an “indigenous grid” to an exogenous “French grid”) to a more entangled approach, one that reflects hybrid present-day spatialities. Employing rich and variegated methodology, sources, and recent fieldwork, we investigate a number of Senegalese urban centers of past or contemporary importantance. We hope that the chapter will contribute to the mainstreaming of Afrtica’s urban traditions within the global urbanization meta-narrative. In this way, another African thread can be woven into the fabric of Global Urban Studies, creating a more inclusive and cosmopolitan tapestry.