Assignment, Week 6

1. Continue to rectify the African city plans assigned to you (2­–3 cities). Provide screenshots of these rectified maps on your blog.
2. Select two of the additional cities you have rectified and compare them with your city from the vantage of spatial differences. Illustrate your findings with screen shots and other images.

The map-rectifying is going well. Predictably, my plans for high break-time productivity largely collapsed, but I did find myself with some free time last night to work on maps. I have now completed five out of my twelve: four of Douala, Cameroon, and one of Yaoundé, Cameroon. Screenshots below:

The southwest corner of Douala, closest to the harbor, was presumably the colonial “European” sector; it now has the majority of the city’s infrastructure, including government ministries, hospitals and embassies. See the interactive map here.

Moving east, there are still well-planned blocks, but few place-markers other than “École,” suggesting a colonial-era, now upper-class, residential area. Rectifying this map was made more difficult—and more useful—by the presence of no fewer than seven clouds obscuring the satellite image. See the interactive map here.

To the north of the previous map is also a large residential area, but a different color—literally. I don’t have a legend, but it seems as though the mapmakers drew any colonial or European-style buildings in red and everything else in gray, which is consistent with the color of the planned neighborhoods in the other maps and the much more chaotic ones here. Note that a marketplace, a couple of missions, a police station and a railway stockyard on this map are also red. See the interactive map here.

This northern part of the city looks like a commercial area, judging from the mixture of red and gray buildings. There are also large areas of undeveloped land, maybe parks or golf courses. See the interactive map here.

This is a map of central Cameroon, including the city of Yaoundé (center-left). It was a breeze to rectify, since it had latitude and longitude markers; they were not precisely accurate, but enough so that I didn’t think it worth it to refine any more. Yaoundé, from what I can see, has undergone unchecked sprawl in a large part dictated by the topography of the region (hills and plateaus and such); in this way it reminds me of Kigali. (See the white billowiness behind the map there? Well, it must have been overcast in Yaoundé that day.) See the interactive map here.

Douala is known for its sprawling, underdeveloped slums; most of them are not shown in the four maps I rectified, and there are probably a lot more of them now than there were when those maps were drawn in 1963. In this way, it shows a similar contrast between the decaying neatness and spaciousness of the former European city and the expanses of ramshackle slums to what is seen in Bangui. It is not quite on the same magnitude, though: Douala’s worst squatter-like slums are far away from the city center, and the remnants of its European city are fairly large; in Bangui, the European city was very small, and the completely unplanned settlements start just outside the city center. This is probably related to Douala’s longtime importance as a port city, as opposed to Bangui’s obscurity due to its remoteness. Additionally, Douala is simply larger: its population is well over 2 million, whereas Bangui’s is ambiguously at about 700,000. Interestingly, similar proportions of their respective countries live in them: 10.7% of Cameroonians live in Douala, and 12% of Central Africans live in Bangui (source).

Another unusual parallel between Douala and Bangui relates to their shared location on rivers—Douala at the mouth of the Wouri River, and Bangui a good distance up the Ubangi. One of the first things I notice about the first map of Douala I rectified is that the coastline that existed in 1963 is vastly different from the one shown by the recent satellite image. This could either be the result of landfilling or sedimentation, and possibly a mixture of the two, but there is simply a lot more land—and developed land!—in Douala now than there was 40 years ago.

The 1963 roadmap overlaid onto very recent Google satellite imagery: notice that, though the streets match up perfectly, the coastlines are completely different. See the interactive map here.

This happens in Bangui too—though on a smaller scale, and I’m fairly certain that it is all sedimentation (curve in the river and all that) and no landfilling. I mainly just notice that the same islands in the Ubangi river are shown as different sizes on every new map I try to rectify. The map-warper hates me for it.

It’s hard to compare Yaoundé with Bangui with so little detail on the map I rectified. The main thing that I notice is that Yaoundé’s expansion, as I noted in the above caption, seems to be much more determined by topographical variation than Bangui’s; it is true that Bangui’s sprawl is limited by the river to the south and a hill to the east, but other than that it has essentially radiated out evenly in all directions. Yaoundé, on the other hand, is not built on a body of water and has expanded in all directions—but to varying extents, apparently contingent upon the prevalence of hills and plateaus.