Why it looks like this

The city exists because of the Copperbelt: Belgian colonial interests founded Élisabethville in 1910 next to the Étoile mine and the railway from South Africa, laying out a formal grid of avenues for the European town — with African workers' townships set apart, in the standard colonial split.

A century of smelting built the city's strangest monument: the terril, a vast black slag hill beside the centre, visible from everywhere. Lubumbashi remains DR Congo's mining capital, its street network still radiating from mine, railway and grid.