Precolonial Towns of Southern Africa

Abstract

As South Africa underwent a period of fundamental change in the early 1990s, staff at the University of the Witwatersrand sought to make the planning curriculum relevant to the changing needs of the profession. One component that had been neglected was the study of precolonial towns in Southern Africa. Urban morphology, with its emphasis on how and why settlements took the shapes they did, provided a useful tool in the analysis of precolonial towns. Initial attempts by the staff to integrate selected parts of the syllabi of urban morphology and planning history are documented, illustrating how the links were reinforced through student project work.