The rapid urbanization of sub-Saharan African cities has generated major plans for the planning and design of urban spaces and the construction of housing. With these plans, new demands and opportunities have emerged to better couple such development with principles of urban resilience and sustainable building, often unsuccessfully. At the same time, major public investments in urban development and housing provision are highly needed, and in many sub-Saharan African contexts, ongoing. Against this backdrop, major questions remain around how global-scale environmental issues may be considered with specificity to small-scale and low-budget architectural and urban design choices, and how these considerations may be embedded into tools that allow for appropriate action on the ground. This paper uses case studies of the affordable housing green building guideline development in Kenya and informal settlement upgrading in Rwanda as bases for investigating how architectural and urban design approaches may more directly link design decision-making to their impacts on the Planetary Boundaries and to the Sustainable Development Goals. The study argues that in a time of climate crisis and planetary overshoot, typical building code standards are no longer an adequate approach to development control, and that direct linkages to overarching sustainability frameworks are needed as a means of steering the design and construction industries towards a green shift, particularly in developing countries. More specifically, it identifies that relating design guidelines and regulations to scales of larger influence, rather than categories of building elements, and to processes of production, rather than prescriptive outcomes, may become a method of approaching urban resilience in built environment projects targeted at the bottom of the income pyramid. If operationalized, adoption of similar approaches may contribute to resilience-building benefiting lower-income residents in the urban development of sub-Saharan Africa.