World Cities Day

Last week the world’s foremost conference on urbanisation, the World Urban Forum (WUF), convened in Cairo, Egypt. The biennial UN-Habitat-led event returned to the African continent for the second time since the inauguration in 2002 in Nairobi, Kenya. This year’s theme focused on the role of local action in sustainable urbanisation. The WUF theme culminated from the theme of Urban October, which centred around the role of youth in climate and local action for cities, starting with World Habitat Day on the first Monday of October to World Cities Day on the last day of October.

Adding to this year’s WUF dialogues, I posit that achieving meaningful climate action and sustainability for African cities will require radically rethinking how we want our cities to develop and function in ways that have not been seen elsewhere. There are four aspects of cities which I suggest will require critical re-imagination if we are to meet the demands for climate action and urban sustainability on the continent. But before I delve into these aspects, I would like to contextualise Africa’s unprecedented challenge for sustainable urbanisation.

The scale of urbanisation expected in Africa

The projected growth for my hometown of Lilongwe, Malawi exemplifies the daunting challenge for sustainable urbanisation that Africa will face this century. Lilongwe is predicted to become the 13th largest city in the World by the year 2100 (according to research by scholars Hoornweg and Pope), growing from its current population of one million to over 41 million residents. If this prediction comes to life, Lilongwe will be one of 13 African cities among the top 20 largest cities in the world by the turn of the next century. To put Lilongwe’s predicted growth into perspective, the city will grow from a size similar to Qheberha in South Africa, surpassing the size of Johannesburg, London and New York to become a megacity equivalent to the size of Tokyo, Japan, currently the reigning world’s largest city.

But what capacity does Lilongwe have to handle the expected fortyfold growth? Like many African cities, Lilongwe is already struggling to meet its current modest urban development demands. The city is experiencing massive urban infrastructure shortfalls and poor public services. Sights include people clambering to walk along the sides of roads due to no pedestrian pavements, cars dodging potholes, dead traffic lights due to regular power cuts, piles of trash and excessive litter in the streets due to irregular municipal waste collection. These are some of the most obvious challenges experienced while navigating Lilongwe and many other African cities. Thus, it is quite hard to imagine how a city like Lilongwe could handle 40 million more residents without crumbling. Add to that the pressures on infrastructure and services for demands to feed, house, and provide water and energy for the expected avalanche of new residents. Certainly, sustaining African cities like Lilongwe would require some form of urban leapfrogging to alleviate the massive lag in infrastructure and services, and position such cities to thrive amidst the unprecedented growth rates.

Complicating things for Africa’s urbanisation trajectory are the outdated urban planning laws and regulatory frameworks which are relics of our colonial past. Many African countries like Malawi maintain urban planning regulations first enforced by colonial governments to benefit an urban minority mostly comprising the colonising European populations. In the post-colonial period, the exclusionary urban regulations have kept buttressing class privilege regarding where people live and how they access places, opportunities and resources in the city. For instance, urban development regulations are used to criminalise informality by prohibiting street vending or demolishing buildings or structures deemed ‘unplanned’ without sensitivity to the context or circumstances.

Most African urban residents have their lives intertwined with urban informality as residents of informal settlements, vendors or customers of street trade, or users of informal public transport modes. Yet, Africa’s urban policy continues to be in denial of the reality that urban informality is in fact the predominant mode in which our cities operate. Informal or unplanned settlements house more urban dwellers than the planned formal parts of cities. The informal economy provides many poor urban residents with essential livelihood opportunities. Nonetheless, many African cities continue pursuing out-of-touch aspirations towards attaining purported ‘global city’ statuses.

Aspirations in denial of contextual realities

African global city agendas are awash with unreasonable prospects to eliminate urban informality, with a quest to turn our cities into the next Singapore or Dubai. While aspiring towards improved states for our African cities is pertinent, the aspirational urban development policies adopted on the continent are often based on exclusionary rhetoric and impractical ambitions. These agendas somewhat reflect the wishes of a disconnected ruling urban elite, but also the continent’s appalling city planning, and urban design capacity exemplified by the somewhat copycat urban development trajectories envisaged.

To meet the demands of climate action and sustainability in African cities, fresh and radical aspirations of the kinds of cities we want to develop are needed. Our context necessitates that African cities should become much more than the models of cities that emerged in previous rapid urbanisation waves elsewhere. We need to reckon that the so-called global cities on which we benchmark our urban aspirations developed by responding to their contextual challenges and seizing opportunities relevant to their context and time. The global North cities we look up to, rapidly developed their modern urban infrastructure and amenities in response to challenges like overcrowded housing and public health disasters due to the uncontrolled settlement development experienced during the Industrial Revolution labour centralisation boom to supply factories with workers. Furthermore, their urbanisation pursuits were financed through wealth acquired through nefarious means such as slave trade and colonial exploitation. Nevertheless, over time the global North cities continued to reinvent their urban development models to rebuild following World War destructions and in response to technological innovations such as the emergence of the automobile. In recent decades, they have been determined to reinvent to address socio-ecological issues such as air pollution resulting from an era of automobile dependence.

Some of the aspirational Asian cities often cited as models by our African leaders have also developed in response to their contextual realities. It is inconsiderate and quite irresponsible to want a city like Lilongwe to aim to become like Dubai when the city or country not only lacks the kind of money Dubai has but also faces challenges such as high levels of unemployment and poverty the likes of which Dubai hasn’t ever faced. While recognising that African cities are as diverse as Africa’s peoples and landscapes and should not be treated as aiming for a universal African urban form, the envisioned future of African cities should focus more on responding creatively to our intrinsic contextual challenges and opportunities than trying to imitate the product of other cities’ quest to address their own issues elsewhere.

Inspiration from success stories elsewhere is imperative. However, what we need for our African aspirations is to recognise that what matters most from the other urban successes are the lessons we can draw from them. Both positive and negative. Moreover, we then need to determine the applicability of those lessons in our context instead of wanting to import urban vision from elsewhere wholesale.

Shifting towards meaningful urban sustainability

A critical prerequisite for any meaningful action towards the betterment of our African cities is accepting that informality will continue to be an integral part of our urban development. Even global North cities have their own forms of informality, the difference is that in our context, conditions of informality are prominent. What matters is how we treat conditions of urban informality. By viewing informality for what it is – as the manifestation of forms of recognition by the state defining what is considered legal or illegal, permissible or forbidden, but also as citizens’ agency in response to the failures of the state and capitalism – we can begin to find ways to support conditions of urban informality and minimise their negative attributes. This acceptance should be championed by urban policy, planning and governance.

Embracing informality is but one piece of the puzzle. Across all levels of African urban society, we need to start thinking differently about the possibilities of how our cities ought to look, feel and function. The challenge is to decouple our urban imaginaries and aspirations from what we have seen work elsewhere because it may not offer the most appropriate solutions for our time and context. This is a challenge for all urban innovators and residents, not just city planners and urban designers because everyone is a city-maker – we all make our cities collectively and incrementally through our agency. I am hopeful about the possibilities of moving into more sustainable city forms that work for everyone without having to follow the same stages of urban development achieved elsewhere.

Now, as my small contribution to the dialogue on pathways towards sustainable African cities, I turn to the four critical aspects of cities which will require never-seen-before approaches to safeguard sustainable African urban futures.

1. Fresh models of dense urban form

Critical for reducing the carbon footprint of cities are dense, compact urban forms in which the places where people live, work and visit for other essential needs or leisure are in close proximity so that people can preferably walk or cycle to reduce dependence on car travel which greatly contributes to cities’ carbon footprints. However, many African cities already possess compact forms especially dense informal settlements. Furthermore, the dense settlements of urban Africa usually lack the necessary urban amenities like adequate green open spaces to make them more liveable. On top of that, since the colonial era, well-off urban residents tend to live in less-dense neighbourhoods with big single-family dwellings surrounded by private open spaces. On the contrary, the dense parts of our cities tend to be associated with urban poverty. Consequently, in our African urban context, density has a certain stigma associated with crowding and poor urban qualities, while less dense areas are more aspirational and associated with socio-economic achievement.

To meaningfully shift aspirations regarding densities and urban form, we must find ways to improve the appeal of the existing dense urban settlements and decouple them from the stigmas they hold. Through urban design, we can creatively retrofit the existing dense settlements with amenities like recreational open spaces, public facilities and economic opportunities to make them wholesome neighbourhoods that people choose to remain in even, as they climb the socio-economic class ladder. On the other hand, we also need to find ways to encourage wealthier residents to embrace living in denser settlement forms and living close to less-affluent households. Here, the kind of models for urban form that African cities should champion, require a public realm (i.e., the network of public spaces and facilities within which we experience the city outside of private buildings) that is not easily distinguishable in its material qualities between wealthier parts and poorer parts of the city. In the long run, a public realm not distinguishable based on wealth characteristics can encourage people to live in any part of the city regardless of their income levels thereby facilitating spatial integration across socio-economic class.

2. Multi-story buildings but not skyscrapers

Skyscrapers emerged at the end of the 19th century in the North American cities of Chicago and New York in response to rising costs of prime land and advancements in building technology. By the early 21st century skyscrapers had become symbols of cities as notable landmarks and associated with urban economic prosperity. The Asian wave of rapid economic growth embraced skyscrapers as indicators for urban prosperity, evident in many Chinese cities. Some cities like Dubai chose to build skyscrapers as an urban identity marker to reposition themselves as globally competitive cities. So, it is no surprise that African cities want to follow suit.

However, building skyscrapers is not good for climate change. Skyscrapers are not only extremely expensive to construct but the materials required to build them, like large quantities of concrete, are also associated with high carbon footprints. Furthermore, skyscrapers are unaffordable and inaccessible to typical urban residents and function as vertical enclaves. Even worse, skyscrapers are difficult to convert to residential properties –especially affordable residences – because of their scale of height and huge internal floor areas. The struggle to convert vacant or underutilised skyscrapers has been more evident by the drop in office space demand since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adding to this, skyscrapers are also expensive to maintain due to energy costs associated with running and maintaining elevators, air conditioning and water pumping.

While multi-story buildings optimise the use of land and are necessary for compact urban development, African cities may have to skip the skyscraper building type in favour of more sustainable, less expensive mid-rise building types to meet the building demands of our growing cities while simultaneously lessening the carbon footprint of our built environment.

3. Affordably housing the most vulnerable urban residents

Most low-income urban residents reside in poorly planned, informal settlements. These settlements occupy parts of the city unsuitable for settlement development such as wetlands, flood plains, and steep slopes. Such settlements are often more susceptible to the effects of extreme weather like flooding. Nonetheless, people end up residing in such vulnerable areas because urban land and housing markets systematically exclude the poor. At the same time, such vulnerable settlements tend to have other compounding social problems like high levels of crime because of the concentration of poverty in these areas. Therefore, acting towards climate-resilient sustainable urban futures in Africa requires us to think critically about new models to affordably house the most vulnerable residents in areas more resilient to climate shocks.

Affordable housing models remain a challenge for cities the world over. Nonetheless, the need is even more dire for African cities because of the large population of residents residing in substandard housing and vulnerable settlements. Hence, one of the most critical challenges for African urban innovators is to create novel models to enable affordable housing at scales from the design of affordable housing units relevant to our context to the disruption of urban land markets and the property development industry.

4. Reimagining public transport

Public transport is another critical challenge for climate action and urban sustainability in Africa. The combination of public transport like trains and active modes of mobility like walking and cycling offer the best sustainable mass travel in cities unlike private car mobility, even with advancements such as electric vehicles. However, Africa lags behind the rest of the world on rapid mass transit systems like metro lines as well as the appropriate infrastructure supporting active mobility like networks of comfortable pedestrian sidewalks and protected cycling lanes. The paradox, however, is that many residents primarily move around African cities by walking despite the walking environments being considered unwalkable because of the lack of supporting infrastructure and spatial design. Moreover, for longer distances, most people rely on uncomfortable and unreliable informal or semi-formal transport options like minibuses. Consequently, commuting in private cars is considered more convenient and preferable in many African cities. Moreover, people tend to not use cars not out of choice, but because they cannot afford them. Private car mobility is also associated with wealth and therefore aspirational for the most lower-income people.

The aspirational factor of private car mobility is perhaps one of the most critical challenges for the transition towards sustainable urban mobility in Africa. Therefore, creative imagination and innovation are imperative to make public transport fashionable in the African context beyond implementing the much-needed rapid mass transit systems like metros, light rail and bus rapid transit (BRT). I would go as far as suggesting that what is even more important is creatively retrofitting the existing forms of informal transport like minibus and motorcycle taxis with adaptive innovations for reliability, comfort and safety. African cities present an opportunity to harness new models of sustainable urban travel, and I am of the view that the necessary starting point to begin shifting perceptions on public transport should be leveraging advancements in technology to improve the user experience of existing informal transport modes.

Curating a new urban identity for Africa

In closing, I want to emphasise that new urban imaginations and aspirations are perhaps the most critical factors in our quest towards achieving sustainable urbanisation in Africa. Such new imaginations and aspirations will require radically disrupting our collective image of the city. We need cities that are responsive to our contexts and cultural sensitivities across all scales from individual buildings to streets, neighbourhoods, and metropolitan regions. With Africa being as diverse as it is, sustainable African cities would also have to function and look in remarkably diverse ways. Citizen agency and collective action will have to play a crucial role in curating novel identities for our African cities. Local materials, ideas and talent will have to take centre stage in this transition. New forms of architecture will have to emerge. New modes of moving around and accessing places will have to emerge. New identities of the image of the city will have to emerge.