Building and Developing Western-Style Cities: The Influence of European Architecture and Urban Planning in Senegambia 1659–1854

Abstract In the fifteenth century, Portuguese economic migrants frequented the African coasts to trade in gold and captives. From the seventeenth century onwards, African trade attracted other French, English, and Dutch migrants, who, individually or grouped together in trading companies, settled on African coasts as part of a global trading economy based on the circulation of goods, ideas, knowledge, know-how, and techniques. These exchanges fostered a cultural and racial melting pot in the trading cities of Gorée and Saint-Louis. Indeed, the union between Europeans and the women of Senegambia fostered the birth of a new Afro-European social class that served as an intermediary for commercial activities and technological dialogue. In the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to their wealth from the slave economy, Afro-Europeans contributed to the urban transformation of the towns of Gorée and Saint-Louis, replicating Provençal houses built using European and local techniques and materials. Following the prohibition of the slave trade by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the royal French administration embarked on a slow process of urban transformation in Saint-Louis, the first French city in West Africa, attempting to construct public and military buildings and impose a European-style urban planning.