Cities and resilience are concepts which were present and informed urban life in Zimbabwe well before colonial rule. However, many of the urban centres we identify today were established as a result of the European project to control African land and population. In particular, the construction of railway infrastructure was imagined in parallel with the foundation of company towns, as means to facilitate the extraction of local goods. The morphological scars in the structure of land tenure and urban form left behind by those infrastructural projects are a clear manifestation of a divisive, racist, and unjust process.