Appraising Appropriate Urban Design Models in Developing Countries: An Integrated Builtscape Approach and the Case of Secondary Cities in Ghana

Abstract

Urban design is increasingly becoming important in urban regeneration, development and beautification transformations in the global South, as it has been in the North. However, while urban design is an established and explicit part of the planning systems in the latter, it is far less so in the former. And a real difficulty is the tendency to apply urban design models developed in the global North in the South. While this is an inertia of colonial urbanisation and Westernism, generally, these approaches tend not to be appropriate, en masse, in the context of developing countries. This study, therefore, aimed to explore and appraise an appropriate urban design model by reviewing selected existing ones and proposing an approach considered more relevant to the built environment in a developing country like Ghana: the Integrated Builtscape model. And this was applied to appraise the impact of urban regeneration and development programmes on urban design in the two secondary cities of Cape Coast and Elmina in Ghana. Results of the routscaping, buildscaping, plantscaping, formscaping, varietyscaping, personalisascaping and legibilityscaping modeled demonstrated a basis for making relevant and respective recommendations for improving urban design, within the planning system, in Ghana and the global South generally.

Keywords: Urban design approaches, Integrated Builtscape design model, urban regeneration and development, beautification, urban policy and planning, development control, secondary cities

DOI: 10.7176/DCS/14-1-04

Publication date: January 31^st 2024