Rural networks and planned communities: Doxiadis Associates’ plans for rural settlements in post-independence Zambia: Fid-Bau Portal

Rural networks and planned communities: Doxiadis Associates’ plans for rural settlements in post-independence Zambia

Phokaides, Petros

The paper focusses on the planning of rural settlements by the Athens-based firm Doxiadis Associates (DA), a key, even if unrealised, project for Zambia's nation-building and development efforts in the mid-1960s. In line with post-war discourses of modernisation, DA employed Christaller's 1933-Central Place Theory and its abstract hexagonal geometrical model to organise different-sized settlements within a single spatial system. By introducing a hierarchical rural network over Zambia, the firm aimed to standardise rural settlement patterns and to formulate a strategy to alleviate rural-urban migration. DA's top-down, large-scale approach even exceeded the State's aspirations and the firm's visions eventually faced two challenges: First, DA's modernist planning was questioned by the social/ecological considerations as formulated by George Kay's counterproposal on resettlement policy. Secondly, DA's ‘urbanising’ visions for rural areas were forestalled by some of the country's realities, which remained out of the planners’ field of control, and eventually called for more cautious responses to the realities on the ground. By exposing the challenges DA's rural proposal faced, the paper ultimately contemplates the multiple, and even conflicting reactions towards Zambia's rural settlement projects, and also adds nuances to the wider histories of rural development in Africa.