Metropolitan Cartography: A Novel Approach for Assessing How New Morpho-Types Solutions Impact the Circular City Agenda. The Ouagadougou Case Study

Global South cities are reclaiming a new metropolitan cultural framework and a structural matrix that binds different urban morpho-types to improve its economic and spatial dynamics. Today, new and old ways to use local resources are scaled in time among practices that exist since the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial phases. To align the theoretical and conceptual grounds of the circular economy with sustainable urban development principles in the Global South, the potential benefits associated with non-planned or low-income settlements in promoting circular and sustainable cities should be investigated by recognising the infrastructure connections between planned (loti) and non-planned (non-loti) settlements. This also means trying to overcome the classic monocentric city model regarding services, functions and economic attractivity to create more accessible and equitable spatial distributions that consider accessibility for all and facilities diffusion as the main values of a balanced urban structure. It is therefore essential to shape an inclusive planning approach to support citizenship by generating knowledge for a collective action based on a new city model’s storytelling through maps. The MSLab’s innovative approach introduces an open-source mapping methodology: Metropolitan Cartography, which relates the geographic ground to spatial structures to manage scarce urban resources. We aim to showcase the effectiveness of an inclusive planning approach that utilises a new city model’s storytelling through open-source maps as a tool. By doing so, we seek to empower metropolitan citizens to generate knowledge for collective action.