“The future of Africa lies in its cities,” read Addis Ababa Mayor Adanech Abebe’s welcoming statement on the third and final day of the Africa Urban Forum’s plenary session, “Connecting national and local for an efficient multilevel governance approach to urbanization”.
While the mayor’s words captured the embracing spirit animating this first Forum dedicated to engaging with Africa’s urban future, neither the issues nor principles discussed were in fact novel.
In the plenary’s first panel, “The dynamic of urbanisation and the challenge of territorial and urban planning in the African context”, UN-Habitat Executive Director Anacláudia Rossbach reminded participants of the core ideas committed to nearly ten years prior in the New Urban Agenda (2016). “First: people and housing at the centre,” Rossbach emphasised.
But while the principles may be familiar, addressing the housing and infrastructural needs of the 600 million additional people estimated to inhabit Africa’s cities by 2050 will demand new planning paradigms.
“We [need to] move away from models of planning that were conceptualised [for] cities that are not ours—from Europe and North America. This is not the context of the global South,” said Rossbach, who hails from Brazil, giving voice to a sentiment expressed repeatedly over these past few days, that “it’s time for Africa”. Fundamental to this recognition is an honest, transparent and pragmatic incorporation of informal settlements into urban planning models.
“We need to be who we are,” agreed Eswatini’s Minister of Housing and Urban development, Appolo Maphalala, adding that the urban planning models currently used in Eswatini “do not respond to the social fabric of who we are”.
To that point, Maphalala also noted a “new twist” in urbanisation observed in Eswatini, where he said “rural areas are themselves urbanising”. That is, contrary to the classic rural-to-urban migration pattern, Eswatini’s rural areas themselves are rapidly transforming into a new kind of spatial agglomeration with a different set of challenges to physical planning that he enjoined researchers to examine.
Secretary General of the East Africa Local Government Association (EALGA), Gertrude Rose Gamwera also warned of the need to expand thinking—and developmental approaches—around the word “city”, noting how planning needs of secondary cities and major metropoles like Addis Ababa diverge.
Across the full spectrum of the urban, however, the fact that all African cities must engage with the realities of informality was uncontested. “Almost 50% of the population of urban Africa is in informal settlements,” Rossbach noted.
As such, it is critical that all forms of urban planning recognise and work with informality, while also always considering the social and ecological principles that are another fundamental principle of the NUA. That is, maintaining the balancing act of filling housing and infrastructure gaps while addressing the challenges of climate change, urban sprawl, and the need to protect biodiversity, the environment, and rural activities—including those related to food security. All of this comes down to smarter land-use and “balanced densification”, as Rossbach termed it: “Because we cannot fabricate land. Land is unique. It’s the single resource that we have”.
This sentiment was echoed in the plenary’s second panel, “Making African cities engines of structural economic and social transformation of Africa”, where Edgar Pieterse of the African Centre for Cities pointed to the duelling developmental and economic imperatives of the structural transformation ahead. That is, realising industrialised growth that is both inclusive and able to contribute to the regeneration of biodiversity while also maintaining a low-carbon profile.
Having presented this apparently contradictory mandate, Pieterse urged the audience to consider the possibilities of “a regenerative economy for the 21st century”. Driven by growing urban populations, this vision recasts the myriad services that make a city run (e.g., basic services, housing, real estate, food systems, etc.—or the “built environment infrastructure”, as he termed it) as an industrial sector unto itself, and proposes fulfilling those physical needs with new, low-carbon solutions that could also spur employment opportunities.
“There’s an opportunity in this transition, to demonstrate in the built environment what a regenerative economy looks like; [to] do it in a way that grows formal businesses—small, medium and micro—and most importantly to transition the incredible entrepreneurial capacity and energy in the informal sector and make them part of this regenerative economy.” – Edgar Pieterse, ACC
Using the example of converting eucalyptus trees (an alien invasive draining the water tables in Oromia regional state) into material for Ethiopia’s ambitious construction industry, he explained: “They could build an industry around bio-based construction materials that clears the eucalyptus, makes it an input into the construction material, and builds a whole generation of labour, businesses, skills, and training around the construction technology”.
Critical to this vision are cities exerting their procurement power and insisting on new kinds of businesses to deliver the fundamentals of the built environment. The new kinds of businesses imagined importantly would include social enterprises—micro-construction, micro-maintenance companies, etc.—created from slum dweller movements.
“There’s an opportunity in this transition, to demonstrate in the built environment what a regenerative economy looks like; [to] do it in a way that grows formal businesses—small, medium and micro—and most importantly to transition the incredible entrepreneurial capacity and energy in the informal sector and make them part of this regenerative economy. What we’re doing is not just delivering [services or infrastructure], but fundamentally constructing a new economy that has to be regenerative,” Pieterse said.
In this economic vision—linked to that of Agenda 2063—cities thus become not only the drivers of this economy, but “living laboratories for economic experimentation and transformation”.
Key to this possibility is the third NUA principle that Rossbach highlighted: participatory multilevel governance that empowers local government. Thus, while national government must continue to enact the laws, regulations and framework that supports development in cities and attracts public and private resources, it must also deepen and genuinely resource the decentralisation processes that empower local government to be at the driver’s seat of their own development.
To that point, Gamwera reminded AUF participants of the African Charter on Decentralisation, adopted by the AU in 2014: “I wonder the pace at which our member states are ratifying this?” she asked.
