Rome has a long history of using speculative urbanization endeavors in pursuit of empire, exporting its formats of settlement, infrastructure, and governance as instruments of economic production and political influence. With this in mind, I propose to explore the implications of increasing contemporary foreign incursions of urbanization activities into the African continent, reflecting on the appearance of “African New Towns” as a new kind of soft empire building. Though this geography is certainly in urgent need of infrastructural and urbanistic upgrades, the promiscuous replication of exogenous models of city building in this context demands critical assessment. However, rather than undertaking this work as a purely text-based research endeavor, my interest is in engaging the volatility of these pursuits through the development of a robust body of visual design scholarship that will hypothesize on, and experiment with alternative land use, planning, infrastructure, and building logics as hedges against this new speculative settlement.