R&B Artist Akon Plans for $6 Billion City Built From Scratch in Senegal

"The twisting metallic skyscrapers planned for Akon City look like they could sprout on Mars in the distant future — blueprints that scream: Bring your hoverboard," according to an article by Danielle Paquette. 

Akon City is the brainchild of Akon, an R&B singer "who split his youth between this West African country and New Jersey" and is now moving forward with an expensive and ambitious project to build a testbed for "smart city" technology, urban design and planning that centers the African experience, and more. 

“I want the buildings to look like real African sculptures that they make in the villages,” Akon, 47, told a masked crowd Monday in the seaside capital, Dakar.

The project's website includes a section on the master planning and physical planning principles informing the planning and design process. "Futuristic design begins with an informed understanding of the past," reads the site.

Senegal officials are hoping that Akon City's location on the Atlantic Coast of Africa will drive new levels of tourism to a country hit hard by the economic downturn of the coronavirus pandemic. 

"Tourism was hit especially hard in the country of nearly 16 million, which strives to leverage its glittering Atlantic shorelines. A four-month airport closure — followed by border restrictions that now allow mostly citizens and residents to enter — has cast adrift many workers here, whose average wages are about $189 a month," according to Paquette. 

The article also includes early assessments of the design proposals, coinciding with a big media event, with Akon in the country to lay the first stone for the project on land donated by the Senegalese government for the project.