Tarik Oualalou on the Urban Planning of the Future

Currently, the world is home to around 3.5 billion city-dwellers. Over the next 20 years, this number will increase by yet another three billion people – half of them in Africa. What will this mean for urban planning? We discuss this question on our podcast with Tarik Oualalou of the Moroccan-French architecture studio Oualalou + Choi. In a recent essay, Oualalou argues that Africa must reinvent her cities, and that people there must relearn the nomadic lifestyle. “Africa today is effectively a testing ground for the rest of humanity”, he states. “It is the last continent to be caught up in the global wave of urbanization. In this respect, it is also our last chance to meet this challenge better than in other parts of the world.” In response to the question whether we will be equal to the task, Oualalou is optimistic: “We are experiencing a moment of decolonization, in which people are less and less willing to blindly adopt models of the Global North, but are instead working on viable local solutions.”

© Oualalou + Choi

Tarik Oualalou is a founding partner of architecture firm Oualalou + Choi in Paris and Casablanca. A native of the Moroccan capital of Rabat, he studied ­architecture and civil engineering in Paris, worked for architecture firms in the USA, and has taught at universities in the USA, France, and Morocco for around 20 years.

Read the full interview with Tarik Oualalou in Detail 3.2022 and in our databank Detail Inspiration.