Given the diverse nature of cities in the African continent, the reading of urbanity in Africa is particularly complex. Although urban formation and development is extremely varied and differentiated from city to city, common challenges which include the provision of services, land ownership, and citizenship feature heavily in today’s African urban landscapes. The architectural fabric at the urban level directly engages regional systems, settlement patterns, and social forms, and practitioners today are challenged with approaching and addressing a multitude of critical issues in their respective context. Eschewing the prototypical and often destructive top-down approach to addressing these challenges, a number of the most prominent efforts in recent years have sought to cultivate new models of development by utilizing processes of social inclusion and participatory planning. This panel seeks to highlight contemporary shifts in the discourse on development and to establish some provocations about the critical pieces of missing infrastructure that could improve the operational and visual coherence/organization/synthesis of urban centers in Africa.