Introduction: Urban Transitions in Africa

Since 2007, most of the world's population has lived in urban settings for the first time in human history. Africa is the last (inhabited) predominantly rural continent, but it's most rapidly urbanizing one. It is undergoing an "urban revolution" (Parnell and Pieterse 2014) unlike that seen anywhere else in the world for reasons that will be elaborated later. What this means for development outcomes and pathways is one of the most pressing questions facing the region.

Africa's urbanization rate is rising steadily, and this will continue in coming decades (see Figure I.1). The geographical distribution of urban agglomerations is widespread, and some estimates suggest more than 50 cities on the continent have populations greater than one million people (see Figure I.2). Lagos and Kinshasa alone are thought to hold approximately 14 million people each (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018), although some estimates put the formers' population at over 20 million. Many cities in the region have populations which have grown rapidly in recent decades. For example, Kinshasa added 8.2 million people between 2000 and 2020; Lagos added 354,000 per annum, and a few even tripled their population numbers since 2000 (e.g., Luanda and Dar es Salaam). However, some of the fastest growth rates of all (7.3% per year 2015-2020) are registered for smaller urban settlements such as Gwagwalda (Nigeria), Kabinda (Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC]), and Mbouda (Cameroon) (Satterthwaite 2021). Some observers posit that thirteen of the world's twenty largest cities will be in Africa by the end of this century, with Lagos potentially being the first city with more than 100 million people (Hoornweg and Pope 2017).1 As Figure I.2 demonstrates, urban growth will be highly significant throughout the region and not only in mega, primate, or large cities but in secondary agglomerations as well. By 2050 it is estimated that 70% of all Africans will be urbanites (Paller 2019).

Figure I.1 Urbanization trends by region 1950-2050.
Source: UNDESA, 2019 / United Nations / Licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Figure I.2 Size and growth of Africa's urban agglomerations 1990-2030.
Data source: World Population Prospect-UNDESA GISS/ACS/ECA 2016; Original figure modified from United Nations Economic Commission for Africa [UNECA], 2017.

While official statistics on urban growth rates remain somewhat specious - based on inconsistent vital registration systems and irregular censuses, United Nations [UN] projections, and sample surveys - it is clear that municipal leaders and policymakers in most African cities face very significant challenges with respect to delivering vital collective goods and services (e.g., water, housing, energy). Common to almost all cities is the reality that municipal governments' budgetary, bureaucratic, and technical capacities are insufficient to effectively manage the "urban revolution." For example, only 5% of Kinshasa's huge population has sewer connections and Lagos' municipal leaders grappled with an estimated 1,353 (new) in-migrants per day in 2020-2021; giving a growth rate of approximately 3.5% per year (Macrotrends 2021a). In Nairobi, nearly 60% of the city's population lives in informal settlements that occupy only 6% of the land area (Bird et al. 2017; Talukdar 2018). Providing housing, sanitation, education, and job opportunities for burgeoning populations is incredibly challenging, even if, as the case of Lagos, some cities have relatively/more effective urban governance systems (Cheeseman and de Gramont 2017).2

Historically, urbanization is most often a process associated with structural economic transformation, whereby countries shift from reliance on primary sectors, such as agriculture, to manufacturing and other secondary industries (e.g., construction) that benefit from the scale and scope economies that cities can provide. Such transitions can generate formal employment, create new trading opportunities, and base industries, and facilitate social upgrading in terms of improved incomes and access to services. In Africa today, however, generative pathways such as these remain generally elusive as the region has not experienced sufficient growth in manufacturing sectors and other value-adding industries capable of providing employment for rising urban populations; the discourse of "Africa Rising" notwithstanding (Carmody et al. 2020). Instead, urbanization without industrialization has become the norm in most of the region's countries; marked, in particular, by an expanding informal economy where approximately 85% of Africans currently work (Choi et al. 2020). Furthermore, many African cities are "imploding" due to infrastructure overload, marked by a general lack, and highly uneven distribution of, basic services and collective goods (e.g., water, sanitation, housing).

Such conditions coexist with the increasing integration of Africa's cities and economies into the world economy through trade, financial flows, information-communication technologies (ICTs), and migration. Economic growth has accompanied this process in most countries, but wealth and welfare distributions have been highly uneven. As Abdul Malik Simone (2001: p. 17) explains:

as the "insides" of African cities are more differentially linked to proliferating networks of accumulation and circulation operating at also increasingly differentiated scales, this uncertainty [for most of the population] is "materalized."

In response to this precarity, networks of social support play a vital role, making people a type of "infrastructure" (Simone 2004). As one respondent for another study noted "we don't have insurance here, you see, we make connections and friendships, it's our insurance" (quoted in Joelsson 2021: p. 144). Social capital, relationships, and networks thus serve as vital means for the urban poor to manage material deprivations associated with uneven development, creating "a moral economy in the sense that the maintenance of social relationships often outweigh[s] the importance of profits" (Newell 2012: p. 3). Africa's urban poor deliberately create their own social capital in work realms, where jobs must be "invented," and reside in the region's burgeoning informal economies (Grant 2010).

Simone (2022, p. 4) has more recently developed a more encompassing theory of the "surrounds" to better explain the urban milieu. This he says can be thought of as urbanization from the bottom up, most visible in urban peripheries undergoing (re)development. "These are spaces of intensive contiguity of the disparate - disparate forms, functions and ways of doing things." They are a "mode of accompaniment" to more formal urbanism.

Paradoxically, however, African cities are also sites for hyperdifferentiation (Grant and Nijman 2004) and hyperaccumulation and wealth generation for elites and growing middle classes. As a result, many cities have experienced construction booms and real estate speculation in middle and high-income markets, physically manifest in the development of shopping malls, gated communities, and luxury housing projects that do little to ameliorate, or may even exacerbate, the material challenges facing the poor (Murphy and Carmody 2019; Murphy 2022), generally marked by extreme social and spatial polarization (Grant and Nijman 2004). For example, the redevelopment of Lagos' urban waterfront was enabled in part by the partial destruction of Makoko, a floating slum built on stilts on an area partly reclaimed from the water by compacting sand, wood shavings, and rubbish. The results were devastating to some of the long-time residents of the settlement and fisherfolk such as Elebiomayo Folashade, who had been a relatively well-off woman living there:

They destroyed my boats and my husband's boats and now I cannot pay the school fees, so the children have been withdrawn from school," she says. "I am old - what am I going to do now?(Leithead 2017: p. 7).

The Lagos state government has had a "war" and "kick against indiscipline" policies directed against informal residents, such as the mass displacement at Oshodi market in 2009 (Omoegun 2015). Violent displacements of urban residents are often undertaken by the military or police, but also in some cases by armed private companies such as the infamous "Red Ants" in South Africa, allowing for "accumulation by repossession" (Cooper and Paton 2021). Such uneven developments are widening inequalities and further complicating attempts to improve the distribution of vital collective goods and services. Thus urban "renewal" and "urbicide" (Coward 2009) are often two sides of the same coin, despite the plaudits the urban management of Lagos has received (see Cheeseman and de Gramont 2017). However, displaced urban residents may also "take back" spaces from which they have been displaced through informal street trading, for example (Gillespie 2017). Residents in informal settlements may also appropriate or repurpose infrastructure to their own ends as well, so are far from completely powerless as is often depicted in the literature.

The circumstances facing Africa's cities today can be understood in part as a symptom of what Fox and Goodfellow (2022) term "late...