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Overview
Drawing on the expertise of scholars and practitioners associated with the African Centre for Cities, and utilising a diverse array of case studies, Africa's Urban Revolution provides a comprehensive insight into the key issues - demographic, cultural, political, technical, environmental and economic - surrounding African urbanisation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780325231 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Edgar Pieterse is holder of the South African Research Chair in Urban Policy. He is director of the African Centre for Cities and professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, both at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of, amongst other books, City Futures: Confronting the crisis of urban development (Zed Books, 2008).
Edgar Pieterse is Director of the African Centre for Cities and Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, both at the University of Cape Town. He is also a founding director of Isandla Institute; an urban policy think-tank where he continues advocacy oriented research work. His publications include: Voices of the Transition: The Politics, Poetics and Practices of Social Change in South Africa (2004), Democratising Local Government: The South African Experiment. (2002) and Consolidating Developmental Local Government: Lessons from the South Africa Experience (2007).
Read an Excerpt
Africa's Urban Revolution
By Susan Parnell, Edgar Pieterse
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Susan Parnell and Edgar PieterseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78032-523-1
CHAPTER 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 after 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 firmly under way. The continent is 40 per cent urbanised at present, which means that there are 414 million African urbanites (2011 figures), 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 afforded 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 find 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 finance. Mindful of the importance of the general lack of capacity to manage the rupture that is taking place all across Africa because of the shift 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 conflict (by Beall and Goodfellow) in the opening section of the book as a sobering reminder that violence, while not necessarily centred on cities or taking place throughout the continent, is disproportionally influential 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 offer 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 fix 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 find affordable transport (see Chapter 7) into perspective. In other words, our objective is to get a sense of the nature of the shift 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 specificity of Africa's path towards urbanisation and the relationship between urbanisation and industrialisation, where the African record is one that defies 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 first 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 finally there was a significant 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.
Although the antecedents of Africa's urban revolution can be traced to the second half of the twentieth century (Simon 1992;O'Conner 1983; Iliffe 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 reconfigure 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 figures 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 Affairs (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 if we consider the numerical scale of urban growth as reflected 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 significant 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 significant 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.
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 different), but completely different to 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 different conditions to those faced by other world regions when they confronted the rapid expansion of cities and the shift 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 efficient urban form and metabolism because of the new imperatives for low-carbon economies and settlements (UNEP 2012). The fiscal arrangements of urban construction have, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first 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 shifts illustrated in Figure 1.4 and sets out the wider ramifications where demographic change is taking place:
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.
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 shifts, 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. (UNFPA 2007: 7–8)
The time frames in which the escalation of the number of people in the world and the shift 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 classified 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 more than 10 million people (UN DESA 2012: 282). This distribution of the urban population differs 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 specific 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 fiscal 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 often 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 9and 10) or about dealing with specifically 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 efforts 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Africa's Urban Revolution by Susan Parnell, Edgar Pieterse. Copyright © 2014 Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
1. Africa's urban revolution in context - Edgar Pieterse and Susan Parnell2. Conflict and post-war transition in African cities - Jo Beall and Tom Goodfellow
3. Sub-Saharan African urbanisation and global environmental change - Susan Parnell and Ruwani Walawege
4. Linking Urbanisation and development in Africa's economic revival - Ivan Turok
5. Religion and social life in African cities - Carole Rakodi
6. Feeding African cities: the growing challenge of urban food insecurity - Jonathan Crush and Bruce Frayne
7. Transport pressures in urban Africa: practices, policies, perspectives - Gordon Pirie
8. Decentralisation and institutional reconfiguration in urban Africa - Warren Smit and Edgar Pieterse
9. The challenge of urban planning law reform in African cities - Stephen Berrisford
10. The education and research imperatives of urban planning professionals in Africa - James Duminy, Nancy Odendaal and Vanessa Watson
11. Filling the void: an agenda for tackling African urbanisation - Edgar Pieterse
12. Infrastructure, real economies and social transformation: assembling the components for regional urban development in Africa - AbdouMaliq Simone
13. National urbanisation and urban strategies: necessary but absent policy instruments in Africa - Susan Parnell and David Simon
14. Urbanisation as a global historical process: theory and evidence from sub-Saharan Africa - Sean Fox
Postscript: Building new knowledge and networks to foster sustainable urban development - Thomas Melin