African Design Magazine November 2015 | Page 88

Book Review BOOK Africa Drawn: One Hundred Cities Africa is certainly not only a continent of small villages in the jungle and savannah. The urbanisation of the continent is advancing rapidly, while African cities and metropolitan regions are among the fastest growing in the world. Africa Drawn presents one hundred of the most connected and important cities of the continent. The approach of this book is an effort to map the urban form and structure of African cities, and to describe and illustrate how these different places were formed. Therefore, it presents the historic character of African locations as a valuable resource for imagining the future of the continent’s cities. A visual feast of 300 images and masterfully drawn plans illustrate contemporary and historical place-making actions in Africa. The result is a fascinating documentation of African urban space and at the same time a convincing analysis of its structure and morphology. The drawings are accompanied by introductory texts and, for the first time, render possible a comparison of diversity of u ­ rban form on the continent. AD 88 africandesignmagazine.com AUTHORS: Gary White, Marguerite Pienaar, Bouwer Serfontein HARDCOVER: 224 pages ISBN-10: 3869224231 ISBN-13: 978-3869224237 PUBLISHERS: DOM Publishers RELEASED: September 1, 2015 CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE