Re-imagining African university towns: urban visions and anchor strategies for post-Covid African transitions

Abstract

In his 2016 article, Reimagining the city from the internet up, Dan Doctoroff argued that cities and towns that are based on the internet and the fourth industrial revolution could potentially look very different from the cities created by modernist planners in the second and third industrial revolutions of the 20th century. With his colleagues at the Sidewalk Labs innovation project in New York he argued that the fundamental shape of the city will need to change to accommodate the internet, accelerating processes of innovation and producing new urban forms. Cities, he argued, will need to become quite different places for society to realise the full benefits of digitalisation and the power of the internet. Doctoroff (2016) believed that a new situation had emerged similar to that at the turn of the 20th century when the Victorian industrial city was no longer tenable and had to be redesigned to eradicate slums; incorporate new innovations; address urban growth; and reduce poverty, disease and human degradation.