Explaining Urban Order

This article connects the political incentives of state leaders to the physical geometry of urban built environments. Drawing on a novel combination of street network data, archival maps, and satellite imagery, the author builds on classic claims that autocratic regimes order urban space, rendering society more legible through the production of gridded streets. Backdating the construction of 1.5 million streets across a sample of African cities, the author shows that ordered, gridded urban neighborhoods emerge more often under relatively more autocratic postcolonial regimes than under less autocratic regimes. But rather than a conscious effort to increase society’s legibility, evidence on mechanisms is more consistent with ordered urban designs emerging as a side-effect of patronage strategies that autocrats use to placate critical subsets of the urban population. Ultimately, efforts to intervene in the built environment represent an underexplored element of both autocratic and urban politics in the developing world

Urban and Rural Development Challenges

• Characterising Active Mobility in Urban Areas Through Street Network Indices

  Open Access•Juan Pablo Duque Ordoñez, Maria Antonia Brovelli•ISPRS International Journal of…•2025

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• Political change in African cities

  Open Access•Kristian Hoelscher, Taibat Lawanson et al.•World Development•2026

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