Eight urban strategic plans across Santiago Island, Cabo Verde — commissioned by the World Bank to provide the planning framework for sustainable urban development across Cabo Verde’s most populous island.
The Challenge
Santiago island, home to more than half of Cabo Verde’s total population, was growing faster than its urban infrastructure could accommodate. Informal settlements were expanding without drainage, access roads, or adequate public services. The capital, Praia, was absorbing rural migration at a rate that existing planning frameworks could not manage.
The World Bank identified urban planning as the critical intervention point — not individual buildings, but the framework that governs where and how buildings are permitted to exist.
“The question was not how to design a better building. It was how to design the conditions under which better buildings become possible.”
The brief called for strategic urban plans across all major municipalities of Santiago — documents that would guide land use, infrastructure investment, and community development for the next 20 years. CFA was commissioned to deliver eight plans covering the full island.
The Approach
CFA’s approach began not with the drawing board but with the ground — systematic site analysis across all five municipalities, community engagement sessions with residents and local government, and a typological study of how Santiago’s informal settlements had grown and what they preserved that formal planning had failed to provide.
What Made This Complex
Urban planning in an island state presents specific challenges that mainland practice does not prepare for. Every material decision carries a shipping cost. Every infrastructure specification must account for isolation — if a mechanism fails, there may be no specialist on the island to repair it.
More critically: Santiago’s informal settlements were not simply unplanned growth. They encoded social structures, economic networks, and community relationships that formal planning had consistently failed to honor.
“The most dangerous planning assumption is that informality is the problem. Informality is often the community’s solution to a problem that formal systems created.”
CFA’s plans were designed to integrate informal settlements into formal frameworks — not displace them. Where streets were rationalized, the social fabric that ran along those streets was mapped and preserved within the new structure.
Outcomes
The Santiago Strategic Plans are the active planning framework for urban development across Cabo Verde’s largest island — guiding infrastructure investment, land use decisions, and community development for a population of over 300,000 residents.
Year 2 assessment was completed in 2024. All eight plans remain active and are being used by municipal planning departments as the primary reference for urban development decisions.
What it Means for Institutional Clients
For development finance organizations commissioning urban work in island and coastal states: CFA brings 30 years of practice in Cabo Verde’s specific context — archipelago logistics, tropical climate design, community engagement in Portuguese-speaking West Africa, and direct experience navigating World Bank procurement frameworks.
