“Above All, Look at Your Own Reality!”: Patsy Healey and the Future of Planning African Cities

This commentary revisits Patsy Healey’s institutionalist approach to planning, distilling three lessons relevant to planning in African cities. These include examining structure-agency relations that redefine the public realm of planning, understanding process outcomes as human agency interacts with institutional structures, and establishing evaluation criteria for governance structures that support (or subvert) desired processes and outcomes. The insights illuminate the realities of planning in African contexts marked by multi-scalar sites of consensus, tensions, alliances, and asymmetric power relations. Further exploration is needed to understand how planners and communities exercise their agency to shape these structures and to what end.