Africa's Urban Revolution - Introduction chapter

Africa’s Urban Revolution edited by Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse Zed Books london | new york Africa’s Urban Revolution was irst published in 2014 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fith Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa www.zedbooks.co.uk Editorial copyright © Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse 2014 Copyright in this collection © Zed Books 2014 The rights of Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse to be identiied as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Set in OurType Arnhem, Monotype Gill Sans Heavy by Ewan Smith, London Index: [email protected] Cover designed by Rawshock Design Printed and bound by Distributed in the usa exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, llc, 175 Fith Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa All rights reserved. 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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available isbn 978 1 78032 521 7 hb isbn 978 1 78032 520 0 pb Contents Figures, tables and box | vii Acknowledgements | ix 1 Africa’s urban revolution in context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Edgar Pieterse and Susan Parnell 2 Conlict and post-war transition in African cities . . . . . . . . . . 18 Jo Beall and Tom Goodfellow 3 Sub-Saharan African urbanisation and global environmental change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Susan Parnell and Ruwani Walawege 4 Linking urbanisation and development in Africa’s economic revival. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Ivan Turok 5 Religion and social life in African cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Carole Rakodi 6 Feeding African cities: the growing challenge of urban food insecurity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Jonathan Crush and Bruce Frayne 7 Transport pressures in urban Africa: practices, policies, perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Gordon Pirie 8 Decentralisation and institutional reconiguration in urban Africa . . 148 Warren Smit and Edgar Pieterse 9 The challenge of urban planning law reform in African cities . . . . 167 Stephen Berrisford 10 The education and research imperatives of urban planning professionals in Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 James Duminy, Nancy Odendaal and Vanessa Watson 11 Filling the void: an agenda for tackling African urbanisation . . . . 200 Edgar Pieterse 12 Infrastructure, real economies and social transformation: assembling the components for regional urban development in Africa . . . . . 221 AbdouMaliq Simone 13 National urbanisation and urban strategies: necessary but absent policy instruments in Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Susan Parnell and David Simon 14 Urbanisation as a global historical process: theory and evidence from sub-Saharan Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Sean Fox Postscript: Building new knowledge and networks to foster sustainable urban development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Thomas Melin About the contributors | 294 Index | 299 vi Figures, tables and box Figures 1.1a Roman Catholic Cathedral at Kampala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1b Dar es Salaam port . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1c ‘Nairobi, metropolis of East Africa’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1d Bari village . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Africa’s largest urban centres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Africa’s rural and urban population, 1950–2050. . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Percentage of the population that is urban by geographic area, 1950–2050 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Percentage of people with access to selected basic services . . . . . 1.6 Africa’s demographic structure by age cohort, 2000–50 . . . . . . . 3.1 Urban transition in major world regions, 1950–2050 . . . . . . . . 3.2 Comparative rates of urbanisation, 1950–2050 . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Comparative migration patterns in selected African countries . . . . 6.1 Urban and rural population in sub-Saharan Africa, 1960–2050 . . . . 6.2 Seasonal variations in urban food insecurity. . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Months of adequate food provisioning by food security status . . . . 6.4 Household income terciles by food security status . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Food security status and sources of food . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Dimensions of sustainable urban development . . . . . . . . . . 11.1 Developmental links at the micro scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 Policy and institutional dimensions of the sustainable city . . . . . 13.1 Distribution of urban population by city size in sub-Saharan Africa . 14.1 World population and urbanisation, AD 1000–2000 . . . . . . . . . 14.2 Historical theory of urbanisation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.3 Levels of urbanisation by major world regions: estimates and projections, 1850–2050 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.4 Capital investment in the colonial period and total urban population in 20 sub-Saharan African territories, 1950 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.5 Urban population growth (millions) and surplus food supply in subSaharan Africa, 1961–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.6 A case of de-urbanisation: food supply, mortality and the urban percentage of the population in Zambia, 1965–2000. . . . . . . . . .o .o .o .o .o .o .o .o .o .o .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0 Tables 1.1 Percentage of urban dwellers living in slums in three developing regions, 2005. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 vii 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 8.1 11.1 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 A.1 A.2 Future trends for GEC in Africa by climate variable . . . . . . . . . . 0 Future trends for GEC in Africa by sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Explanations for migration in sub-Saharan Africa that might be ampliied or muted by GEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Indicators of employment growth for selected African countries . . . . 0 Estimates of agglomeration economies in the North . . . . . . . . . 0 Projected urbanisation in Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, 1990–2030 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Sample population for the AFSUN Urban Food Security Baseline Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Extent of urban food insecurity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Levels of food insecurity by city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Dietary diversity scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Major sources of food for poor urban households . . . . . . . . . . 0 Urban agriculture and informal food transfer . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Functions of urban local government bodies in selected African countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Overall infrastructure spending needs for sub-Saharan Africa . . . . . 0 Summary of the diferent imperatives deining national urbanisation and urban strategies in late twentieth and early twenty-irst century Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Typology of national urbanisation strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Levels of African urbanisation, 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Trends in African urbanisation in a global context, 1950–2050 . . . . . 0 Typology of South African settlements, 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Demographic and economic trends in less developed regions, 1960–2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Efect of geographic characteristics on the percentage of the population that is urban and the urban population size, based on a sample of 126 countries, 1960 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Demographic and economic trends in Africa, 1960–2005 . . . . . . . 0 Determinants of urbanisation and urban growth rates, 1960–75, 1975–90 and 1990–2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Determinants of changes in relative and absolute size of urban populations, 1960–2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 The colonial origins of variations in mortality, food security and early urbanisation trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Data sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 Box 13.1 Seven arguments for a national urban strategy to complement and reinforce essential action at the local scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 viii Acknowledgements This volume is the culmination of a series of dialogues and research exchanges that the African Centre for Cities (ACC) has facilitated since its founding at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2008. With the establishment of ACC we were determined to create Africa-wide platforms that would allow scholars, practitioners, policy managers and activists to convene on a regular basis to interrogate the urban development problematique, in order to foster an endogenous reading of ‘the urban’ that was both theoretically robust and connected to ields of practice. The irst of these was the African Urban Innovations Workshop that we convened in Cape Town on 1–5 September 2008. It was a fascinating week of exchange and deep learning that was made possible through funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. The synthesis of this workshop is captured in Chapter 11 of this volume, but at the time it formed the basis for an African input into the World Urban Forum in Nanjing, China. Since then, ACC has convened various sessions focusing on urban development policy imperatives in Africa at every World Urban Forum gathering, slowly but surely seeding many of the perspectives collected in this volume. The Innovations Workshop put ACC in a good position to host the launch of the African chapter of the Sustainable Urban Development Network (SUD-Net), an initiative of UN-HABITAT aimed at nurturing a network of actors and existing networks to promote a multilateral and interdisciplinary approach to sustainable urban development. The launch happened in February 2009 and was supported by UN-HABITAT and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). In fact, this volume is in print in large measure due to SIDA’s commitment to promote critical, independent scholarship on the policy implications of African urban transition. Their support is deeply appreciated. Inevitably, the intellectual currents that emerged from these processes drew on and infected numerous other of ACC’s continental initiatives, such as the Association of African Planning Schools, the State of African Cities programme, and the African Food Security Urban Network. Some of the chapters in this volume explicitly relect this crosspollination. Also included are two articles originally published in Global Environmental Change and Population and Development Review. Thanks ix to Elsevier and Wiley for permission to republish. An extended version of Chapter 8 appeared in Urbanisation and Socio-economic Development in Africa: Challenges and opportunities, edited by Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa, Abebe Shimeles and Nadège Désirée Yaméogo (Routledge, 2013). We are grateful to all our colleagues in ACC, our associates and friends and the various networks that we anchor for the intellectual generosity that has been important for the credibility of this volume. Thanks to Ken Barlow, Judith Forshaw, Ewan Smith and the rest of the Zed team, who are an absolute pleasure to work with. The most important person responsible for the realisation of this volume is our highly valued research assistant, Saskia Greyling. She always goes well beyond the call of duty to get things done and her ingerprints are all over this book. In fact, we dedicate this volume to the new crop of African urban scholars and students who are happy to explore a world beyond binaries and certainty and who are conscious of the imperative of being ethically grounded. We hope that our contribution to the ceaseless work of meaning making will aid their journey and bring much needed new insights into the world. Finally, we need to acknowledge the generous and consistent support of SIDA, the Rockefeller Foundation, Mistra Urban Futures, the National Research Foundation, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, UCT Signature Theme and the African Centre on this journey. Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse Cape Town, July 2013 x 1 | Africa’s urban revolution in context Edgar Pieterse and Susan Parnell ‘Revolution: … any fundamental change or reversal of conditions’ (The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 9th edition, 1995) Africa’s dramatic demographic transition is a profoundly spatial story. Not only will the continent give birth to thousands of new towns and cities as it crosses the ‘magical’ 50 per cent urban threshold shortly ater 2030 (UN DESA 2011), the absolute growth of population and the increasing concentration of Africa’s people in cities will transform the landscape of the urban hinterlands as demand for building material, food, energy and water escalates. This is not a future transition; the African urban revolution is already irmly under way. The continent is 40 per cent urbanised at present, which means that there are 414 million African urbanites (2011 igures), and Africa already has more city dwellers than Europe, Australasia, North or South America. Only Asia has more people living in cities. The overarching argument of this book is that Africa’s urban transition, which manifests across sectors as diverse as transport, education and religion, is not aforded the serious attention that it needs or deserves. Impacts from the rise of an urban Africa are formative locally, but will reverberate globally (see Chapter 11). Our main concern is to sharpen the awareness of world policy makers (from those in local government to the global institutions that wield power at the city scale), but we are hopeful that scholars, civil society activists and business leaders will also ind value in the chapters and that collectively we can debate competing visions to ensure a positive outcome for Africa’s inevitable urban revolution. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to set the scene for the chapters that follow by presenting trend data on the speed, scope and dynamics of the urban transition. Of course, the revolution that is occurring is not just about numbers; it is also about Africa’s urban leadership, institutions and technical domains, such as design, technology and inance. Mindful of the importance of the general lack of capacity to manage the rupture that is taking place all across Africa because of the shit to cities and the absolute growth in population (UNCHS 1996; Stren and White 1989), we look back over the postcolonial era to identify the historical forces framing the policy context for Africa’s present and its urban future. We have included a chapter on war and conlict (by Beall and Goodfellow) in the opening section of the book 1 as a sobering reminder that violence, while not necessarily centred on cities or taking place throughout the continent, is disproportionally inluential in shaping the contemporary African landscape. Many of the chapters take as their central concern the persistence of widespread urban poverty; the depth of chronic poverty is another distinguishing feature of African cities compared with those elsewhere in the world. Notwithstanding the very low levels of average income on which urban Africans survive, taken together the chapters present an optimistic outlook on the changes that are likely to be ushered in by the urban revolution and ofer new ways of imagining African urbanism. One word of caution is imperative. The scope of this book is continental, and this scale brings with it problems of generalisation. Africa incorporates over 50 countries, thousands of cities and millions of people. Africa is a vast territory (larger than China, India, the USA or all of Europe), with many different climate zones and a complex web of cultures, religions and languages: there is no one Africa. The African urban revolution cannot be seen through a solitary prism, just as responses to the dilemmas and opportunities raised in the book’s chapters must, of necessity, be numerous. The volume has no coherent or singular argument or position, other than to assert the absolute importance of cities. We are hopeful that we will provoke a realisation of the need to build a larger policy and intellectual project to understand, contest and shape Africa’s urban futures. In this sense, our book stands alongside a companion volume that dwells more on the phenomenological, cultural and aesthetic dimensions of African urbanism (Pieterse and Simone 2013). So what if Africa is urban? Time and numbers do matter. Location matters too. Under conditions of rapid and large-scale change, simple questions such as how many people there are and where exactly they plan to live over their lifespans become critical, especially if you are disbursing scarce resources or making long-term decisions that will ix the infrastructure on which tens of millions of people’s livelihoods and prosperity depend. The purpose of this section is to draw attention to the scale, rate and dynamics of urbanisation in Africa in order to contextualise the policy imperatives faced by those tasked with managing the building and maintenance of African cities, the stimulus of their economies and the protection of the most vulnerable of their residents or natural systems. The bigger picture also puts the struggles of ordinary people, to access food (see Chapter 6) or to ind afordable transport (see Chapter 7) into perspective. In other words, our objective is to get a sense of the nature of the shit in the size of the population and the associated changes in settlement patterns to assess what urban growth and higher levels of urbanisation mean for policy and politics in Africa. Fox’s account (Chapter 14) probes in much greater detail the speciicity of Africa’s path towards urbanisation and the relationship between 2 1 | Pieterse and Parnell 1.1a Roman Catholic Cathedral at Kampala (source: Light 1941, plates 224) urbanisation and industrialisation, where the African record is one that deies traditional expectations. Underlying his account, and indeed the book as a whole, is the question of African urban exceptionalism. Closer scrutiny of particular places and issues will negate a generalisation of the African city, but we would suggest that there are at least some common themes regarding drivers of change on the continent that relate to the time frame and form of the urban revolution in Africa. Africa is at least unusual in that its urban transition has, compared with that of other world regions (except parts of Asia), been delayed. At the point of colonial independence, most of Africa was predominantly rural, with less than one in eight people living in a town (Freund 2007). Not only that, as captured by some of the irst aerial photography of Africa, undertaken by Mary Light and published in a text authored by Richard Upjohn Light in 1941, most urban centres that did exist were either small colonial towns (Figures 1.1a, b and c) or traditional villages (Figure 1.1d). As the post-World War Two population expanded – a result of, among other things, the introduction of antibiotics – three factors transformed Africa’s settlement experience. First, the number of new towns and cities increased; second, at the same time the proportion of people living in cities rather than in the countryside grew; and 3 1.1b Dar es Salaam port (source: Light 1941, plates 149) inally there was a signiicant rise in the number of very large cities, some of which, such as Lagos and greater Kinshasa, are predicted soon to be among the world’s largest metropolitan centres (UNCHS 1996; McKinsey Global Institute 2012). Today, Africa’s 50 largest cities all have populations of over a million people (Figure 1.2), roughly the size of Birmingham in the United Kingdom or Amsterdam, Holland’s largest city. Africa is no longer a continent of villages and towns; it encompasses the full spectrum of scale in urban settlement. 1.1c ‘Nairobi, metropolis of East Africa’ (source: Light 1941, plates 226) 4 1.1d Bari village (source: Light 1941, plates 284) if we consider the numerical scale of urban growth as relected in Figure 1.3. Everybody accepts that the data are problematic. Nevertheless, several scholars are at pains to show that Africa’s rate of natural population growth, which is the highest in the world, is a more signiicant factor in understanding the urban transition than migration from rural areas (see Chapter 3; Potts 2012; McGranahan et al. 2009). This point about the relative importance of natural urban growth and migration, which are both driving Africa’s urban expansion, is signiicant because it reveals why, no matter what governments try to do to keep development and people in rural areas, increasing levels of urbanisation are probably inevitable and must be confronted. 5 1 | Pieterse and Parnell Although the antecedents of Africa’s urban revolution can be traced to the second half of the twentieth century (Simon 1992; O’Conner 1983; Ilife 1995), it is only now that the size and importance of urban Africa are becoming widely apparent. Along with the belated acknowledgement of the increasingly dominant urban reality has come the imperative to radically reconigure professional and policy responses to Africa’s human settlements (see Chapter 10; Parnell et al. 2009; Myers 2011; Pieterse 2008). The last formal cross-national collation of population igures from across the continent is for 2011, over 50 years into the postcolonial era, by which time Africa’s population was already almost 40 per cent urban (Figure 1.3). The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Afairs (UN DESA) forecasts that Africa will be 50 per cent urban by the early 2030s and 60 per cent urban by 2050. What these percentages imply for those managing cities on the ground is more revealing 1.2 Africa’s largest urban centres As a number of the chapters in this book reveal (see especially Chapter 4), in the economic revival of the continent, decades of experience have shown that urbanisation is a central characteristic of Africa’s recent past, and that it has also had largely desirable developmental outcomes. Across this volume, the authors take the position that the anti-urban bias of previous generations, most infamously articulated by Lipton (1977), is outmoded, and that Africa’s future is, opportunely, urban. However, there is also consensus that the rapidity of the urban transition (as shown in Figure 1.3) has put great stress on the ability of Africa’s urban leaders to manage change. The overarching point to be taken from the data in Figure 1.3 is that both urban and rural populations are expanding, but that cities are growing faster. Africa’s urbanisation trend line is most like that of Asia (even though the absolute numbers of people are vastly diferent), but completely diferent to 6 At the world level, the 20th century saw an increase from 220 million urbanites in 1900 to 2.84 billion in 2000. The present century will match this absolute increase in about four decades. Developing regions as a whole will account for 93 per cent of this growth – Asia and Africa for over 80 per cent. 927 Urban 818 Rural 632 1,265 744 197 1950 33 282 1970 87 414 2011 2030 2050 1.3 Africa’s rural and urban population, 1950–2050 (millions) (source: UN DESA 2012) 7 1 | Pieterse and Parnell the pattern in Latin America and most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (see Figure 1.4). This is very important because it ties in with Africa’s unique place in the global economy and how its position impacts on the policy landscape that shapes how ‘the urban’ is perceived and addressed by African policy makers. We return to this point later on. This comparison is also important because it reminds us that Africa and Asia have had to manage their respective urban transitions in vastly diferent conditions to those faced by other world regions when they confronted the rapid expansion of cities and the shit of national population distribution through urbanisation. For instance, Africa must deal with the foundations of urban management, including the supply of basic services and supporting network infrastructure, but it must do this in a manner that ensures a highly eicient urban form and metabolism because of the new imperatives for lowcarbon economies and settlements (UNEP 2012). The iscal arrangements of urban construction have, in the late twentieth and early twenty-irst centuries, also become much more international, removing or reducing the power of local elites over the big infrastructure investments. How Africans manage their urban revolution is not a matter solely of domestic importance. The United Nations Population Fund usefully summarises the longitudinal dynamics that sit behind the global demographic shits illustrated in Figure 1.4 and sets out the wider ramiications where demographic change is taking place: 90 80 Northern America 70 60 Oceania Europe 50 Latin America, Caribbean 40 30 Asia 20 Africa 10 2050 2045 2040 2035 2030 2025 2020 2015 201o 2005 2000 1995 1990 1985 1980 1975 1970 1965 1960 1955 1950 0 1.4 Percentage of the population that is urban by geographic area, 1950–2050 (source: UN DESA 2012) Between 2000 and 2030, Asia’s urban population will increase from 1.36 billion to 2.64 billion, Africa’s from 294 million to 742 million, and that of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) from 394 million to 609 million. As a result of these shits, developing countries will have 80 per cent of the world’s urban population in 2030. By then, Africa and Asia will include almost seven out of every ten urban inhabitants in the world.1 (UNFPA 2007: 7–8) The time frames in which the escalation of the number of people in the world and the shit in their geographical location have taken place are staggering. However, they mask the fact that, once we establish the broad quantum of how many people are classiied as living in urban settlements, we need, immediately, to move down in scale and consider the immense diversity of settlement size and the internal capacity of urban places. Like most other regions in the world, the vast majority of urban Africans live in cities or towns of fewer than 0.5 million people, and will probably continue to do so. It is projected that by 2015, 54 per cent of the urban population will live in settlements with fewer than 0.5 million people; this compares with 9.9 per cent in cities of between 0.5 and 1 million; 26.1 per cent in cities of 1–5 million; 2.4 per cent in cities of 5–10 million; and only 7.5 per cent in cities with 8 9 1 | Pieterse and Parnell more than 10 million people (UN DESA 2012: 282). This distribution of the urban population difers profoundly from the populist image of megacities exploding all over Africa and Asia. The institutional reality, however, is that small cities and towns are not immune from crisis. While large cities in the global South present speciic management challenges precisely because of their scale, the concentration of poverty and the paucity of municipal capacity (UN-HABITAT 2009), few small urban settlements, especially in Africa, have a viable local government or a tax base capable of supporting a more equitable and just pattern of investment (see Chapter 8). Making the requisite iscal and governance reforms to accommodate the new realities of African settlements requires both political will and administrative reform. As Parnell and Simon discuss in Chapter 13, to date African governments have been slow to respond to the urban revolution that is transforming their nations by reprioritising their expenditure and policy focus. Just as important as the size of any one city is the system of cities of which it is a part. African cities have several distinctive features. First, they are integrally connected to rural areas through the practice of circular migration, a strategy for maintaining multiple bases so as to optimise livelihoods and mitigate the risks of settling permanently in economically, environmentally, socially or politically precarious African towns (Potts 2012; Chapter 12). Second, there is the sponge of the urban fringe or peri-urban edge; this is oten a porous settlement boundary which is neither urban nor rural in its character or governance (Gough and Yankson 2000). What is also distinctive in Africa is the phenomenon of urban primacy, which in many African countries is a direct hangover from the colonial era (Myers 2011; O’Conner 1983). Urban primacy refers to the dynamic whereby one large capital city serves as the centre point of the national settlement system and is typically three to four times larger than the second largest city in the country. Maputo in Mozambique is a typical example. This dynamic makes the governance of these large primate cities highly contentious, especially as newer political opposition parties tend to make their biggest inroads in these cities (Resnick 2012; see also Chapters 2 and 13). In other words, primate cities can overshadow other settlements in political importance and centrality, challenging national power and on occasion making governments reticent about embracing urban issues such as land use, planning reform and professional training (see Chapters 9 and 10) or about dealing with speciically urban problems that require complex governance at the city scale, such as transport (see Chapter 7). Another distinctive feature of urban Africa is the predominance of informal modes of urbanisation in terms of both social and economic reproduction. In Chapter 12, Simone gives some indication of the complex adjustments urban slum residents have to embrace in order to navigate the dysfunctionalities imposed on their everyday existence. Rakodi, in Chapter 5, reminds us that nowadays residents rarely depend wholly on the state or on traditional leaders for social assistance or community organisation, since there is a range of faith-based structures acting as critical institutional intermediaries to navigate power in African cities. The problem for residents and their organisations is that it is not always clear with whom they should be interacting in their eforts to improve urban livelihoods, especially of the poor. African cities, more than most others, are characterised by overlapping and even competing systems of power. Learning where power lies in the city can be as challenging as persuading those in power of the need for change. Poverty, informality and the absence of a strong local state with a clear and unchallenged mandate to manage the city are arguably the leitmotifs of African urbanism today. The most telling illustration of this is the extremely high level of ‘slum’ living conditions in Africa, even compared with other regions in the global South. Table 1.1 compares the percentage of urban dwellers living in areas formally designated as slums and breaks down those statistics further to demonstrate the depth of deprivation by showing the number of deiciencies to which slum dwellers are subjected (UN-HABITAT 2008). It should be noted that both the reintroduction of the use of the pejorative word ‘slum’ and its formal deinition are widely contested (Gilbert 2007). Perhaps for this reason, the irst UN-HABITAT State of African Cities report nuanced the rather crude original deinition of a slum by tabulating whether slums are moderately deicient (one or two deiciencies of the ive listed in endnote 2) or severely deicient (three or four deiciencies). Data in Table 1.1 are based on the UN-HABITAT classiication of slum dwellers.2 What is signiicant here is the regional variation, rather than the conceptual or measured integrity of any particular variable. Table 1.1 Percentage of urban dwellers living in slums in three developing regions, 2005 Region Sub-Saharan Africa Latin America and the Caribbean Southern Asia In slums With moderate (1–2) deiciencies With severe (3–4) deiciencies 62 27 43 63 82 95 27 18 5 Source: UN-HABITAT 2008: 90. The manifestations of slum life – severe overcrowding, lack of sanitation, constant threat of bodily harm and abuse, and so on – are linked to the structural poverty and systemic exclusion experienced by a large proportion of the urban population in most African cities, even those that have high average incomes and service standards, such as Accra, Gaborone or Johan10 Electricity network access Sub-Saharan Africa Potable water South Asia East Asia and the Pacific Latin America Sanitation Europe and central Asia Middle East and North Africa Rural access to roads Fixed and mobile access to phones 0 20 40 60 80 100 1.5 Percentage of people with access to selected basic services (source: Ajulu and Motsamai 2008: 3) 11 1 | Pieterse and Parnell nesburg. These depressing conditions are made more intractable because of the extremely high levels of income inequality that exist. Urban inequality in Africa, measured in terms of the Gini coeicient, is already among the highest in the world, rivalling Latin America (Africa Progress Panel 2012). In the larger African economies such as South Africa, income inequality is far more severely skewed, with Gini ratios of over 0.7 for many of the largest cities (UN-HABITAT 2008). The Gini coeicient depends on income data, and so is a notoriously inaccurate measure, especially in Africa where data are not generally robust. But as Crush and Frayne show in Chapter 6 on food security, in Africa, where measures of social protection are all but absent for most urbanites, the amount of money a household can lay its hands on is a key determinant of survival. Food security, they argue, is more than just afordability; it is also the outcome of availability and distribution or access. In African cities, these aspects are precarious, and so millions of urbanites go hungry – one of the most tangible expressions of poverty. It is also surprisingly diicult to secure accurate data about the levels of access to basic services in rural and urban areas in African countries. Most of the data are aggregated at a national level, and service delivery standards are not factored to relect the diferential costs between urban and rural areas (Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2013). Figure 1.5 provides a snapshot of how much Africa lags behind other world regions with regard to basic services. The scale of slum conditions in most African cities and towns can be linked to a variety of factors. Most importantly, it stems from the contradictions in the urban land management system and a general outmoded code of practice for land use control (see Chapter 9). Cities in Africa typically have the worst of two inappropriate regulatory systems. It is not uncommon for there to be areas of the town (oten on the edge) where there are traditional land use controls that were intended for subsistence-based settlements. Overlaying these traditional practices are laws administered by municipalities that date from the colonial era (Mamdani 1996). Modernist legislation and urban standards, a system of urban management that was intended to protect elite colonial interests rather than provide for universal application in postcolonial African cities, continued to serve as a template for urban planning, land use regulation and public housing provision during the post-independence era. Postcolonial governments hardly changed either of the earlier urban management schemes, and the result is one of planning ambiguity, confusion and even chaos. Taken together, the complex urban governance regimes, difuse iscal interests, rapid growth of the population and pent-up poverty create a volatile cocktail that should make the African urban revolution a key global issue. The collective response, however, is complacency. The lack of transparency in urban management law and practice has not, until recently, been challenged or reformed, possibly because of lack of demand for efective or transparent urban government from developers. It is also possible that what happened, or failed to happen, in cities was not seen as especially important politically. The ruling party in national governments also typically ixated on national political ambitions and displayed a deep ambivalence towards the importance of decentralised government (Myers 2010). Initially this emphasis on the national interest was understandable as these were vulnerable governments, oten espousing radical ideologies during the Cold War era and also stuck in dependency relationships with former metropole economies. Cities were small and rural development was prioritised because it itted neatly with nationalist ideologies that equated a return to ‘the land’ with postcolonial freedom. When the lean years of structural adjustment rolled in (roughly the 1980s to the mid-2000s) and social investments were severely cut, urban areas, which were already profoundly deicient in terms of infrastructure and associated services, were badly hit. Under structural adjustment, cuts in public sector funding and the shrinking of the civil service depleted already weak local government. As a result, at exactly the time when urbanisation across Africa was increasing, there was inadequate local government to address the related challenges (Rakodi 1997). African economies had also stagnated for most of this period (from 1960 to the 2000s) as a result of active mismanagement, highly disadvantaged connections with the global economy, rent-seeking and proligate elites and 12 only 17 per cent of working youth have full-time wage employment in the lowincome countries. The proportion is 39 per cent in the lower middle-income countries and 52 per cent in the upper middle-income countries. (ibid.: 14) The dearth of urban work and the inadequate incomes of urban youth make the conluence of Africa’s demographic and urbanisation transitions painful. The urban youth of Africa are disadvantaged both relative to older African populations already living in cities and in comparison to the same age cohort in cities in other world regions. Africa’s share of the global population was just under 15 per cent in 2010 and it is expected to reach 23 per cent by 2050 (Africa Progress Panel 2012: 34). This relects in part the fact that Africa has the fastest growth rate of the 0–14 years cohort, and as a proportion of its total population this youth bulge has not yet peaked. It also points to a substantial youthful population that will require education, healthcare services, housing and, of course, and most importantly, stable employment (see Figure 1.6). If stable employment, with regular income, even if low, is not achievable, it is impossible to solve the problem of slum formation. Relatively mainstream multilateral institutions in Africa have come to a very similar conclusion about the implications of the exponential growth of urban youth: Strong growth across the continent has not been translated into the broadbased economic and social development needed to lit millions of Africans out of poverty and reduce the high levels of inequality experienced in most coun13 1 | Pieterse and Parnell limited ixed investments manifesting as systemic dysfunctionality (Chabal 2009; Mbembe 2001; Chapter 4). One, albeit limited, indicator that captures the impact of this situation is the lack of improvement in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita values between 1960 and 2010. The report African Futures 2050, published by the Pardee Center for International Futures and the Institute for Security Studies, explains that over the entire half-century (1960–2010), ‘Eastern Africa gained only about $150 per capita and Western Africa about $130 per capita, while GDP per capita in Central Africa has remained almost unchanged since 1960’ (Cilliers et al. 2011: 30). This is an unfathomable accomplishment of economic, political and social failure. In practical terms, it means that the formal economy remained very small and provided secure employment for only a fraction of the labour force. Consequently, by 2012, despite more than a decade of robust GDP growth, it was reported by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the African Union (AU) that ‘[m]ore than 70 per cent of Africans earn their living from vulnerable employment as African economies continue to depend heavily on the production and export of primary commodities’ (ECA et al. 2012: 13). This impact of this dynamic is most pernicious on the youth. The same report inds that: 2,000 1,800 1,600 Population 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 Age: 0–14 Age 0–14 15–65 65+ Total 15–65 2010 416m 582m 35m 1,033m 65+ % 40 56 4 100 2050 546m 1,320m 142m 2,008m % 27 66 7 100 2050 2045 2040 2035 2030 2025 2020 2015 2010 2005 0 2000 200 1.6 Africa’s demographic structure by age cohort, 2000–50 (population in millions)(source: UN DESA 2011) tries. On the contrary, the continent continues to sufer from high levels of unemployment, particularly for the young and female population, with limited opportunities to absorb new labour market entrants. (ECA et al. 2012: 12) It is against this alternative account of Africa’s urban population growth that the unbridled optimism of reports by private sector think tanks such as McKinsey Global Institute (2012), Monitor (2009), Hatch et al. (2011) and others needs to be considered. The reports basically tell a story that assumes that GDP growth will remain the primary development goal and political priority. The logic is that economic growth will enlarge a middle class of consumers who can contribute, through investments and demand, to a sectoral diversiication of African economies. Within this, cities are the linchpin to drive increased consumer demand and ensure greater economic productivity. If governments can get their acts together to invest in the ‘right’ kinds of basic and connective infrastructures – roads, ports, airports, information and communications technology (ICT), energy, water and so on – then they will also be able to make doing business easier. Despite the crude development policy thinking that shapes many of these glossy reports (with some notable exceptions), it seems that the new private sector actors have a real impact on the policy landscape, outstripping the inluence of scholars, civil society pressure groups and the old-style development industry. It is not immediately clear why there has been such a noticeable shit with regards to who sets the intellectual agenda on African development, but it may be related to the growing volumes 14 15 1 | Pieterse and Parnell of highly targeted and partial foreign direct investment (FDI) lowing into African countries, investment that is contributing to the further distortion of African urban landscapes (Van Synghel and de Boeck 2013). In summary, Africa displays the fastest rate of urban growth in the world, albeit from a low base level. However, at the moment most African countries are not able to capitalise on this demographic shit, because urban residents are structurally trapped in profoundly unhealthy conditions that impact negatively on productivity, economic eiciencies and market expansion. As a consequence of sluggish economic performance, the tax base in African cities remains limited and fragile, making it diicult for governments to raise the revenues necessary to address the litany of urban ills referred to here. Yet the global economy is shiting its axis to the emerging powers, at the same time there is a broader shit towards a fundamentally diferent, much more resource-eicient economy, and technological opportunities are emerging to fuse citizenship and urban living; within this context the African urban transition could be truly revolutionary. However, this demands a diferent scholarly agenda to what has been the norm for some time. The rise of Africa’s cities will not be ignored. How the revolution is navigated will depend on how well the forces of change are understood and taken up. In this regard the role of the continent’s intellectuals in framing the debate about cities must be underscored. The chapters that follow focus on key aspects of the urban revolution that is currently taking place in Africa. They were all written by scholars and/or practitioners who, as staf, students, associates or funders, have a close association with the African Centre for Cities (ACC). Restricting authorship in this way was intentional. ACC is an interdisciplinary research hub based at the University of Cape Town, one of the very few African institutions able to draw on the critical intellectual mass necessary to produce a volume that can address a continental urban agenda. This volume highlights speciic aspects of the urban transition that has been experienced most acutely in Africa, compared with the process in other parts of the world, but further study will need detailed sectoral and city-speciic work from across the continent. In order to get to grips with what exactly Africa’s urban revolution implies for speciic cities, particular countries and the rest of the world, careful research, critical relection and sound leadership are vital. As the continent that will be disproportionately shaped by the way in which society thinks about cities, Africa must assume an increasingly central position in the urban imaginary of theorists and practitioners. With this challenge in mind, the contributors to this book have set out substantive areas of academic and policy concern in which the urban revolution is driving change across the continent. Notes 1 It is important to heed the warning that urban projections that go too far into the future, e.g. 2030, must be treated with great circumspection because the underlying data sets for many developing countries remain extremely problematic (Satterthwaite 2007). 2 A slum household is deined as a group of individuals living under the same roof and lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water; access to improved sanitation facilities; suicient living area (not more than three people sharing the same room); structural quality and durability of dwellings; and security of tenure. Four out of ive of the slum deinition indicators measure physical expressions of slum conditions. These indicators focus attention on the circumstances that surround slum life, showing deiciencies and poverty as attributes of the environments in which slum dwellers live. The ith indicator – security of tenure – has to do with legality, which is not as easy to measure or monitor, as the tenure status of slum dwellers oten depends on de facto or de jure rights – or lack of them. This indicator has special relevance for measuring the denial and violation of housing rights, as well as the progressive fulilment of those rights (UN-HABITAT 2008: 92). References Africa Progress Panel (2012) Africa Progress Report 2012. Jobs, justice and equity: Seizing opportunities in times of global change. Geneva: Africa Progress Panel. Ajulu, C. and D. Motsamai (2008) The PanAfrican Infrastructure Development Fund (PAIDF): Towards an African agenda. Global Insight 76. Johannesburg: Institute for Global Dialogue. Chabal, P. (2009) Africa: The politics of suffering and smiling. London: Zed Books. 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