Infrahub.Africa is the product of a collaboration between the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, the Urban Futures Studio (UFS) at Utrecht University and the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at the University of Stellenbosch, exploring the use of sustainable infrastructure examples from Africa as an entry point for imagining more sustainable, equitable cities. This project sits within a larger concern about alternative futures for African cities. In December 2024, the research partners spent three days to reflect on what the theoretical, political, pedagogic and policy implications of this work might be. Lee Middleton joined the workshop and distilled a useful account of the discussions.
By: Lee Middleton
Introduction: Redefining the terms of Africa’s development
“There is an urgent need for African perspectives and stories to redefine the terms of our development,” said Cameroonian community engagement strategist and researcher, Chrispo Balila Dingha.
With colleagues from the CST, ACC and UFS, Dingha joined a diverse group—from engineers and economists to futurists and social scientists—at a year-end workshop in South Africa, to start articulating what an agenda for more sustainable and just urban infrastructure for the continent could look like.
With the world’s fastest urbanising population, the continent’s infrastructural development requirements are estimated at about $US150 billion a year, for which an annual financing gap of some 100 billion looms.[1] From a historic foundation of exclusive colonial grids never intended to accommodate populations expected to exceed 2 billion by 2050,[2] Africa’s cities today are a pastiche of “makeshift” responses to gaps in formal infrastructure systems, from housing to electricity and water.
Additionally facing the onslaughts of climate change, shrinking natural resource bases, and radical inequality, Africa’s urban infrastructure challenge in many ways acts as a prism—refracting the dynamic interplay of humanity’s most wicked problems as we stumble into the second quarter of the 21st century.
Acknowledging this context, ACC Director Edgar Pieterse opened the workshop by highlighting the “systemic knot”—institutional inertia, path dependency, and limited resources—constraining the possibility of finding not just a way forward, but a path to a destination that remains unknown.
“We looked at the figures and said if we don’t change the way in which we urbanise, the resource requirement for African infrastructure in itself is enough to blow the fuses of the planet. It’s so massive,” noted Maarten Hajer, UFS Director, of the resource/infrastructure requirement calculations published in The Weight of Cities report for which he and several colleagues present were lead authors.
In other words, if Africa follows the global North’s fossil fuel-dependent urbanisation path, “we are toast”, as Mark Swilling, CST’s outgoing-co-Director, put it, referring not just to those on the continent. And while Western models of urbanisation continue to define people’s conception of what constitutes a city, the reality is that the global South’s conditions of urbanisation are almost an inverse when it comes to the fundamentals of labour and capital.[3]
“The binding constraint is the limited imaginary about what an alternative could look, feel and smell like,” Pieterse asserted, wrangling the conversation back to the workshop’s theme of new urban imaginaries. “Without that alternative as something we can grasp, it is almost impossible to think about viable pathways to get there.”
Infrahub imaginaries & spaces of elasticity
On the screen, images of black soldier fly larvae transforming food waste into animal feed depict the Nambu Insect Protein Project: a “viable and profitable” waste management concept from South Africa’s Eastern Cape. A triple-win of circular waste management, decarbonisation (the process is less carbon-intensive than composting), and sustainability (the resulting feed is environmentally superior to fishmeal/soy), the labour-intensive, low-tech project is one of 50 “caselets”—not quite case studies—populating the Infrahub.Africa database. [4]
Launched by the ACC and UFS in 2023 and supported with case study research from the CST, this online collection of real-life initiatives from across Africa often challenges traditional notions of what constitutes infrastructure.
Designed to surface “an African conception of sustainable infrastructure”, the Hub’s criteria for inclusion are social (meeting a basic service need, versus mega-projects aimed at general economic growth like airports); economic (creating decent jobs for locals, versus primarily employing foreign contractors); and ecological (minimising or reversing environmental harm).
Endeavouring to introduce new storylines to seed the ‘alternative imaginaries’ needed by the urbanising continent (and the global South more broadly), cases span 30 countries and over 80 infrastructure themes, and are available in five African languages.
“But is it working? Is there enough profit to be self-sustaining?” someone asks of the Nambu Insect Project.
The answer remains “unclear”, thus surfacing a fundamental tension around the Infrahub cases, and by extension, the larger project of sustainable infrastructure imaginaries.
Given the size and stakes of the infrastructure gap in Africa, questions of scale and replicability are far from academic. And while many of the Infrahub examples are relatively small in scale, as the site grows, it raises the issue of how to string “emergent” examples together in a way that adds up to the need on the ground. This tension was recently explored by CST researchers who visited urban innovations across Benin, Kenya, Ethiopia and Rwanda with the aim to contextually locate future and existing Infrahub examples.
“There is no agreement, even among like-minded scholars, if small-scale projects are sufficient to transform economies and effect the change needed,” observed ACC governance and finance researcher Liza Rose Cirolia, who said that part of the appeal of small-scale infrastructure is the daunting complexity of the financial, material, historical, and political factors underpinning large-scale infrastructure.
Core to the ‘big-small’ debate is the question of who will pay, which loops back to the dominance of global North development models and financial systems underwriting them. But as with the need for new approaches to the infrastructures themselves, a new way of conceptualising the problem of finance—and therefore its solution—is perhaps demanded.
“Money forces you to create the capabilities to spend it,” said Swilling, who sits on South Africa’s National Planning Commission, and, until September 2023, was on the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) board. “I want to completely reverse this.”
That is, instead of developing a national infrastructure framework plan, to which a national budget-aligned costing is “tacked on”, governments should start with the total investment calculation required to achieve national infrastructure goals and the SDGs; then use that figure as the basis of a public-private dialogue to mobilise capital.
While Swilling allowed that blended finance and public-private-partnerships will undoubtedly be involved, he stressed that these buzzy concepts are not adequate to the financial task ahead. Instead he offered the concept of “a balance sheet reconfiguration”, inspired by a critical macro-finance school of thought.[5]
“If everyone’s asset is someone else’s liability, we can empirically map the web of interlocking balance sheets [and] identify elasticity spaces…to unlock new flows of capital,” Swilling asserted, explaining that such an approach could offer a glimmer of light at the end of what is admittedly a long, dark tunnel.
Grounding the conversation for the non-economists in the room by highlighting how much capital is on the African continent (answer: far more than is typically assumed), the deep inequality of its distribution, and how much leaves without being invested, Swilling estimated that various multiple balance reconfigurations could possibly unlock as much as ZAR5 trillion through to 2050 for South Africa’s infrastructure requirement.
But these so-called “elasticity spaces” must be identified both with financial investors and public sector commitments to creating a pipeline of projects that can redirect said capital into the real economy.
And here we arrive at the chicken and egg of needing a “pipeline of projects” to release finance, but also needing upfront finance to codevelop viable projects and capacitate institutions to deliver them at scale.
“You don’t fix institutions to wait for the money,” said Swilling of this conundrum. “Talent comes when the real game is on.”
In search of an adaptive infrastructure pipeline (aka, the real game)
“This project is looking to visualise complexity. Thinking back to the interconnected web of [financial] balance sheets, [this shows the] interconnected web of resource sectors,” said Garth Malan, an engineer and PhD candidate at the CST.
On the screen behind him, bright lines representing Cape Town’s shifting water, energy, and food requirements pulse around Table Mountain, a dazzling representation of the “material flows analysis” (MFA) tool he developed to quantitatively analyse a city’s resource flows (aka, urban metabolism) in real time.
Powerfully visualising “how resources are interacting as they move through the city”, this tool could allow decision makers to see how material resources interact with and impact one another, assisting municipalities to move away from the siloed sectoral management that by necessity has traditionally reigned.
The tool also offers an inroad to address some of the data and modelling issues that stymie accurate projections of (and thus appropriate responses to) the continent’s infrastructure deficits. Able to map where resources are most intensively used, the tool additionally—and profoundly—enables researchers to visualise inequality.
“It challenges the idea of the rich subsidising the poor,” noted ACC human rights researcher, Nokukhanya Mncwabe, pointing to the stark evidence of intense resource use in the city’s relatively tiny wealthier suburbs.
But such evidence does not guarantee action.
“It’s very seductive, but I’m left with the question of what gets you quickest to the effective governance and planning and regulation that can attend to the equity and sustainability issues?” Pieterse provoked. As with any technology, the brilliance of an innovation is unrelated to how people will use it. Thus the question of how to anchor infrastructural innovations in justice was a constant over the three-day workshop.
“Once it is a question of justice, it’s no good news to many persons: justice steps on the toes of all,” Dingha sagely observed, insisting on “leading with justice” in considering any infrastructural solution.
Indeed, the question of how to balance the exigencies of survival against the allure of Afro-futuristic visions was another tension that ran throughout discussions. “How will we live together now?” asked Michael Uwemedimo, director of the Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform (CMAP) in Nigeria, noting that the future itself can appear “a luxury commodity” for the vast majority of African urban dwellers.
“Small and under-resourced as we are, how do we begin to unpack the nested futures whose horizons we find ourselves in?” asked the poetic Uwemedimo, who joined the workshop by video call from Port Harcourt.
Emphasising the importance of iterative practice and design, the human rights filmmaker’s exhortation to “fail forward into the future” was a welcome reminder that the path to new imaginaries is paved by the uncertainties of the now. Uwemedimo’s wariness of rhetoric around future imaginaries was echoed by Swilling, who maintained that “being serious about the future means being obsessed with the present”, underscoring how the work of innovation and change is tied to relationality: that is, the vital and messy work of negotiating the multiple relationships—between institutions, communities, the state, civil society organisations—that shape what will emerge.
In other words, dealing with people. And here the conversation turned to the dangers of promoting essentialist notions around “community”—that amorphous grouping so often evoked in African development discourse—and the critical importance of leading not just with justice, but also with cultural acumen.
The pertinence of questions around who constitutes “the community” and what “they” actually need or want was stressed by ACC urban planner, Nobukhosi Ngwenya, presenting the Black River Syndicate project.[6] While images of the proposed ecological walkway linking Langa township and Athlone with the Cape Town neighbourhood of Observatory ticked all the feel-good sustainability boxes—restoring the polluted river into a thriving public space enjoyed by pedestrians, small-scale commerce and wildlife alike—larger questions loomed: whose vision is this, how do you define “the community”, and how do you facilitate the trade-offs that will doubtless arise?
A global community?
Contemplating the above, the conversation turned to the dangers of romanticising “bottom up” infrastructures and the fact that community-led innovations do not necessarily produce the best, most sustainable or just outcomes (lest we forget, misogyny and corruption are also the products of communities).
Referring to the developmental discourse of “local is better, frugal is better” Cirolia noted the problematic tendency in anthropology and development studies “to essentialise or hyper-localise the African experience”.
Importantly, such privileging also sets itself in opposition to the large-scale projects that are ultimately what is required to meaningfully address Africa’s infrastructure gap.
For anyone doubting the power of “urban imaginaries” to influence development visions (of whatever scale)—or assuming that new imaginaries are not also subject to their own forms of elitism—the example of Addis Ababa’s Corridor of Development was salient. Driven by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (known by Uber drivers as “the PM who builds to complete”), downtown Addis’s rapid makeover could in some ways be seen as the antithesis of the values—social, economic and ecological—championed on Infrahub.Africa.
Referring to a discussion she joined in Addis—where PhD scholars, politicians and lawyers debated the forced removals of Addis slum dwellers to make way for wide boulevards illuminated by a phalanx of “garish” golden lamps—CST sustainability researcher Nontsikelelo Mogosetsi-Gabriel related the perspective voiced by an Addis politician, that “every country that has moved from poverty, got rid of slums: someone has to sacrifice”.
“Any decent political leader understands the aspirations of the majority,” Pieterse acknowledged. “That is, the idea that social mobility is possible for your kids because the economy is growing and there are jobs.”
The fact that many Addis residents have embraced the PM’s modernist vision points to the reality that the dominant imaginary influencing what many Africans still want in a city—wide boulevards, bright lights and plenty of concrete—remains largely driven by aspirational visions from the global North. (Participants were reminded of the EcoSUN Green Village, where sustainable green building technology for low-income state housing was rejected by the intended beneficiaries, who perceived the alternative materials as inferior.)
“People want to be able to imagine themselves as part of the global balance sheet, they want to feel like they are part of world making,” noted Cirolia of this reality, adding that scholars and changemakers need to also question their own presumptions when critiquing existing imaginaries.
And so the question remained: how to create new aspirations for a future—one that is more sustainable, just and economically inclusive—on which politicians can also expend their political capital with confidence.
Radical Incrementalism: shifting the narrative
“How does imagination facilitate societal transformation?” asked CST urban sustainability researcher, Merin Raju Jacob.
Picking up on the workshop’s surfacing of the tensions between desire and aspiration, and addressing the often-cited (but rarely substantiated) suggestion that African cities “leapfrog” towards a just and sustainable future, Jacob recast the global North’s narrative of an Africa “dominated by catastrophe and collapse”.
Pulling themes from her work analysing the imaginaries presented in African science fiction, Jacob noted a uniquely African perspective on crisis: “It’s never the focal point of the ‘story’, but just part of the context within which characters and their actors are situated. So there’s no such thing as the ‘end of the world’, because the end of the world has already come for many communities across the continent, multiple times, and it’s going to come again.”
As such, the new imaginaries needed—alternative narratives that politicians and policymakers could potentially work with—may exist somewhere between unbridled Afro-optimism and the nihilism of “collapsology”.
With this directive, we return to Infrahub.Africa as a repository of stories to draw on, a trove of real-life examples to begin seeding a “vocabulary from the fringes”. If taken as true that language shapes our understanding and thus construction of reality, then a (re)negotiation of the meaning of certain words (e.g., “informal” versus “makeshift”) is called for; perhaps within these recalibrations, a shared vocabulary that acknowledges its nested power can emerge.
Grounding this borderline esoterica in a working definition to guide the formulation of new imaginaries, Pieterse proposed the following: “Urban innovation is the intentional co-generation of novel, systemic responses to solve wicked challenges, embedded in resonant narratives”.
From this small but vital foundation, pragmatic thinking around what the group framed as the “adaptive city” could begin to coalesce. But still, issues raised over the course of the three days—in particular, the difficulty in connecting top-down and bottom-up processes, and the relentless tide of financial and regulatory realities—threatened to dissolve the fragile construct.
“There is a need to develop new narratives and influence these dynamics, but in a way that really keeps social justice concerns at heart, and also attends to ingrained legal and regulatory dynamics that hinder possibilities or might support them. I’m still trying to understand how…we might enrich that effort,” said UFS urban futures researcher, Josephine Chambers.
Suggesting that a foundational part of this experimental work is breaking down the binaries—big versus small; public versus private; process versus outcomes; financial viability (becoming self-sustainable) versus financial limits (not making too much profit); innovation versus maintenance—Chambers landed on the intentional fostering of intersectionalities among infrastructure types as a key focus.
That is, the new imaginaries must explicitly endeavour to connect top and bottom, embrace hybridity, and acknowledge the big as the critical material base for the small and everything in-between.
Perhaps this is where the pipeline of viable projects begins: taking the types of innovations and experiments found on Infrahub and mainstreaming them.
“There’s got to be a step of institutional codification: how to produce new practices and narratives? What is that translation? And what’s the function of leadership?” asked Pieterse of the sight line.
Hope is having a plan
The workshop ended with pragmatics: a discussion on the role of pedagogy (in which the stark contrast between Africa’s prevailing optimism and the collaposology dominating Europe was highlighted), and concrete planning around research agendas refined with insights from the workshop.
Identified areas very much focused on connecting the big-small: quantifying the continent’s material infrastructure requirements; packaging operational alternatives; analysing dominant “imaginaries” of cities, and mapping the deployment of capital in the same; and identifying and inviting to future forums “pockets of intellectual capital” (e.g., marketing agencies, investment bankers) that influence investment decisions.
Infrahub’s value in demonstrating how to get from the de facto to the alternative, in setting and steering the research agenda, and in amplifying cases in search of resonance beyond specific cities was clear.
There was also consensus that Infrahub should pursue more large-scale examples and explore existing cases in greater depth, with a focus on “The Big Four”: energy, water, digital communications and mobility. To that end, the creation of an Observatory as a research device complementing Infrahub, to track data on the continent’s largest infrastructure projects, was welcomed.
Fittingly, justice had the last word: “I’ll say again and again, call it justice, call it whatever you want, but what Africa needs is support for the survival of local populations,” said Dingha. “In terms of infrastructure, that means delivering basic necessities, providing jobs, and reducing or reversing environmental harm. With this framing for the development of a future urban Africa, we cannot evade the justice question.”
[1] African Development Bank, 2023; also see: https://www.uneca.org/stories/perspectives-the-long-winding-road-defining-africa%E2%80%99s-infrastructure-development
[2] https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2023/07/strengthen_regional_representation_in_sub-saharan_africa.pdf
[3] The global North is marked by high labour costs and low costs of capital, versus the global South’s need to create employment and access affordable capital.
[4] A major output of the African Urban Futures Project funded by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, Infrahub.Africa is being built by an extended network of researchers, and funded in part by South Africa’s National Research Foundation.
[5] Murau, S., Haas, A. & Guter-Sandu, A. 2023. Monetary Architecture and the Green Transition. Economy and Space, DOI:10.1177/0308518X231197296
[6] The Black River Syndicate is an ACC urban living lab to co-design with affected communities the restoration process around Cape Town’s Black River. The aim of the lab is to foster, through a series of local experiments, the activation of green infrastructure for the purposes of spatial integration and establishment of a circular economy.
