The Prototype City: Or How the Countries of the South are Reinventing Urbanism

As the Habitat III international conference to be held at Quito in October 2016 is in preparation (following the conferences of Vancouver in 1976 and Istanbul in 1996, it will lay down the United Nations road map for urban development over the next twenty years), one thing is clear: solutions for the city of tomorrow are no longer to be sought solely from among the developed countries, but increasingly from the cities of the South. Those cities, with populations that are increasing rapidly and should continue to do so in the coming decades, are offering a new approach to urbanism: namely prototype urbanism, an approach that is less theoretical and more experimental. Morgan Poulizac outlines its mechanisms for us here (responding –often urgently– to the social demand with the means that happen to be to hand) and provides various examples from the African, Asian and South American continents.