Our joint statement suggests three main avenues of effort for the scientific and technological community in supporting human needs, maintaining the environment, and moving toward sustainable human consumption patterns. I want to speak on the second of these-the need to actively generate new knowledge. To do so, we need to change science itself, to go beyond what we already know and expand the world's capacity system for discovering new things.

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Rapid urbanization has been perhaps the most dramatic of the social phenomena that marked the end of the colonial era in Africa. From a situation in 1950 in which the total urban population was no more than 28 million, the figure had by 1984 jumped to well over 125 million, representing a sharply increasing proportion of the total population (World Bank, 1986a). Yet, after an initial period when urbanization was welcomed as a positive tendency in the modernization of the continent (Friedmann, 1961) there is today some ambivalence as to the contributions of urban centers to the overall development of the continent. There are those (Santos, 1971; Bardinet, 1977) who argue that urban centers have failed to serve as a major force in the economic transformation of African countries but have, instead, highlighted their economic dependency and the negative social consequences that go with this. Others (Collier and Lai, 1980; Mabogunje, 1983) argue that much of the limited development that has been achieved in these countries has been due in no small measure to non-farm activities of these urban centers. Cities and towns are therefore apprehended not as the cause but only as the scene of social and economic problems, their role being to draw attention to endemic poverty and social degradation which otherwise remain buried and unobtrusive in the rural areas. When it comes to the role of urban planning and policies in resolving these problems, the pervading impression is of the failure of governments in most African countries to make any appreciable impact on the situation, a fact which has in turn provoked serious debates as to the nature of the post-colonial state in Africa (Hyden, 1983).

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review.RECENT years there has been a growing awareness, particularly in sociological writings, of the special characteristics of urbanization in underdeveloped countries. A certain amount has been written by geographers on African towns, but works in English on the important clusters in West Africa are few.' In this part of the continent the beginning of urbanization predated both the contact with Europe and industrialization. Many of the pre-European and preindustrial towns today form the nuclei around which most of the elements of modern Western urbanization are being established. This is true of Ibadan, the largest city in tropical Africa and the capital of the Western Region of Nigeria.Though it has a population today of some six hundred thousand, lbadan dates only from about 1821. It was founded as a war encampment during the intertribal wars of the nineteenth century and grew into importance because of its military strength. From the start it attracted a large number of "war boys," free-lance soldiers who found the free-booty life of the period much to their liking. To provide for their military and domestic needs, artisans, traders, and slaves were drawn into the town. Even after the British brought this era to an end about 1893, Ibadan continued to attract a large population. This paper sets out to consider, first, the growth of the town; second, the development of residential districts; and last, the resulting pattern of residential regions. THE GROWTH OF IBADANThe growth of lbadan can be understood only in relation to its location within the Yoruba country and to the history of human movemeents within this area during the nineteenth century. The Yoruba country occupies the southwestern part of the new state of Nigeria. As a people, the Yoruba are noted for their propensity for settling in large towns; six of their towns today have populations of more than one hundred thousand. From the late eighteenth century almost to the end of the nineteenth the northern half of the ' See, however, two papers by Derwent Whittlesey: "Kano: RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS IN IBADAN 57Yoruba country was invaded by the Fulani, whose military power was based on cavalry. The grassland vegetation of these areas gave the Fulani and their horses easy access. Many towns, some of them large even by present-day standards, were destroyed or deserted. The most notable was Old Oyo, the capital of the Yoruba kingdom, whose name was given to the new settlement (the present Oyo) founded by refugees from it about sixty miles farther south.2 The population of these northern Yoruba towns consequently m...

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