Developing Urban Futures Urban Age conference newspaper

DEVELOPING URBAN FUTURES CONTENTS 3 DATA FOREWORD Ricky Burdett and Anna Herrhausen 4 FOREWORD 25 DYNAMICS OF URBAN GROWTH DEVELOPING URBAN FUTURES 26 WHERE PEOPLE LIVE Peter Griffiths 30 FLIGHT PATTERNS PERSPECTIVES ON AFRICA 6 7 36 URBAN EXPANSION Vera Songwe 37 BUILT FORM PARADOXES OF AFRICAN URBANISM 38 MASS TRANSIT 39 POPULAR TRANSIT PRODUCTIVITY AND URBAN FORM J. Vernon Henderson, Sebastian Kriticos and Tanner Regan 9 34 RESIDENTIAL DENSITY AFRICA’S URBAN TRANSFORMATION Edward Glaeser 8 32 COMPARING CITIES 40 HOW PEOPLE MOVE 42 LIVING IN THE CITY DELIVERING EQUITY LOCALLY 44 GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES Mpho Parks Tau 48 AFRICAN URBAN DYNAMICS URBAN AGE DEVELOPING URBAN FUTURES CONFERENCE ADDIS ABABA 29 – 30 NOVEMBER 2018 ORGANISED BY LSE CITIES AT THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND THE ALFRED HERRHAUSEN GESELLSCHAFT URBANAGE.LSECITIES.NET EDITORS Ricky Burdett, Director, LSE Cities Philipp Rode, Executive Director, LSE Cities Peter Griffiths, Managing Editor, LSE Cities SPECIAL THANKS 12 PLACE-MAKING IN DISSONANT TIMES Edgar Pieterse AFRICAN CITIES 13 MAKING INCLUSION MORE INCLUSIVE Kate Meagher 51 CAPTURING URBAN LIVES 14 VISUALISING POPULAR TRANSPORT Jacqueline M. Klopp 16 ETHIOPIA’S RAILWAY REVOLUTION LEARNING FROM ADDIS ABABA Philipp Rode 59 STEERING GROWTH Mathewos Asfaw Bekele GLOBAL CHALLENGES 59 A CITY IN FLUX 19 URBANISATION TRENDS Fasil Giorghis Eduardo López Moreno 60 GATED ADDIS Yeraswork Admassie 19 LOCKING-IN CITIES Nicholas Stern and Dimitri Zenghelis 61 TAKING THE CITY TO THE COUNTRYSIDE Zegeye Cherenet 20 NEW URBAN PERIPHERIES Shlomo Angel 61 THE NEW FLOWER Rahel Shawl 21 AGENCY OF INFORMALITY David Satterthwaite 62 REQUIEM FOR ARAT KILO 22 ON HOLD IN JAKARTA Marco Di Nunzio AbdouMaliq Simone 62 INFORMAL LOGICS Elias Yitbarek Alemayehu British Academy Cities and Infrastructure Programme British Council, Ethiopia Ethiopian Embassy, London Mathewos Asfaw Bekele, Addis Ababa City Plan Commission Getachew Betru, CEO, Ethiopia Railways Corporation (2007-17) Lealem Berhanu Desta, Addis Ababa City Plan Commission Fasil Giorghis, EiABC, Addis Ababa University Astrid Haas, IGC Khaled Hussein, UNECA Taibat Lawanson, University of Lagos Susanna Moorehead, British Ambassador to Ethiopia Sue Parnell, University of Bristol and University of Cape Town Vera Songwe, UNECA Henry Telli, IGC Photography Charlie Rosser (Addis Ababa); Mudondo Evaline (Kampala); Emeka Okereke (Lagos); Yann Arthus-Bertrand (Lagos); Robert Harding (Cape Town); Daniel Hayduk (Dar es Salaam); Tony Karumba (Nairobi); Daniel Koßmann (Nairobi). Cover: Urban development near Bole Arabsa on the edges of Addis Ababa. ©Charlie Rosser Back cover: Addis Ababa’s Chinese-built light rail transit is the first in sub-Saharan Africa. ©Charlie Rosser The Urban Age turns its ‘reflexive lens’ to Africa after a series of international conferences that have allowed us to assess selected cities in hotspots of urban growth and change across the world. For 15 years, the Urban Age project has conducted a worldwide investigation into the future of cities, holding conferences, generating research, curating exhibitions, publishing books (most recently Shaping Cities in an Urban Age) and producing newspapers like this one to explore the relationship between the design of cities – how we live, move and work – and how they can be better governed and managed to tackle the challenges of, for example, uncontrolled sprawl, inequality and climate change. The final leap towards an ‘urban age’ requires urgent exploration. 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by 2050, the vast majority in Africa and Asia.Yet, much of the infrastructure to support this urban expansion is yet to be built.To contribute to the exploration, the Urban Age has carried out new research on African cities in the build-up to the Addis Ababa conference on Developing Urban Futures.The dynamics of growth and change of ‘young’ sub-Saharan African cities – their size, population, density and social and economic profiles – are presented alongside those of emerging cities in Asia and more mature urban centres of developed nations.The aim is not to create a ranking of urban performance or ‘success’ but to better inform the decisions that are taken today that will shape urban lives for generations to come. The risks associated with steep and unmanaged urban growth are high.The essays in this publication provide context and perspective on the challenges faced by developing cities: from fragmented urbanisation and economic inefficiency, to environmental damage and limited democratic accountability. As the location for the 17th Urban Age conference, Addis Ababa, with its distinctive model of urban transformation in Africa, is explored in greater detail as a basis to frame questions around our shared urban future. With the help of over 60 experts and policymakers from 26 cities in Africa, Asia, Europe, South and North America, the Urban Age conference in Addis Ababa is designed to create common ground to take the debate about Developing Urban Futures further. It is the continuation of a conversation that since 2005 has investigated over 40 cities globally, engaged more than 6,000 people and given voice to 500 urban experts, scholars, practitioners and policymakers. We welcome you to the 2018 Urban Age. Ricky Burdett Anna Herrhausen Director, Urban Age and LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science Executive Director, Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft MAYOR’S OFFICE 2 3 PERSPECTIVES ON AFRICA DEVELOPING URBAN FUTURES Peter Griffiths In 1950, roughly half the world’s urban population lived in Europe and North America. A few decades on, Asia eclipsed Europe and is today home to half the world’s city dwellers. As Europe enters deeper into an ageing society, Africa will soon overtake it for second position behind Asia. Today, 42 per cent of Africans are urban dwellers, about 500 million people. In the next few decades this number will swell to over 1.4 billion, with twelve million young people entering the labour market every year. ‘...experiments across Africa’s divergent cities suggests that perhaps Africa may give birth to new forms of city-making.’ The rapidly growing urban areas in Africa and Asia may soon set the global urban agenda on everything from climate change and social inclusion to productivity and transport innovation, given the relatively larger populations and significant need for constructing spaces, connecting people and supporting livelihoods. Nigeria’s cities alone will accommodate 189 million more people by 2050. Ethiopia is fast moving from being a predominantly rural economy to an urban one, with Addis Ababa growing at an annual rate of about 4 per cent – twice the rate of Beijing or Jakarta. In the rush to deliver cities, critical infrastructure needs may be overwhelming. According to the African Development Bank, two-thirds of the investments in urban infrastructure needed between now and 2050 have yet to be made, and extensive informal housing will require some form of upgrading. But can the grace of an incremental growth narrative be afforded to African cities? London grew its metro rail network over 150 years; Shanghai built the world’s longest metro in little over 15 years. In a more technologically advanced world than Victorian England, the question of how to design and plan cities may never have been so important. Since the start of the millennium there has been renewed interest in building tall in cities as diverse as Cairo, Maputo, Abuja, Kampala, Cape Town, Durban, Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam, Luanda and Port Louis. A building in Johannesburg’s financial district has just become the new tallest building in Africa after 45 years, highlighting a growing optimism in Africa’s cities. Plans for even taller towers in Casablanca, Nairobi, Accra and Abuja are on the drawing board. The state-led development model in Addis Ababa is perhaps atypical of the African story. Green and yellow corrugated-iron sheets enclose demolished 4 areas like bandages, highlighting a scale of change occurring in many cities across the continent (see page 24). The plethora of experiments across Africa’s divergent cities suggests that perhaps Africa may give birth to new forms of city-making and find bold ways of responding to rapid growth, environmental sustainability and reconfiguring cities to be spatially more inclusive in a context of urbanisation without industrialisation. A potential benefit of the continent’s current phase of urbanisation is that development models have already been tested sufficiently across the globe. Those developing Africa’s urban futures can learn from what worked and, perhaps more important, what didn’t. But the evidence on the ground is, at best, mixed. Congestion, sprawl and inadequate infrastructure prevail as city leaders attempt to modernise and retrofit overstressed urban systems. Policymakers, investors and entrepreneurs are operating in a context where the informal economy accounts for 50–80 per cent of the continent’s GDP, 60–80 per cent of employment and 90 per cent of new jobs. The prevailing form of growth in many African cities of varying size is ad-hoc and incremental. As a continent, Africa’s infrastructure patterns have historically focused on connecting resources and commodities to global markets, rather than people and ideas. This process has become more complex in the twenty-first century, with China playing a critical – and controversial – role in creating a new generation of infrastructure with potentially transformative impact. Among other forms of investment, the growing superpower is replacing and extending some of the railways built by British, French and Portuguese colonial governments to connect places in Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia. This infrastructure may allow cities in the world’s most unified regional union (the African Union covers the entire continent) to link not just to the outside world, but also internally. Intra-regional trade in Africa is only 18 per cent of total exports versus 59 per cent and 69 per cent for Asia and Europe. As African cities connect to each other and share ideas, opportunities to negotiate more favourable trade terms increase. Africa’s changing flight patterns (see page 30) illustrate this: growth has not only been directed at China and India – flights within Africa have also doubled in the last 15 years. Trade figures over a similar period mirror this trend, with export and import growth between Africa and China and India almost doubling. And, as China taught the English to drink tea, Ethiopia is taking coffee to China, with one entrepreneur betting on an empire of 100 cafes by 2022, highlighting how culture continues to flow from African shores. An Urban Age perspective The data and essays in this Urban Age newspaper present key aspects of African urbanisation in a global context. Shlomo Angel’s work shows that, globally, it isn’t necessarily rapid population growth (while a significant contributor) that is driving urban expansion, but sprawl, with cities taking up more space per person than ever before, a condition known to make cities less productive, less sustainable and less inclusive. Since 1990, a basket of 200 cities has expanded five times, but their populations have only doubled. This, and Nicholas Stern’s caution that the next few decades are a once-inhistory opportunity to build sustainable cities, frames the challenge of developing new urban futures that are resilient to technological, economic and climate change, and inclusive. Even so, all the research into understanding Africa’s existing popular transport networks, the challenge of connecting people and opportunities and how best to govern urban informality also suggests that at least some of what might need to be built in Africa has already been built. Lagos and Cairo already have populations as large as some of the world’s largest mega-cities: New York City, Shanghai and Mexico City. ‘Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Africa’s urban future is not the magnitude of problems, but the urgency of implementing solutions.’ In the quest to have a story that is more connected to a modern and global narrative, Fasil Giorghis warns of the importance of retaining a past, not only in symbolic architecture, but also in the texture of connection on the streets. These are qualities that, once lost, can never be designed back in. Edgar Pieterse’s provocation is that citizen participation experiments, like in Nigeria’s Port Harcourt, could be part of the solution to retrofitting existing pieces of city instead of rebuilding them from scratch. An extensive community mapping project plugged a gap in available data, enabling the possibility of delivering urban infrastructures in informally planned areas. A significant challenge in understanding Africa’s urban conditions is its vast complexity. While some areas are among the least urbanised globally (see page 26), others can trace urban histories back further than much of Europe1. Language barriers in Anglo-, Franco- and Lusophone knowledge production, and a tendency to simplify the African story given limited and inaccessible locally produced content, has increased the challenge of comparing African cities to each other and to global examples. Almost half of all cities in Africa do not have a recent census and accessing data at sufficient quality for study required substantial resources except in a few examples. Many of the African cities investigated by the Urban Age simply cannot be known at the same level of detail as more developed cities. With knowledge production about cities still concentrated in the Global North, the risk is that Africa’s urban success stories remain hidden. But there are exceptions. Cape Town, for instance, encourages the use of city data by universities, entrepreneurs and the general public to drive innovation. There is considerable work to be done, though, to satisfy Michael Bloomberg’s tongue-in-cheek exhortation to city mayors: ‘In God we trust. Everyone else bring data.’ In an effort to understand the local story, we commissioned a series of commentaries on cities across Africa. Some came back overwhelmingly negative. The more objective comparative data collected by LSE Cities (see pages 24–49) shows that African cities do not necessarily perform worstof-the-worst. In many instances African cities – for now – perform far better than cities elsewhere, particularly in resource use. This can offer some reason to hope. It is also clear that African countries with the highest human development are also the most urbanised (see page 24), mirroring a trend found across the world. As Africa urbanises, it seems likely that measures of education, health and wellbeing will increase, as will democratic accountability. The Urban Age has investigated models of sustainable development in other parts of the world where urbanisation is largely complete. Will Africa produce new models, rendering them more inclusive, productive and liveable? The evidence, in part, suggests this is possible. Greater connectivity and trade between cities, which could soon be part of the largest free trade area in terms of participating countries since the formation of the World Trade Organization2, may also result in a far less fragmented urban landscape. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Africa’s urban future is not the magnitude of problems, but the urgency of implementing solutions. 1. Anderson, David and Richard Rathbone. Africa’s Urban Past. 2000. 2. Crabtree, Justina. 2018. ‘Africa is on the verge of forming the largest free trade area since the World Trade Organization’ in CNBC, 20 March 2018. Peter Griffiths is the Managing Editor of LSE Cities. Street vendor, Kampala: Africa’s cities, like all others, thrive by maximising opportunities for transaction. ©Mudondo Evaline 5 AFRICA’S URBAN TRANSFORMATION Vera Songwe Africa, along with Asia, is the epicentre of global urbanisation. This transition will undoubtedly result in considerable challenges including demand for employment, services and infrastructure. At the same time, it presents significant opportunities to enable structural transformation, if well planned and managed. Urbanisation in many African countries has not been driven by improving productivity. Indeed, most countries are urbanising rapidly amid declining or stagnant industrial output and low agricultural productivity. One useful way to group African countries in terms of urbanisation is to consider their position in natural resource exports and economic diversification. Countries fall into four basic groups with similar development challenges: pre-transition countries, transition countries, diversified economies and natural resource exporters (see page 48). Pre-transition countries (for example, Ethiopia), have an opportunity to set a trajectory for well-planned development of cities, balanced development of urban systems and diversified, labour-rich industrial target sectors. They also face challenges of limited public resources, low capacities (particularly outside primary cities) and low levels of infrastructure. Transition countries (Cameroon, Mozambique and Rwanda) tend to be early in the urbanisation process, but already experiencing some of the urban diseconomies. They can still channel emerging growth to invest in key infrastructure and create well placed and serviced industrial locations, linking industry to rural resources. Diversified economies (Mauritius and South Africa) must manage the challenges of urban growth to maximise the benefits of agglomeration economies and the continued dynamism of their cities. They face crucial trade-offs between investing limited resources, primarily in established and growing cities and industries, or attempting to balance development and industrialise lagging regions. Natural resource exporters (Republic of Congo and Gabon) face some of the toughest challenges. Large, export-driven consumption cities tend to have high informality and inequality, and job-poor sectors can crowd out industries that generate more jobs and more balanced development. However, these exporters also have huge opportunities to use financial resources for infrastructure investments, leverage industrial linkages to successful export sectors and harness the power of consumption as a driver of industrial development. African leaders have already affirmed the need to harness the potential of urbanisation for structural transformation through the Common African Position on the New Urban Agenda that emerged from Habitat III as the global urban development framework for the next two decades, underscoring the role of cities in structural transformation and sustainable development. 6 Using urban demand to drive industrial development Industrial targets tied to urbanisation can tap into Africa’s rapid urban growth to develop domestic and regional markets for domestic industrial products, including through leveraging the recently agreed African Continental Free Trade Area. Africa’s urbanisation is in many places accompanied by a growing consumer class with more purchasing power and preferences for manufactured goods. Changing consumption patterns have already created opportunities for domestic industry, especially in the automotive, food, housing and the infrastructure sectors. Automobile consumption in Africa is associated with rising incomes and continued urbanisation. With the sector’s potential to meet the growing demand of the urban middle class for vehicles domestically, or regionally, policies can target the sector to foster industrialisation and generate learning for later entry to global value chains. South Africa – the continent’s leading producer – illustrates the industry’s potential. Largely reflecting policies since 1995, it domestically produced 588,000 vehicles and exported 329,053 in 2017. The automotive industry, which has 150 component companies, contributed 6.9 per cent of GDP in 2017. Gauteng, though geographically the smallest province in South Africa, is the most populous with an estimated population of 14.7 million. It also has the most automotive suppliers, as it offers investors business opportunities, including a well-developed infrastructure. The Gauteng Growth and Development Agency, the Automotive Industry Development Centre and the Automotive Supplier Park provide support to the industry and are charged with promoting its trade and investment and implementing projects. An additional enabling factor is South Africa’s position as a major supplier of platinum and other platinum-group metals required by the automotive industry. South Africa meets 12 per cent of the demand for catalytic converters and has 70 per cent of the world’s chromium, used in producing modern auto exhausts1. Similarly, in Morocco industrial policies have fostered a large and fast-expanding automotive industry, including a Renault factory in the economic free zone municipality of Melloussa, near Tangiers. The industry is now the country’s largest export sector, dethroning phosphate exports. Automobile production is also on the rise in Algeria, Egypt has 15 car assembly plants targeting the domestic market2 and Kenya and Ethiopia have emerging vehicle assembly sectors. In the area of construction, growth, particularly for housing and urban infrastructure, reflects rising urban demand. Housing is a major source of wealth creation and savings, with investments accounting for 6 per cent of GDP, and for each house built, five jobs can be created3. Housing, through backward linkages, can encourage construction industries to form, including basic industries such as cement and steel. With the expanding housing and construction sector and sophistication of the real estate market, there are good prospects to develop industry further by upgrading skills and developing design, contracting and consulting capacities. African per capita spending on urban housing is consistently higher than in rural areas, pointing to growing opportunities. However, the sector is struggling in many countries as institutional problems account for an inefficient supply chain and expensive housing units, highlighting the need to remove regulatory barriers. Housing is 55 per cent more expensive in urban Africa than in other developing countries’ urban areas4. Typical house-price-to-income ratio globally ranges between 3:1 and 5:1, but often in Africa, even for public service employees whose average income is higher than the majority’s, the ratio goes above 10:1. The cheapest formally built housing, too, is much higher in Africa on this ratio than in other developing regions. The level and growth of per capita GDP will be major contributors to upgrading urban housing supplies. Middle-class households tend to own their own homes and reside in bigger and more permanent housing, equipped with modern durable goods. In Algeria, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia more than 60 per cent of households own their homes, in part a reflection of the rise of the middle class5. The quality of their housing also tends to be better, with more solidly built roofs, walls and floors, and less overcrowding6. There is need for governments to actively address the persistent formal housing gap for families who will not enter the middle class in the coming decades. Such programmes can be directly tied to industrialisation policies, as has been done in Ethiopia. Similarly, the investment in housing that North African countries like Morocco and Tunisia have made since the 1990s is reflected in impressive changes in housing conditions. In Morocco the share of the urban population living in slums fell from 37 per cent in 1990 to 13 per cent in 2005. Africa’s urban housing deficit is accompanied by a huge infrastructure deficit. The continent lags behind the rest of the world in access to electricity, internet penetration and access to improved water, and has large road-maintenance needs. West Africa has lower road density and road quality than other regions; North Africa has a higher prevalence of paved roads and better access to electricity; East and Southern Africa do best on internet servers. The annual financing requirement for infrastructure investment in Africa excluding North Africa is estimated at $93 billion7, but this covers rural and urban areas. With rapid urbanisation and growing cities, countries will need to simultaneously catch up with the backlog, invest for the growing population and spend on maintenance. In the last two decades the region has seen significant growth in infrastructure investment, with an increasing share of private sector finance relative to official development assistance, including growing investment by China. Still, 65 per cent of the total comes from public budgets. This might be lower than the 5–6 per cent of GDP advocated by development practitioners, but countries such as Angola, Cabo Verde and Lesotho are investing more than 8 per cent of GDP7. Diverse and connected system of cities African countries are often characterised by unbalanced national urban systems with a very large primary city and less competitive smaller cities. Urban systems tend to be top heavy with expensive and crowded primary cities, and secondary cities that are too small to be viable alternatives for competitive industries. In response, some African countries have put in place policies to rebalance urban systems, which risks wasting resources. Ethiopia’s urban policies focus on promoting planned secondary city development in advance of urbanisation, largely as industrial enterprises are relatively clustered. In 2009/10, Addis Ababa had 11 times the number of manufacturing enterprises of the second city on this metric (Awassa)8. Road and railway linkages connecting secondary cities to each other and to their surrounding rural areas form a central plank for developing regional growth poles. During the first decade of this century, Ethiopia allocated 3 per cent of GDP to investment in roads, bringing the quality of the trunk network up to the level of other low-income countries in Africa9. Current and planned railway mega-projects, including the Addis Ababa–Djibouti railway project (see page 16) and road and railway connections to agricultural hinterlands, are designed to facilitate trade, agro-processing and industrial development. In Egypt, crowding in urban centres, particularly Greater Cairo and Alexandria, as well as urban expansion onto precious agricultural land, led the government to develop a New Cities programme from 1977. Twenty-two new cities have been established, which fall into the following categories: primarily residential satellite centres around Cairo; twin cities intended to have an economic base but connected to an existing smaller city; and independent cities, with their own industrial base. Better-functioning cities The power of agglomeration economies gives large cities a major productive advantage. Firms in cities have better access to labour, markets, inputs and knowledge sharing. However, many large cities in Africa are underperforming, with the potential of agglomeration economies undercut by poorly functioning land and property markets, inadequate mobility options and disconnected and sprawling urban form including residential segregation. Poorly functioning land markets lead to disconnect between the productive potential of a city and the cost of land. For instance, the cost of non-residential land is not necessarily correlated with GDP per capita in Africa’s cities. Tunis and Nouakchott, for example, have lower rents while Lusaka and Dakar have higher rents relative to per capita GDP. Rwanda has proven that large-scale land regularisation is financially and administratively feasible. As part of its land reform policies, the Land Tenure Regularisation Programme identified and registered 8.4 million plots, with a trial period in 2008–10 and full scaling-up in 2010–1310. The programme employed 110,000 Rwandans, with 99 per cent working in their own communities, while keeping the cost per title at approximately $7, which is extremely low for such programmes11. As of 2014, 81 per cent of identified plots had been approved for titling (freehold and leasehold), with only 0.1 per cent remaining unregistered parcels with unresolved disputes12. The programme improved gender equity through regulations and education, resulting in the inclusion of married women’s names on plots and enhanced gender parity in inheritance rights13. Agglomeration economies are also undercut by weak connectivity and poor urban mobility. The inability of people to move easily through cities shrinks opportunities for labour pooling and knowledge sharing, both critical to increased firm productivity. One study has revealed that there is a higher productivity gap within Kenya’s industrial sector than in India or China, with the productivity differential between firms at the 80th and 20th percentile three times more than in India and over four times more than in China. Insufficient, poorly planned and disconnected road space alongside increasing motorisation has led to choking levels of congestion in many cities. Road investments are often skewed towards highways and ring roads rather than a more fine-grained scale of urban connectivity, leading to only temporary relief as excess road space is quickly filled up by more drivers and as cities de-densify in response to new peripheral connections. However, five quantitative studies on industrial clusters in Africa suggest that agglomeration economies are at work, confirming that urban areas hold benefits for firms in Africa. Harnessing urbanisation for industrialisation: policy priorities Today’s policy decisions for urban design and infrastructure will have a long-term lock-in effect and thus shape the development path of Africa’s cities. But to be more productive and tap into urban advantages for industrial development, policies need to be more integrated in the following areas: Centrality of national development planning: Policymakers need to leverage urban drivers such as increase in aggregate demand and consumption by maximising urban productivity enablers and addressing barriers through a coherent set of sound urban development policies, planning and investments aligned to industrial development goals and priorities. Many African states have recently re-recognised the need for national development plans, including long-term visions and the means of achieving them. South Africa’s 2030 National Development Plan, for example, considers urban growth an opportunity. Industrial policies should enable sector targeting: Investments and public resources will have more impact if they lift certain industrial subsectors and their value chains to achieve the development goals in the national development plan. Targeting specific subsectors for industrialisation and managing the trade-offs between investment strategies should consider the comparative advantages of these subsectors. Spatial considerations in industrial policies: Successful industrial policies should be tailored to the spatial needs of targeted subsectors and firms, and different types of cities should be developed to match different industry needs. Spatial targeting of investments and developing a functionally complementary system of cities and towns must be embedded in industrial and urban policies. Special economic zones (SEZs) offer one option for spatially connecting industry with the benefits of agglomeration economies in pockets of well-serviced land. The way forward African cities present common opportunities to expand industries to meet urban domestic and regional demand while generating jobs and supporting development outcomes, including agro-processing, urban housing construction and urban infrastructure construction. Across the continent, national, regional and city-level policymakers can make the most of these opportunities, but only if they take into account the following interconnected issues that will enable cities to deliver sustainable change. Implementing policies: Administrative arrangements and budgetary support should mirror a coordinated structure for urban and industrial development policies. Disconnects between these elements are often the cause of failures in implementation. Institutional capacity: Implementing urban and industrial policies in a coordinated manner requires a sound institutional framework matching the structure of the policies. Many African countries still face institutional constraints for coordinating the two strands – urban and industrial. Finding the financing: Empowering urban local authorities with financial capacity to better plan and manage cities is crucial if cities are to better support industrial development. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda, for instance, recognised the role of subnational actors in financing for development. But decentralisation without financing, and weak local capacities for financial management and revenue generation, challenge many African cities. Knowledge: A critical challenge in harmonising urban and industrial development is the paucity of knowledge and evidence. In particular, spatial economic data, especially at subnational level, are lacking, which constrains progress. Closer cooperation is thus needed between urban agencies and national statistical offices. Conclusion Africa is undergoing a rapid urban transition with considerable implications for industrialisation, a key imperative for inclusive structural transformation. Urbanisation and industrialisation are closely linked elsewhere, but in Africa these links are weak. Where they exist, the urbanisation-industrialisation nexus has often developed organically rather than through deliberate policy responses, even though the importance of coordinating industrial and urban development was recognised by African policymakers as far back as the 1960s14. The challenge for Africa is thus to transform its economic growth into sustained and inclusive development by harnessing urbanisation to promote economic diversification, with a special focus on industrialisation that creates jobs, reduces inequality and poverty, and enhances access to basic services. Domestic and regional markets are expanding, creating opportunities for African industries to meet growing, and shifting, demand. Strategic and expanding sectors, supported by domestic policy, are in a position to leverage this demand to boost industrial development. Still, policies that are well targeted can create viable industrial locations that meet the needs of industry without impinging on the economic power of large cities. Supporting the role of large cities to be centres of knowledge and innovation can help leverage their potential for industrial productivity. At the same time, secondary cities and well-located SEZs with the right infrastructure can balance the needs of sectors for access to inputs, labour, markets and knowledge. Further, despite the importance of cities for industrial development and vice versa, the planning processes and institutional frameworks are disjointed. Policies are often formulated and implemented in ‘silos,’ with little analysis of the impact of urban trends and economic geography on industrialisation in national development plans. To leverage the opportunities created by urban demand, a host of strategic actions should support activities at all stages of targeted value chains in agriculture, manufacturing and services, such as building skills, improving infrastructure, expanding access to business services and promoting spatial development policies. 1. Lemprecht, N. 2016. South Africa Automotive Export Manual. Pretoria, South Africa: Automotive Industry Export Council. 2. Oxford Business Group. 2016. Egypt’s domestic automotive industry shows promise. 3. World Bank. 2015. Stocktaking of the Housing Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges and opportunities. 4. Dasgupta, B., S. Lall and N. Lozano-Gracia. 2014. ‘Urbanization and Housing Investment.’ Policy Research Working Paper. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. 5. Ncube, M., C. Lufumpa and S. Kayizzi-Mugerwa. 2011. ‘The Middle of The Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa.’ Market Brief. Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire: African Development Bank. 6. Lozano-Garcia, N., and C. Young. 2014. ‘Housing Consumption and Urbanization’. Washington, DC: World Bank. 7. Gutman, J., A. Sy and S. Chattopadhyay. 2015. Financing African Infrastructure: Can the World Deliver? Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. 8.Gebreeyesus, M. 2016. ‘Industrial policy and development in Ethiopia.’ In C. Newman, J. Page, J. Rand, A. Shimeles, M. Söderbom, and F. Tarp (eds.), Manufacturing Transformation: Comparative studies of industrial development in Africa and emerging Asia (pp. 27–49). Helsinki: UNU-WIDER. 9.Foster, V., and Morella, E. 2010. Ethiopia’s Infrastructure: A Continental Perspective. 10. Ministry of Infrastructure. 2015. Habitat III: Rwanda Report. Kigali: Government of Rwanda. 11. DAI. n.d.. Support for Land Tenure Regularisation. Retrieved from DAI.com. 12. Gillingham, P., and Buckle, F. 2014. Rwanda Land Tenure Regularisation Case Study. London: Evidence on Demand. 13. Ali, D. A., Deininger, K., and Goldstein, M. 2013. ‘Environmental and gender impacts of land tenure regularization in Africa: Pilot evidence from Rwanda.’ Journal of Development Economics, 110, 262–275. 14. UNECA. 1962. Workshop on Urbanization in Africa. Addis Ababa. Vera Songwe is Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. PARADOXES OF AFRICAN URBANISM Edward Glaeser Africa’s past is rural. Africa’s future is urban. The growth of Africa’s cities offers tremendous economic, social and political upsides. Urban agglomerations have generated industrialisation, cultural breakthroughs and democratisation, but there are also downsides of urbanisation. Rural life in poor countries offers much less chance for change than urbanisation. Despite the challenges of Africa’s cities, the right response is to fight for improvements in the quality of urban government. For when density is managed well, cities can be places of remarkable pleasure and productivity. Singapore, for example, manages to be clean, healthy and relatively uncongested. Without proper management, density can diminish quality of life. Cities are the absence of physical space between human beings. That closeness enables the flow of goods and ideas, and the use of shared urban joys, including museums, parks and restaurants. But just as urban proximity makes it easier to share a laugh or an insight, it also makes it easier to share a virus. Density enables harmful involuntary transactions, like robberies, just as it enables benign voluntary transactions. The downsides of density can readily spiral out of control, unless they are managed by effective local government. Many of the wealthy cities of the Global North dealt with these by-products of urban crowding so long ago that they may have forgotten how difficult it was to make Paris or New York liveable. Only massive investments in infrastructure and incentives turned London from a place of early death to a city of long life. Even as recently as 1992, murder continued to haunt New York. Yet today that city is remarkably safe. This change didn’t happen easily. The lessons of the wealthy world’s past are particularly important today, but so are the lessons that come from the more recent urbanisation of Latin America. Just like Africa today, many Latin American countries urbanised before they industrialised. São Paulo and Mexico have dealt with crime and traffic congestion for decades. They lacked resources, just like many African cities, and often responded with creative solutions. The scope of the challenge of African cities generates a temptation to just give up on urbanisation, but there is little future in rural poverty. Cities can provide a pathway out of poverty into prosperity, and they are the best hope for political improvement. Improving the quality of life in developingworld cities brings the hope that those cities can enrich their countries and bring more freedom and political accountability. The quest for better cities in the developing world is one of the most important battles of the twenty-first century. The race against time Europe urbanised over centuries. Africa is urbanising over decades. Communities, like Kibera in Nairobi or Dunoon outside Cape Town, emerge in a startlingly short period of time. Whereas European cities grew because of massive demand for industrial labour in cities like Manchester in the UK and Lille in France, in many cases, urban growth in Africa reflects a flight from conflict, agricultural desperation, or high fertility. Consequently, African cities face the dual challenge of enhancing quality of life and economic viability. East Asian urbanisers such as China and Japan also followed the path of industrialisation, but will this path be open to Africa? 7 Land and money As Henry George argued in Progress and Poverty more than a century ago, the most natural source of subsidy for urban infrastructure is local property and land taxation. Property values can be easier to assess than income. Land cannot relocate in response to a local tax. Taxes based on the value of land, rather than structure, do not even deter new building. Better property taxation provides a means for cities to pay for their own infrastructure in a way that does relatively little damage to the overall economy. 8 In many cases, implementing local property taxes requires a number of difficult institutional reforms, including the constitutional ability to tax, establish land records, create tools for property value assessment and, in many places, the replacement of informal land occupancy by formal land ownership. In India, Mumbai’s ability to act is restricted because the city is controlled by the state government of Maharashtra. Property records are often murky, and local real estate expertise is often limited. Most importantly, vast swathes of the urban world lack formal land titling, which prevents the owners from using their property to finance entrepreneurship and prevents the city from imposing civic obligations, like taxes, on the owners. When local expertise is lacking and vulnerability to local corruption is considerable, property tax assessment can be centralised and essentially automated. Simple statistical models can evaluate land values based on plot size and distance from the city centre. Structures can be evaluated by using images, which can either come from Google Street View or be taken by local governments themselves. By combining these images with a database on property sales, machine learning can provide a reasonably accurate model for assessing the values of every home in a city. Nationwide property value assessment can also limit abuse of compulsory purchase or eminent domain at the local level by providing external estimates of the value of appropriated land. Providing infrastructure requires a source of financing, but it also requires institutional design. Should the infrastructure provider be public or private? If public, should it be part of the city government or an independent agency? There is no easy answer. Private companies can save costs, but they can also corrupt local government. Independent authorities may become centres of excellence, or they may become bloated parastatals that provide an unaccountable patronage source. Paradoxically, weak public capacity can be a reason to manage the project in-house instead of outsourcing it to a private enterprise, because placing sewers can be a less difficult task than avoiding subversion by a profitmaking enterprise. The final challenge in water and sewerage provision is ensuring adoption. A ‘last-mile’ problem often exists in developing-world cities where sewer mains are built, often with external aid, but poorer citizens are unwilling to pay for services. It is not surprising that families in countries with a per capita GDP of less than US$2,000 are not willing to pay US$1,000 for a water connection. In some cases, poorer citizens are even unwilling to take free services. In Manila, the water and sewerage companies often offer free desludging for the thousands of septic tanks that are the primary waste repositories in that metropolitan area. Homeowners do not want the service, however, because their septic tanks lie under their kitchens and living rooms and desludging is disruptive. The result of not desludging is that waste spills out into the streets and their neighbours’ space, and the cost of clearing up is not borne by the household itself. The adoption problem is generally more difficult for sewerage than for water. In the case of clean water, most of the benefits accrue to the household and consequently there is usually some willingness to pay. In the case of sewerage, most of the benefits accrue to the wider community that is saved from the costs of rampant waste. Consequently, there is a particularly strong need to provide incentives that complement sewerage infrastructure. Property and ownership In much of urban Africa, property rights are murky at best. One major agenda for Africa is to regularise ownership of urban land in a way that is both fair and efficient. Westerners often act as if the nature of land ownership is somehow obvious. It is not. Western conceptions of property ownership actually combine a wide range of property rights and obligations. For example, ownership is related to the right to be free from expropriation both by the state and private actors, the right to sell land, the right to mortgage land, and the right to build on that land. Typically, the poorer residents of African cities can occupy their land with little fear of expropriation, but they often lack the other rights that are associated with property ownership in the west. Typically, well-meaning western attempts to promote property ownership focus on land registration, not on the set of rights that may or may not come with registered ownership. Expanding the number of rights associated with property ownership in African cities and townships is important, but far from straightforward. For example, the right to build is challenged by building codes. Poorer residents may want to build higherdensity homes, but they may be unable to build safely enough to satisfy existing building codes. The right answer is not obvious, since both density and safety are worthy objectives. Institutional reform around property rights must be part of the African urban agenda, but that institutional reform must be sensitive to local conditions. Ideally that reform will lead to the ability of current slum dwellers to upgrade their residences and increase the number of people who can thrive within the city. Yet it is also possible that reform will lead to land-taking and expropriation of the poor. Improving institutions in an equitable fashion must be a big part of making African cities more liveable. There is much magic in developing world cities. Rural–urban migrants come to these places because they are hoping to find a better future. They are not fools and they are not misled. For all of Rio de Janeiro’s problems, it offers much more than the impoverished rural north-east of Brazil. Yet these new urbanites do face risks from disease and crime. They will spend far too much time crowded into jitneys or minibus taxis sitting in traffic. Living in dense, poorly managed cities will increase stress in their lives. Developing-world cities can be improved. Simple management tools can improve policing. Singapore instituted congestion pricing using paper permits, not high-tech wizardry. Even water and sewerage improvements are possible. These changes may often be difficult, but they are also necessary. These cities are the best hope for the poorer parts of the planet. Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. A version of this essay appears in Shaping Cities in an Urban Age. PRODUCTIVITY AND URBAN FORM J. Vernon Henderson, Sebastian Kriticos and Tanner Regan Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced massive urban population growth over the past half century, dramatically reshaping the spatial and social profile of the region. Simultaneously, the process has challenged the conventional view that urbanisation and economic transformation go hand in hand, as the sub-continent has experienced far less of the economic gains alongside urbanisation than in Latin America and Asia. This challenges the very notion of why people move to cities and how they contribute to economic development. Since most of Africa’s urbanisation is yet to come, it poses a significant challenge to policymakers: what policies will help future urbanisation be a catalyst for productivity growth, rather than an extension of rural poverty. Improving mobility within cities and land use are two policy instruments at the core of Africa’s urbanisation challenges, fundamentally driving the productive potential, efficiency and liveability of cities. Economic density The notion that productivity gains should be closely linked to urbanisation stems from the seminal work of Saint Lucian and Nobel-prize-winning economist Arthur Lewis on structural transformation and industrialisation. As countries urbanise, labour shifts from unproductive ‘traditional’ sector employment (subsistence farming or petty trade) towards modern capitalist activities (manufacturing and business services). Such activities cluster in cities, with density at the heart of this urban transformation. As individuals and activities cluster in cities, scale and specialisation manifest themselves and generate efficiencies. Firms enjoy closer connections between buyers and suppliers, lowering input and transport costs. Workers and employers experience better job-related matching opportunities, reducing search and hiring costs. Meanwhile, close proximity allows individuals and firms to learn from each other, generating knowledge sharing. From a governance perspective, it’s also much cheaper to provide essential public goods – like infrastructure and basic services – when populations are large and clustered together. The question is whether urban density is as productive in Africa. One major concern is that urbanisation is occurring in the region despite low productivity gains in agriculture and limited industrialisation. Most countries still have extremely high agricultural employment, even in their urban areas. In Ethiopia, for instance, 90 per cent of the workforce is in agriculture, as is close to 15 per cent of the urban population. For other African countries – including Mali, Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya – the proportion of primary sector activity in urban areas ranges from 12 to 40 per cent, as compared to countries like India where the share is closer to 7 per cent. Services employment is another key issue. Although it comprises more than half of GDP, Africa has had limited development of high-value industries like financial and business services. Among the largest cities in Africa, typically less than 12 per cent of employment is in tradable services, and under 10 per cent in manufacturing. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that there are large income gains to be made by living in Africa’s denser areas, and that these gains exist across multiple industry sectors. On average, based on data from five African countries, households in the top 25th percentile of cities by population size earn double the income of their rural counterparts. Perhaps even more salient are the returns to urban density, noting that households benefit from both the overall urban density of the city they live in and the local neighbourhood around them. Within a set of 115 larger cities in these countries, a household moving from the tenth to 90th percentile of average city density across cities increases income by 290 per cent, and in moving from the tenth to 90th percentile of neighbourhood density within cities by 89 per cent. Moving people out of low-density settlements and into high-density living has huge impacts on income. These relative gains from increased density are important, but they obscure the fact that absolute productivity in Africa is low compared to the rest of the developing world. The issue is that much of the continent is urbanising while poor, with a poorly educated population, indeed, strikingly poorer than continents like Asia and Latin America were historically at similar levels of urbanisation. This low base of taxable urbanites contributes to deficiencies in institutional capacity that limit economic density and the agglomeration benefits that come from higher densities. Some of these limitations are based on transport deficiencies and weak land market institutions. Transport Reducing commuting costs is the key to allowing jobs to cluster and centralise. With very high commuting costs people live very close to where they work, limiting access to job opportunities and constraining firms to remain local in scope. The reason why London became a manufacturing and services powerhouse in the early 1900s is because firms could access the labour force and their customers with reliable transport services. The construction of the rail and underground system was at the heart of this through its role in centralising employment (see page 38). Between 1831 and 1921, employment rose four-fold in the City of London while the city lost population. The new infrastructure allowed people longer commutes – rising from a typical one to two kilometres of walking to five to six kilometres – contributing to a massive spatial spread of residential locations into the peripheries, and an intense clustering of economic activity within the City of London. In most African cities, economic efficiency is undermined by limited infrastructure and weak public transport. Most travel is done by private means; occasionally by car, motorbike or bicycle, but most often on foot. In major cities like Nairobi, Lagos and Addis Ababa, 30–45 per cent of trips are made on foot, and as many as 70 per cent of trips in Kampala are made by walking (see page 40). This limits households to small distances around their residencies and impedes their access to jobs. Another striking feature of African cities is that motorised transportation is primarily informal – with matatus, tuk-tuks and boda bodas being the standard examples. Planted on congested streets with slow speeds and uncertain commute times, they are not enough to transform mobility in cities. The question is whether the building of modern transit systems in developing countries, such as the roll-out of the Bus Rapid Transit system in Dar es Salaam, could have a similar impact on employment clusters and centralisation as rail did in London historically. Bogotá’s TransMilenio BRT system suggests it can. Commuting distances have risen, employment has clustered into productive locations and city in-migration and employment have both increased – leading to substantial welfare gains due to the BRT. Challenges still remain; in particular, zoning restrictions on building height have limited the extent of economic clustering, thus inhibiting the full benefits of the TransMilenio. The Colombian example highlights the fact that installing transport infrastructure in isolation can mean limited success for truly tackling mobility challenges. Accessibility for an everyday citizen must be considered in terms of three factors – distance, time and cost – that all relate closely to the proximity of citizens to jobs and other urban services. This is why any successful transport policy has to be closely coordinated with land use planning in order to facilitate the intensive, high-density land use needed to make publicly provided transport efficient and cost-effective. is also difficult, which makes it extremely challenging for a developer to assemble plots to pursue large-scale developments. The result is two very different-looking cities. In Dar 89 per cent of buildings are four metres high or less (meaning one storey), while in Nairobi it is only 38 per cent. Of the taller structures, 8 per cent of buildings in Nairobi are over 16 metres, or five storeys, while for Dar it is 2 per cent. Average building height 100 Nairobi Dar es Salaam 80 60 40 Built area (%) In a sense, African cities are in a race against time. Some cities are gradually improving their transportation infrastructure and experiencing capital-deepening, but at the same time, industry is continuing to mechanise. If global automation is sufficiently fast, then African industry will find it difficult to compete despite relatively low wages. In the West, cities have moved from manufacturing to services. Yet to be successful, these service-oriented cities must still have a viable export base, such as the financial sector of London or technology in San Francisco. Today, many African cities also specialise in services, and rely on the export of natural resources. Will this be enough in the middle twenty-first century? I remain optimistic because cities have long innovated their way to prosperity. I expect the same for the cities of Africa. Entrepreneurship is abundant in Lagos, Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Johannesburg. Yet for these cities to survive, they must attract and retain talented job creators. Quality of life is important, not only for its own sake, but also because cities attract talent by being pleasant. The poverty of African cities tends to push local governments to focus on service delivery for the poor, and this is largely appropriate. But if cities are going to be successful economically, they must also be appealing to their wealthier residents. One useful framework is to think of city governments as having a pair of tasks, which require radically different approaches. The first task is wealth creation through the management of urban real estate. Essentially, governments can think of themselves as operating an incredibly large and complex for-profit real estate development company. This company will only succeed if it enables the for-profit sector of the economy to thrive, and if it entices talented entrepreneurs to locate within the city. But the purpose of this profit-making entity is to provide funds that will pay for the second, more important task of city government: poverty alleviation. In a sense, cities should see themselves as having a for-profit real estate company that is owned and operated in the interest of a non-profit poverty reduction organisation. Clearly dividing the two tasks of government is important so that African cities can accurately assess the trade-offs when allocating urban space. The African challenge is particularly difficult because successful poverty alleviation will only lead to continued rural–urban migration. That inexorable flow means that African cities should never view poverty as failure. They will attract more poor people if they succeed. Success and failure should be judged based on whether the city is transforming poor people into rich people. As long as the city is an upward ladder then it is doing its job. 20 0 while making reforms to physical planning schemes to involve further public participation. In Dar es Salaam, the government has made efforts to establish universal access to formalised tenure security but has faced prohibitively high survey costs. Like Kigali, Dar has experimented with new forms of derivative right tenure using satelliteimage-based surveying methods. Another approach that has seen particular success in peri-urban areas of Dar that are yet to be intensely developed, such as the Kigamboni district, was to encourage private companies to supply surveyed land data to the municipal offices. It is important that such efforts are able to keep ahead of intensive development, as evidence from Tanzania shows that pre-emptive action in planning and surveying before settlement can lead to much more efficient urban development Conclusion under 4 4-8 8-16 16-28 28+ Height (m) The highest buildings are in the city centres, but outside the centre, Dar is mostly one-storey buildings while Nairobi has much more height and intensity of land use. It appears that property rights in Nairobi have facilitated intensive investment, while weaker rights in Dar have not. Of course, there are other differences. Tanzania is poorer with a different culture and Dar’s climate is much warmer. Land institutions and their impact on urban density are essential considerations for national, municipal and local governments in Africa. Particularly because many countries are currently undergoing major reforms to streamline land administration and registration, as well as to update overall standards and spatial planning principles. Kigali, for instance, has used satellite technology to register all plots at a low cost Being a competitive city has many dimensions; for instance, better human capital through investments in education and training; better provision of supporting legal and financial institutions; and improved integration and coordination across multiple levels of government. These areas for policy reform, which we have not been able to focus on here, are not only critical but also highly complementary. But there should be no doubt that if African cities hope to succeed and accommodate the needs of their rapidly expanding populations, they will need to get transport and land use policy right. J. Vernon Henderson is the School Professor of Economic Geography at the LSE, Sebastian Kriticos is a development economist working on urbanisation policy with the IGC Cities that Work initiative and Tanner Regan is a PhD student in Economic Geography at the LSE. Land use Strong institutions for land and property seem essential to urban development for several reasons. Marketable, enforced property rights facilitate contracts and the transfer of land to its most productive users. These users will invest in intensive development through high-rise building near the city centre and durable buildings throughout the city. Without such rights, the risk of expropriation, the uncertainty of trade and the inability to obtain financing and insurance would limit investments in property and intensity of development. Well-defined rights systems also support legal enforceability, allowing governments to impose obligations on land owners for the public good such as taxation, enforcements that allow the coordination of public services and restrictions on land use that mitigate negative externalities like industrial pollution and overconsumption of public space. The contrast of the state of institutional development to the intensity of land use across different African cities is revelatory in this regard. In Nairobi, for instance, around 90 per cent of all non-government building land is under private ownership and effectively well titled. This has played a large role in fuelling the city’s construction boom over the last decade. In contrast Dar es Salaam is still moving from customary rights to private property rights. Government registry data suggests that only 20–25 per cent of residential plots have full title through a certificate for right of occupancy. Transferring rights across uses DELIVERING EQUITY LOCALLY Mpho Parks Tau The commitments made at the United Nations’ High-level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in July this year, marked a watershed moment for recognition of the indispensable role of local government in implementing the 2030 Global Agenda. For the first time there was unequivocal acceptance of local and regional governments to deliver, effectively and sustainably, on the SDGs, the New Urban Agenda and the Paris Climate Change Accord. This recognition was underlined in the words of the UN Deputy Secretary-General Ms Amina Mohammed that closer collaboration is required ‘to ensure that this twentyfirst-century United Nations system includes a new and innovative strategy to support and build the capacity of local governments.’ This highlights that cities are now located at the centre of a changing and complex world and, furthermore, that cities have a seat at the global table as equal participants to shape and drive the future of humanity. The UN is legitimately concerned to capacitate and empower cities since there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between local government and sustainable development1, and meeting the needs of citizens and communities hinges on the quality of governance. The degree to which cities and local municipalities are able to deliver ever-expanding public goods depends on meeting the challenges of urbanisation, infrastructure, migration, dwindling finances and climate change. These cannot be solved in isolation. Rather, since their impact cuts across societies and regions they require interlinked governance models. In the memorable words of the late UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, these are meta-problems that show scant regard for borders or ideologies, travelling autonomously without passports. If local government and cities are best placed to deliver effectively most common goods, it calls for policy interventions and concerted action to capacitate cities, 9 Namirembe Road, Kampala: Activity concentrates centrally in Uganda’s capital, facilitating an intense dynamism for trade and exchange. Limited traffic management renders movement difficult. ©Mudondo Evaline 10 11 home to more than four billion residents. Such strategic interventions and actions include granting cities and city-regions greater financial muscle and operational powers. Such decentralisation will benefit the local sphere of governance, but demands – especially in the developing world context – political will. An absence of such political support has driven some mega-cities to respond to challenges thought to be the domain of national government. Lagos, like other middle-income cities, is beginning to emphasise its sovereignty over problemsolving by generating its own electricity. Prioritising cities and local government is informed by the understanding that locally rooted economies and administrations, based on the specificities of local conditions, provide immeasurable benefits. The role of cities in expanding opportunities and capabilities talks to the central argument of Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom about ‘the equality of opportunity’ and ‘participation in growth by all’. In essence, the BRT Rea Vaya, which means ‘we are going’, was intended to redress apartheid spatial patterns and bring dignity to the lives of formerly excluded citizens and communities like outer-lying Soweto through provision of a reliable and affordable public transport system. Noteworthy achievements of this project include activating real estate markets in previously dormant areas, increasing social infrastructure investment and providing greater recognition of public spaces for social inclusion and national cohesion. Such policy interventions are a practical expression of the Global Network of Cities’ Local4Action Hub. The Hub is targeted at building communities of practice to support local and regional governments in addressing local challenges. We should not, in the words of former UN Deputy SecretaryGeneral Mark Malloch-Brown, await ‘tragic events of some kind to bring countries to the table.’ Self-initiative is urgently required to guarantee we comprehensively and sustainably deal with problems without passports. Equitable governance 1. Sustainable development, according to the UN, is ‘development that meets needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ Specifically, the quality of governance in the developing world is especially important, since its failure means equitable service delivery is denied to many – like the indigent, urban poor, immigrants and refugees. Good governance, then, is about extending people’s basic opportunities to overcome their conditions and climb the social ladder. Localising the SDGs through shared growth and inclusive urbanism is an indication of the importance of cities and city-regions. ‘Localising’ does not mean the indiscriminate parachuting of global goals into the local context but instead centres on responding to global challenges through locally sourced solutions. This requires closer collaboration between the resourced North and underresourced South, through mechanisms like peer-to-peer co-learning, so that humanity as a whole can move towards a higher trajectory. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda is a significant global compact designed for this particular purpose. As Ms Mohammed said, it is incumbent on all 193 UN member states ‘to get urbanisation right’ as it is the common lifeboat we share, as citizens of Planet Earth. This requires that we ‘ensure balanced territorial development, and urban design and land use planning to promote growth, climate mitigation, urban resilience and poverty eradication.’ This inclusive urbanism calls for taking collective responsibility for a shared future and delivering on universal outcomes such as access to basic-quality services, expansion of economic opportunities and better planning to meet growing infrastructure demands. This was arguably achieved at the City of Johannesburg through projects such as the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRT), Jozi@Work (mainstreaming economic equality) and Jozi Digital Ambassadors (designed to bridge the digital divide). Johannesburg’s flagship BRT project intentionally set out to attain integration through mobility by creating a cheaper, safer, faster and more reliable public transport system. The Corridors of Freedom, a concept and project borrowed from Curitiba in Brazil, is now accepted as a model in developing societies for its objective of equitable access to urban amenities through bringing people closer to opportunities and opportunities closer to people. 12 Parks Tau is President of the Global Network of Cities (UCLG). He was formerly Mayor of Johannesburg. PLACE-MAKING IN DISSONANT TIMES Edgar Pieterse Dissonance is the overwhelming condition of the current era. At a time when formal politics in multiparty democracies seem interminably stuck, over the past few years a supposedly ineffectual United Nations has been able to broker a series of path-breaking development agreements, of which the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda adopted in 2016 are the most ambitious. These agreements represent a fundamentally different political landscape within which tough social justice questions can be confronted more easily. It also means that the opportunity for the pursuit of urban justice is unprecedented, even if not always activated. Yet, even a cursory review of dominant political processes and priorities across the OECD and Global South is enough to deflate hope. Why is participatory development so damn hard? There is remarkable convergence of policy thinking and prescription on participatory development in the knowledge fields of urban development. The New Urban Agenda is emblematic of what is currently considered normative when it asserts a vision for cities that: Are participatory, promote civic engagement, engender a sense of belonging and ownership among all their inhabitants, prioritise safe, inclusive, accessible, green and quality public spaces that are friendly for families, enhance social and intergenerational interactions, cultural expressions and political participation, as appropriate, and foster social cohesion, inclusion and safety in peaceful and pluralistic societies, where the needs of all inhabitants are met, recognising the specific needs of those in vulnerable situations. According to the New Urban Agenda, there are four drivers that can activate this vision. One, multilevel urban policies that are consistent between the local and national levels. Two, strong urban governance institutions that consistently act in a democratic, accountable and inclusionary manner. Three, an embracing of long-term and integrated territorial planning and design to ensure that the spatial dimensions of urban form – compact and complex – are optimised. Lastly, effective finance policy frameworks to ensure dedicated revenue streams for a new approach to infrastructure investment priorities. Such priorities should be underpinned by a prescriptive spatial (land use) agenda to ensure that the economic, social and environmental benefits of density are realised. It is hard to fault the principles and aspirations. However, it is critical to interrogate these frameworks to understand whether they are able to be deployed for transformative purposes, or whether they will merely keep the status quo in place. The ‘drivers of change’ postulated by the New Urban Agenda are of particular relevance because they are regarded as prerequisites for the establishment of participatory governance and rights-based citizenship. In sub-Saharan Africa, where decentralisation has effectively stalled and national governments are determined to retain control of countries and cities, it is hard to see how ‘consistent’ multilevel urban policies might be formulated. Specifically, opposition parties tend to first get a foothold in cities, which establishes a dynamic whereby national governments resist decentralisation. In such contexts, National Urban Policies can easily become mechanisms to starve cities of power and resources in the name of retaining national coherence and economic development. If multilevel urban policies cannot be developed in an inclusive manner, it reduces the influence of cities on key policies that shape urban investments. Limited power at the local level erodes the value of participatory processes since decisions are consolidated somewhere else. In most sub-Saharan African countries democratic decentralisation remains a distant ideal. The evidence from many African cities suggests that democratically elected local government institutions are not necessarily accountable or inclusionary. They are more likely to opt for chauvinistic populist policies that reinforce certain portions of the electorate at the expense of others, fuelling conflict and sometimes violence. These practices are incorporated into the ways in which political parties are embedded at the grassroots and associated systems of clientalism and patronage. The undemocratic stranglehold political parties exercise at the community level undermines the quality and utility of public participation. Furthermore, there is simply no guarantee that the institutional adoption of long-term and territorial planning is necessarily going to lead to decisions that have a positive impact on urban form, social inclusion and environmental sustainability, as the New Urban Agenda suggests. Long-term planning is equated with anticipatory planning on greenfield sites to accommodate future growth – a policy aggressively promoted by UN-Habitat. Often associated with private mega-projects, this condition leaves the existing city in a state of utter neglect and exclusion, even though this is where the majority of the urban population lives. Private sector mega-projects create conditions for rent-seeking at a scale that far exceeds the typical scenario in existing cities. Most African cities are characterised by limited tax-raising powers and small tax bases. In this context, it is common for local political leaders to negotiate ‘facilitation fees’ outside of the formal tax system to ensure major development projects are approved and connected to existing urban infrastructure networks. Such projects create an even stronger incentive for encrusted elites to want to stay in power, and for cosy business relations to keep them there in order to mitigate risks associated with long-term capital-intensive investments. In other words, mainstream discourses on participatory urban planning and management can come across as naive about how the real (estate) world of urban reproduction operates, and about what is required from a democratic oversight perspective to reorient the incentives of urban management and governance away from rent-seeking towards radical inclusion. Port Harcourt: grounding participatory urban development Insisting on a realistic account of institutional and political constraints on the ideals of participatory development does not amount to an argument for abandoning the ideal. On the contrary, it is an assertion that we ground political ideals in real-world contexts and emergent experiments. The Port Harcourt, Nigeria case study illustrates instances of advocacy and alternative experiments as forms of critical opposition to state neglect. However, both kinds of democratic actions – cooperation and opposition – are vital for a vibrant democracy that can attend to the structural drivers of inequality and social injustice. Founded just over a century ago as a key trading node, the city has experienced rapid urbanisation since 1958 when crude oil was discovered, swelling to 1,450,000 inhabitants today. The economy remains entirely reliant on the extraction of crude oil. In 2009, modernisation ambitions of the then-governor of the state resulted in violent evictions. Up to 19,000 people were displaced in one particularly violent weekend. The first political action of an NGO, Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform’s (CMAP), was to expose the violence through documentary photography and recorded testimonies of waterfront slum communities. This work engaged with those most affected, telling their stories and equipping them to tell their own. One of the most striking symbolic actions was to produce large-scale billboards that projected high-quality portrait images of the residents of these communities, simply saying who they were and that they belonged in the city. An important technique for repressive states is to render their subjects invisible and therefore inconsequential. By installing assertive portraits of ordinary residents in public sight lines, the oppressive power of the state is questioned and rendered a little less absolute. After a couple of years, CMAP’s work moved on to help communities formulate their own visions and plans for the future. At the core of this phase was a radical deployment of participatory planning processes to develop a detailed spatial account of the waterfront communities, which in turn formed the basis for identifying and prioritising needs. The design quality of the maps is striking. This is clearly attributable to the insider/outsider roles of CMAP initiators, Michael Uwemedimo and Ana Bonaldo, who worked for Londonbased institutions and were therefore able to navigate the international humanitarian and development donor communities. They were able to provide the necessary administrative and financial controls to attract funding and communicate effectively. However, this always went hand in hand with building elected grassroots organisations and focusing on skills development. Through a collaboration with architectural firm NLÉ, CMAP embarked on the design of Chicoco Space/Our Place. This hub aims to consolidate existing community projects and programmes into a series of public-focused activities including recording studios, meeting rooms and a cinema. The project offers a literal and imaginative bridge between the host neighbourhood and the city at large. On the back of this evolving practice of participatory planning, mapping and cultural production, CMAP were able to escalate their impact by joining forces with a United States-based research company, and successfully tendered to produce a faecal-sludge-management-based strategy to tackle the sanitation crisis in Port Harcourt. This was premised on the experience and reputation of CMAP to train community members and produce rigorous work. Most importantly, it allowed CMAP and the various community organisations to move from a deep focus on a few of the 49 waterfront communities to the whole city. They are now engaging directly with various state-level and local government departments, enabling them to combine alternative experiments with forms of partnership towards service delivery collaborations down the line. In conclusion There is nothing inevitable about the kinds of outcomes that participatory development processes produce. On the contrary, participation rhetoric and techniques can be deployed by powerful interests to reinforce their legitimacy and stymie sustained critique. Yet, in formal policy pronouncements the mantra remains as confident as ever. The CMAP example reflects that participatory techniques linked to the problematisation of space, with an eye on redefining use and cultural value, can prove to be potent in substantiating urban citizenship even when the state demonstrates disinterest or has a proclivity for exclusionary practices. However, it is important to confront a wicked irony in attempts that seek to reconfigure and democratise power in African polities and cities. In classic leftist thinking the stranglehold of elite power is unlikely to be resolved without a radical displacement of the status quo, which implies a sustained politics of protest, mobilisation, occupation and eventually the gain of electoral power through an effective party that is rooted in a broad-based coalition of insurgent interests. Unfortunately, this scenario is unforeseeable in most African polities (and much of the North, for that matter) because of the difficulty associated with sustaining such coalitions. Moreover, since the state has limited reach in controlling the drivers of urban reproduction, electoral gains are often no guarantee of being able to pursue transformative strategies. Economic and spatial reproduction are co-constituted by a plurality of actors, not least traditional authorities, religious leaders and other local strongmen that regulate daily life. Since urban reproduction in terms of basic services, livelihoods, economic transactions and public space are rarely fully public actions, but rather hybrid institutional configurations of formal, informal, makeshift practices, the work of participatory policies must target these fluid and often opaque knots of regulation. This is a big political ask, but unavoidable. This condition also undermines the prospects of a classic left-styled politics of critique, opposition and counter-power that can generate displacement or replacement. In the end one is left with a canvas of micropolitical experiments that could be articulated through strategic coalitions of citywide importance that, hopefully, confront the intractable questions of spatial justice. The emerging experiences in Port Harcourt demonstrate the immense power that can be unleashed through carefully curated and deployed participatory techniques that are embodied in cultural and artistic sensibilities to animate democratic passions, while fostering a space for thinking and acting propositionally. Edgar Pieterse is the Director of the African Centre for Cities. This is an abridged version of an essay appearing in Shaping Cities in an Urban Age. MAKING INCLUSION MORE INCLUSIVE Kate Meagher Cities across Africa reveal a pressing need for more inclusive approaches to urban development. Despite growth rates averaging 5 per cent for much of the past 15 years, African cities are confronted by expanding slums, persistent poverty and expanding unemployment and informality. Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s highest rate of informal employment, accounting for 77 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force, and even in the era of ‘Africa Rising’, the International Labour Organization notes continued increases in working poverty. Underlying growth dynamics, based on natural resource dependence, dwindling access to land and decades of infrastructural neglect and deindustrialisation, fail to generate adequate levels of employment or basic services for rapidly expanding urban populations. ‘Jobless growth’ and urbanisation without industrialisation have forced policymakers to grapple with the challenge of how to ensure that economic growth and urbanisation generate viable livelihoods and adequate service provision for the vast urban populations living and working informally in African cities. But what does ‘inclusive growth’ entail? How can Africa’s informally employed millions be constructively integrated into urban development strategies in ways that foster urban modernity while engaging the growth potential of Africa’s expanding young populations? Three models of informal economic inclusion have emerged in contemporary urban development thinking: global connection, formalisation and co-production. While economic inclusion sounds inherently positive, it is useful to remember that modern slavery and sweatshops are also forms of global economic inclusion. There is a need to look beyond the fact of inclusion to consider the extent to which inclusive strategies actually reduce informality, improve livelihoods and enhance social rights. Models of informal economic inclusion The market-led model of informal economic inclusion focuses on the importance of global connections. Economic and digital linkages across the formal-informal divide serve to link African informal workers into the modern economic opportunities of the global economy. Many argue that the expansion of the formal economy has proceeded too slowly to absorb Africa’s rapidly expanding labour force. What is needed are direct connections via global value chains, internet and mobile phone connectivity and corporate Bottom of the Pyramid initiatives that can act as conduits of resources, skills, technology and modern jobs for Africa’s vast pool of informal labour. A second model focuses on ‘ formalisation’ through registration, taxation and the extension of basic social protection to informal actors. Rather than assuming that rights and resources will trickle down through global market linkages, formalisers argue for the inclusion of informal actors in the systems of urban governance, including statistics, revenue generation and urban planning. Inclusive policies focus on simplified registration, improved informal economy statistics and the extension of taxation and basic social protection into the informal economy. Formalisation initiatives can be digitally enabled through the spread of mobile phones and mobile money that capture the economic behaviour of informal actors and provide new mechanisms for gathering statistics, collecting taxes and providing social protection. A third model emphasises inclusion through participatory engagement for the co-creation of urban development strategies. Inclusion depends on recognition of the complex organisational ecosystems and constraints that shape informal livelihoods. Without an understanding of informal livelihood systems, market connections or formalisation may disrupt rather than include informal actors. Proponents highlight the need for participatory design and decision-making, engaging with the distinctive logics and innovative solutions of informal ‘insurgent planning’ systems, with a view to harnessing the knowledge and innovative capacities of informal actors in ways that avoid the risks of withdrawal or outright resistance. Inclusion or adverse incorporation? There are clear tensions between the policy approaches deriving from these various models of inclusion. Each seeks to include informal economies differently – the first in markets, the second in formal regulatory systems and the third in urban design and decision-making. Policy implications also vary: inclusive connections call for deregulation to facilitate linkages with informal economies and formalisation strategies seek to adapt regulation to the realities of informal economies, 13 while co-production emphasises participatory governance. While digital technologies offer new ways of combining these modes of inclusion, greater attention needs to be paid to the resulting terms of inclusion. Discussions of informal economic inclusion need to look beyond the apparently benign notion of inclusion to consider the new economic and regulatory ecosystems being created. Global connections with the informal economy tend to cut out informal nodes of accumulation, such as informal wholesalers, local manufacturers and informal transport firms, to connect directly with the informal labour at the micro-end of the informal economy. Such inclusive connections are highly selective, cherrypicking informal actors that facilitate market access and reduce labour and transaction costs, while cutting out those too successful to be compliant, or too poor or unskilled to be economically useful. Global connections with the informal economy also create processes of ‘deregulation through the back door’ by bypassing legal frameworks of labour rights that normally govern employment in formal firms and substituting algorithms and corporate codes disembedded from national democratic control. In the process, global economic inclusion creates new dynamics of exclusion, labour informalisation and political disempowerment. Similarly, more inclusive formalisation initiatives focus on simplified and innovative forms of registration and taxation to bring informal actors into the formal economy. Yet informal actors in Anglophone Africa have been paying formal taxes at the local government level since colonial times without altering their conditions of informality, suggesting that formal economic inclusion requires more than taxation and registration. As Martha Chen has pointed out, there is a tendency to include informal actors in the costs of formalisation, while focusing less on including them in the benefits, such as equitable social and legal protection. New efforts at ‘second best’ inclusion in derisory social benefits serve less to ‘formalise’ than to ‘normalise’ informality by making it more sustainable. Finally, inclusion through participatory urban governance offers more insight into informal ecosystems and livelihood constraints but forgets about the deeper realities of power. Community mapping of informal settlements or generating digital transaction data helps to make African informal economies more legible to states and corporations but gives little control over what this data is being used for. A lack of bargaining power, even when included in urban decision-making and service delivery, limits the transformative power of co-production. Without the support of supportive formal allies, co-production of urban design is easily hijacked by more powerful urban interests to harness informality for profit rather than to improve rights and livelihoods. Digital taxis and paradoxes of inclusion The rise of digital taxis in urban Africa illustrates some of the paradoxes of informal inclusion initiatives. Digital ride-hailing companies claim to use new technology to create jobs, formalise the taxi industry and enhance the efficiency of urban transport. Yet, ongoing research on digital taxis in Lagos, including Uber, Taxify and Oga Taxi (the main Nigerian contender), shows that digital inclusion can exacerbate rather than reduce informality. Collectively, Uber, Taxify and Oga Taxi claim to create a total of over 20,000 jobs 14 in Nigeria, connecting unemployed and informally employed urban youth to modern employment. However, both the extent and quality of jobs created by digital ‘inclusion’ are problematic. 32 per cent of drivers use digital taxis as a second income rather than as a ‘job’, while 64 per cent of drivers work for two or more digital taxi companies simultaneously in order to improve incomes, reducing the touted 20,000+ new jobs to fewer than 8,000. A recent McKinsey report acknowledged that digital connections ‘have a relatively modest impact on employment’ and do as much to eliminate and informalise jobs as to create them. Digital connections and the definition of drivers as ‘independent contractors’ also cut drivers loose from national frameworks of labour protection. While digital taxi drivers are referred to as ‘partners’ rather than employees, they are subject to corporate regulatory systems that lower tariffs and vehicle specifications without consultation, and regulate earning and working conditions using algorithms that undermine driver autonomy. To further complicate matters, 66 per cent of digital taxi drivers do not own the cars they drive. Paying returns to car owners provides incomes well below the minimum wage, despite drivers working an average of 76 hours per week. Given the high levels of education needed to qualify as a digital taxi driver – 47 per cent are university graduates – most drivers regard the activity as a ‘stopgap’ while they look for a proper job. Only 52 per cent of digital taxi drivers in Lagos regard the activity as a ‘job’, and only 14 per cent regard their work as a formal activity. Officials at the Ministry of Labour and the National Labour Congress are also sceptical about the formality of digital taxi work. While they work for a formal company and generate statistical data, digital taxis operate under the radar of national labour laws. Concerns about taxation cast further doubt on the inclusive effect of digital taxi companies. Despite Lagos’ celebrated taxation drive, neither digital taxi drivers nor digital taxi companies pay the taxes and licence fees required of the taxi industry. While this reduces costs, it also informalises the activity and deprives municipal and state authorities of revenues for improving the transport system. Much of the celebrated competitiveness of digital taxi companies derives from cut-rate fares and the evasion of licence fees, which includes underemployed graduates at the expense of existing taxi and car hire drivers. There is a need to question the value of inclusive initiatives that undermine the livelihoods of those with more occupationally relevant skills, better tax compliance and sustainable incomes geared to capital and life-cycle costs. As for the generation of statistics for improved planning, digital taxi companies have extensive data on drivers, riders and traffic patterns, but have so far been unwilling to share this data with relevant government authorities. As a result, Lagos transport authorities are unable to factor digital taxis into their transport plans because they are unable statistically to distinguish digital taxis from private cars. Moreover, digital taxis operate outside existing forms of labour or enterprise organisations, such as the national road transport workers’ union and taxi associations through which the state interfaces with the taxi and mass transport industry, undermining any potential for participatory planning. Digital organising in WhatsApp and other social media groups helps to mobilise strikes, but does not provide a vehicle for engagement with the state. While digital taxis are recognised to have their place in the urban transport ecosystem, Lagos transport authorities feel that their unregulated proliferation runs counter to the official transport strategy, which focuses on mass transport and reducing the number of private cars on the road. Given that public transport in Lagos costs less than 25 per cent of the cost of a digital taxi ride, and less than 20 per cent of Nigerians own smartphones capable of supporting digital taxi apps, inclusive transport means public transport. Despite direct connections to global firms, digital taxi drivers in Lagos feel deprived of dignified inclusion, operate even farther outside formal statistical and regulatory systems than regular taxis and lack the organisational capacity for participatory engagement in urban transport planning. Conclusion Finding effective policies for inclusive growth must move beyond nominal forms of inclusion via connections to the global economy, efforts at formalising without transforming informality or exploitative co-production. Genuine inclusion must do more than just shifting the underemployed from the informal economy into the precariat without altering the realities of extreme vulnerability. Turning Africa’s burgeoning informal economies into sources of urban prosperity requires a stronger focus on how to ensure that informal workers and consumers are included in the gains as well as the processes of growth, share in the benefits as well as the costs of formalisation and are empowered not just to share knowledge and data, but to influence how it is used. There is a pressing need to move beyond the illusion of inclusion if urban development futures are to stem the risks of expanding informality, intensifying inequality and simmering social unrest. Even amid promising rates of growth and technical change, eruptions of disaffection across the continent have made it increasingly clear that failure to find ways of making growth more genuinely inclusive may give ‘Africa Rising’ a more sinister meaning. Kate Meagher is Associate Professor in Development Studies at the LSE. VISUALISING POPULAR TRANSPORT Jacqueline M. Klopp From Cape Town to Cairo most people rely on walking, motorcycles, bicycles and minibuses to get around. These forms of popular transport move large numbers of people and goods and employ a plethora of workers. While imperfect, this makes urban life possible and productive. Individuals, companies and cooperatives often organically arrange everything in these systems, from setting fares and providing security to determining stops and routes. All these are usually critical government functions; when not provided, popular transport steps in to provide services and planning. Given this ‘informality’, popular transport, while strongly present on the street, is often absent from planning, policy and projects. Ambitious infrastructure investment is underway in many African cities, animated by a modernist ideal that envisions eventually replacing these systems. The focus is on expanded highways, Bus Rapid Transit or commuter rail, which, while sometimes necessary, are not sufficient to make cities work well for people. By marginalising popular transport in planning, new infrastructure tends to perform poorly and often adversely impacts people using these modes. Highways designed without considering how most people move tend to be dangerous, adding to already alarmingly high road fatalities in African cities. Similarly, mass transit systems built along corridors tend to poorly integrate with popular mobility systems, which are needed to ‘feed’ these systems passengers. Hence, after a great deal of investment, these systems do not always perform as well as they could. Finally, critical services taken for granted in Europe or North America such as basic transit maps and apps – information systems that allow passengers to better plan efficient trips by public transport – are simply missing. Lack of data on popular transport enables official invisibility of these mobility systems in planning. Data is needed to understand and see popular transport – their networks, dynamics and importance. Without this ability to visualise and analyse these systems, transportation planning is, in effect, looking at the body of a city without understanding the vast, dynamic circulatory system that gives the city life. Working in blindness, planners are more likely to design and implement fragmented, poorly integrated, disruptive and even dangerous transport interventions. The digital commons Rallying against this, a ‘digital commons’ movement has emerged in support of better transport planning globally. This movement leverages the digital revolution to build high-quality, open and standardised public transport data for planning, information services and as the basis for moving towards a new mobility paradigm. Within this paradigm, the ability to access a wide suite of high-quality mobility options via a mobile phone becomes a more compelling ideal of freedom than simply owning or using a car. This transition to freedom of movement by not owning a car but accessing and paying for a choice of multiple transport modes via mobile-phone technology is a key step towards more equitable, clean, safe and Kampala OldTaxi Park: Shared minibus taxis (matatus) form the backbone of Kampala’s public transport provision. Over 16,000 taxi owners pay their city taxes by mobile phone. ©Mudondo Evaline 15 low-emissions cities. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Google and Citymapper are already anticipating and adapting to this trend. This new mobility paradigm means that data and technology are an even more important part of the core infrastructure for urban transportation and mobility. With high public transport and mobilephone use, African cities are uniquely placed to leapfrog into this transition. Indeed, with this vision, civic activists (hackivists) are using basic GPS-enabled mobile phones and other technologies to build high-quality, standardised data for public transport including dominant popular transit modes. This data is made open and shared widely to improve understanding and discussions of how to improve transport planning and build passenger information systems, the stepping stones to a new mobility paradigm. The Digital Matatus project (digitalmatatus.com) is a flagship project that helped catalyse this ongoing mapping work. By making the data publicly available in a standardised format, the project enables spatial analysis and visualisations including the first data-based, stylised public transit map for a minibus system on the continent (see page 39). The Digital Matatus map and data allow us to see a critical part of Nairobi’s circulatory system. The matatu system is radial with routes converging on the centre, contributing – along with cars – to congestion. Connections cluster at the city centre, and the absence of cross-town routes means passengers must get off and walk a distance to find another matatu to cross the city. An optimal network for Nairobi would have more of a grid structure and a richer spread along with cross-town routes. As Jarrett Walker, author of Human Transit, notes: ‘This is a common thing that goes wrong in privately evolved systems. Every matatu wants to go downtown because it’s the biggest market, and a matatu driver doesn’t have to be coordinated with anyone else to fill a bus going to and from there.’ While these systems generate certain efficiencies, they do not create the best kinds of networks for the city and its residents. This suggests negotiating network reorganisation, using financial support as a lever, could improve public transport significantly. When matatu data is overlaid with other kinds of data, we can explore how this mobility system generates access to services and opportunities in a city where only a minority owns cars. For in the end it is really access we wish to improve, not just mobility. The World Bank1, for example, was able to use Digital Matatus data to explore physical access to hospitals in Nairobi. The report identified that good physical access is clustered in the centre of the city. Disturbingly, for significant parts of the city, people do not have a hospital within a 30- or even 60-minute matatu ride. This data highlights the ways that transport and land use are inter-related; the problem of physical access to hospitals in Nairobi can be solved by building more dispersed facilities, encouraging more and better housing in well-serviced areas, redesigning matatu routes or through a combination of these and other interventions. While 70 per cent of Nairobi’s adult residents use matatus daily, many of the city’s poorest residents can only afford to walk. In contrast, the wealthiest residents travel by personal vehicle. Thus, by using the data to compare access by mode, we can get a crude idea of the inequality of physical access to the city by socioeconomic status. Cars give widest access to the city, matatus create substantial access and walking 16 provides limited access to the city. Access is greatest in the centre. This suggests why people may accept lower housing standards and high rents in centrally located slums; it allows more critical access to the city by walking and cheaper matatu trips. Conclusion Overall, this means high-quality, affordable public transport and better land use and distribution of (affordable and good-quality) services are all critical steps towards a more equitable, inclusive and just city. To intervene intelligently and advocate for change, however, we need to be able to see, analyse and also discuss these inter-relations and advocate for holistic data-driven policies and projects. This is also why open data and building a ‘digital commons’ is so critical; it allows more actors to build, analyse and even correct this critical resource for cities. Beyond creating tools for understanding, seeing and refashioning the city, this new open data creates a very important basic service for citizens; passenger information. Passengers can look at a map or on a transit app and see how to get from one place to another using the minibus system. Digital Matatus data is on Google Maps and other platforms, allowing trip planning for matatus, information not available for the vast majority of cities in the world. Evidence is growing that this kind of trip-planning information can help people make more efficient trips and, when coupled with real-time information, reduce waiting. This, in turn, improves the way passengers interact with and feel about public transport. Infrastructure improvements are still very necessary, of course, but building these information systems including ways for citizens to give feedback helps advocate for these improvements and move closer to a twenty-first-century mobility paradigm. Africa’s rapidly growing cities have an opportunity to leverage technology to build critical data infrastructure, not only for minibuses but for other forms of public and popular transport as well. A crowdsourced bike lane map for Nairobi highlights where cycling infrastructure could be beneficial2. New technology and data tools can be applied in many creative ways to allow citizens, transport operators and government to see their whole system together, discuss it in new ways and reimagine policy interventions and projects. Across the continent, in more and more cities government officials, civil society and tech ‘hacktivists’ are leveraging new technological capabilities to build critical open-data infrastructures for transforming urban mobility. Work is ongoing from Cape Town to Cairo and from Accra, Dakar and Maputo to Addis Ababa. To further scale up these efforts, a network of data builders for public transport, with support from the French Development Agency and World Resource Institute, is building an online, open collaborative platform to share standardised data, tools and knowledge called Digital Transport 4 Africa (digitaltransport4africa.org). Motivating this work is the very real possibility that African cities can fashion a transit-oriented, safer, cleaner and more productive future – and in the process address climate change and help the planet too. 1. World Bank World Urbanization Review 2016. 2. http://bit.ly/NairobiBikeMap Jacqueline M. Klopp is Associate Research Scholar at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development, Columbia University and Co-Founder of Digital Matatus. ETHIOPIA’S RAILWAY REVOLUTION Philipp Rode The office of Ethiopia’s Minister for Urban Development displays a beautiful artwork. The woodcarving captures the country’s transformation, depicting a farmer surrounded by new industries, urban housing estates and roads. Prominently situated, a twenty-first-century high-speed train emerges out of a tunnel, offering a glimpse of the importance and powerful symbolism of railways as a catalyst for the country’s urbanisation. The central positioning of railways in Ethiopia’s urban and economic development has already been realised by two prominent projects. The first is Addis Ababa’s 34 kilometres Light Rail Transit (LRT) system, which opened in 2015 and cost US$475 million1. Its north–south and east–west lines link 23 newly built stations, connecting inner city business and transport hubs with rapidly developing commercial centres and new housing developments at the urban periphery. The second project is the Addis Ababa– Djibouti railway, a 650 kilometres electrified, single-track line costing US$4.5 billion and operational since early 2018. Descending from Addis Ababa’s new Furi Lebu Station at 2,300 metres above sea level to Adama and then along the Rift Valley to the Gulf of Aden, it serves several other second-tier cities such as Bishoftu and Dire Dawa along its 17 major stations. The route, designed as Ethiopia’s main transport corridor, includes industrial parks and dry ports, connects the landlocked country with Djibouti Port, which has handled more than 90 per cent of its international trade in the last decade2. These costly investments, occurring in one of the world’s poorest nations, highlight their exceptional status. The projects are more astonishing when considering the marginal role of railways on the African continent after decades of limited investment and unfavourable institutional conditions. Even a push towards rail concessions towards the end of the twentieth century did not stop the decline of railways. In the case of Ethiopia, it ultimately led to closure of the old metre-gauge railway between Addis and Djibouti in the early 2000s. Today, reliable urban rail only exists in a few African cities, while 80 per cent of all rail passenger transport in Africa takes place in just one country: Egypt. Rail-freight plays a more prominent role but in most African countries trains transport less than 20 per cent of total freight volumes3. Ethiopia’s bold commitment to new railway infrastructure recognises a range of key advantages. Rail systems offer high capacity, require less land and are safer, less polluting and lower-carbon than motorised road transport. Not surprisingly, the contemporary case for rail references the enormous negative externalities of road transport, above all accidents, congestion and environmental impact. In an urban context, the advantage of a more efficient use of scarce urban land is critical. Ultimately, however, Ethiopia seems to acknowledge the transformative role railways can play in land development and urbanisation, as well as in connecting societies across regional borders and nations. But the complexity of building and operating railways can be a major obstacle. As a closed and highly integrated system, railways are unique in their demands for joined-up institutions and governance arrangements. They require an ambitious ‘right of way’ that needs to be negotiated with other land uses and utilities. The particularity of railways also includes its rigid infrastructure, the need for an operator, its interoperability dependent on many technical aspects and a system performance that is based on the weakest section across the entire line. In addition, railways depend on complementary transport services for last-mile connectivity as well as associated electricity supply, communication and signalling systems. Ultimately, railways are compromised by institutional arrangements that rarely allow for capturing the societal benefits they produce. Often, planning and decisionmaking processes do not even recognise these wider benefits for which land value increases are arguably the most prominent indicator. As a result, and until recently, most rail expansion plans in Africa did not pass the initial appraisal phase, which concluded costs were simply too high compared to expected returns and economic benefits4. One critical area ignored by transport appraisals is the medium and long-term implications for urban form, a key driver of growth and prosperity. In many rapidly urbanising countries, where fragmentation of urban form, low residential densities and leapfrogged urban expansion severely compromise economic productivity and development5, this is a particularly problematic omission. The impact on urban form Intra- and intercity transport infrastructure systems have always shaped urban development. The distinctive characteristics of railway systems, particularly compared to road infrastructure, have considerable implications for urbanisation patterns and city designs. Railways produce highly nodal centralities concentrated around stations and interchanges, usually enhanced by the station’s level of connectivity and exclusivity in accessing destinations. These centralities can be strong enough to produce the hyper-urbanity that is within walking distance of most of the world’s great train stations such as Tokyo Station, Paris Gare du Nord or Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. High-capacity public transport combined with walking underpins the urban intensity of these centralities, which are usually distributed across larger inner-city areas. Road infrastructure usually does not produce such nodal centralities. This is mainly for three reasons. First, their significantly lower capacity limits the number of people that can access a specific location. Second, the mix of high- and low-speed movement and parking requires exponentially more space with reduced urban qualities. And third, access to road infrastructure does not necessitate nodal access as road networks can be accessed from almost any point. Road and rail developments in expanding cities in China illustrate this: the combined effect of radial highways and ring roads was a relocation of around 25 per cent of central city residents to surrounding regions. Regional railways had no such effect6. The successful integration of rail and urban development requires conscious decisions about trade-offs and thus relies on coherent, cross-sectoral planning. Ethiopia’s recent experiences demonstrate the challenge. The Addis LRT is already a victim of its own success – with considerable levels of overcrowding, it is struggling to provide the service level required to connect peripheral public housing areas. Its fenced groundlevel sections, which have so far ensured that there has not been a single fatality, have also created new barriers and community severance across the city. In the case of the Addis–Djibouti line, rather than reutilising existing city centre stations, the new line features new stations at the outskirts of cities. Addis’ new Furi Lebu Station is more than 11 kilometres southwest from the old La Gare Station in the city centre (twice the distance to the airport and requiring an almost 20 kilometres road journey). In Dire Dawa, this distance is 10 kilometres and again significantly further away than the airport. This follows the logic of China’s new generation of rail connectivity, where high-speed rail stations for Shanghai, Wuhan and Guangzhou are located more like airports at the urban periphery. While providing considerable opportunities for new transit-oriented development (TOD) on less developed and open land, this approach sacrifices the major advantage of direct city-centre rail connectivity. Governing a rail revolution Beyond reflecting on transport and urban development, three underpinning governance issues of Ethiopia’s first two modern rail projects can be identified. First, the unusual commitment to rail infrastructure development of a lower-income country with little experience in building and operating modern railways can only be understood as part of its developmental state ambition and the political leadership that underpins it. It is within this context that state-led infrastructure rollout is considered the central impetus for economic growth and industrial development. Indicative of following this macroeconomic model and its East Asian pioneers such as South Korea, Singapore and China, Ethiopia has become the African country with the highest infrastructure investments at around 19 per cent of GDP since 20127, 8. The central reference guiding this level of infrastructure development is Ethiopia’s Growth Transformation Plan. Its first edition, covering 2010 to 2015, aimed achieving middle-income status for Ethiopia by 2020/23 and becoming a carbon-free economy by 2025. The plan proposes five rail corridors covering 2,400 kilometres and connecting neighbouring Djibouti, Kenya and South Sudan9. However, while the benefits of railways are well established, it is less clear to what extent they can unlock new economic development when other economic development parameters may not be as favourable. Rail-related urban, logistics and industrial development that is planned and underway alongside new rail infrastructure, however, certainly expresses the planners’ confidence in developmentalism. Second, the ambitions of a centrally planned state have created tensions with Ethiopia’s constitutional commitment to ethno-federalism with devolved political powers to its regions and municipalities. This tension has become evident for both the Addis LRT project and the Addis– Djibouti rail line for which top-down institutional arrangements accelerated infrastructure roll-out, despite complex negotiations between city, regional and federal bureaucracies10. Addis Ababa is formally responsible for all urban transport. However, the initial impetus for Addis’ LRT came from the federal government and former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi while the city was preparing to introduce bus rapid transit. Then, the Ethiopian Railway Corporation, created in 2008 as a state-owned corporation, was tasked with developing the Addis LRT. The city was also not involved in securing financing despite its considerable budgetary and fiscal autonomy. For the Addis–Djibouti rail line, the federal government had to secure land, which necessitated negotiations with regional governments, and to offer compensation for land losses and livestock killed in accidents. Interestingly, the new train stations in Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa are located precisely at the border between the city administrations and the surrounding Oromia and Somali regions. Third, the introduction of modern railways in Ethiopia would have been impossible without the financial, technical and managerial support of other countries. While this initially included the EU, Brazil, Turkey and India, it is China who emerged as the most committed. Loans from Exim Bank of China covered 60 per cent of the initial US$400 million financing requirements for the Addis LRT11 and 70 per cent of the initial costs of US$3.4 billion for the Addis–Djibouti line2. By 2014, Ethiopia had become the second-largest recipient of Chinese credit in Africa after Angola, with loans totalling US$12.2 billion11. The design, construction and initial operation also depended on China, the country that has laid the most rail over the last three decades, and the Ethiopian Railways Corporation (ERC) relied on Chinese companies for both the Addis– Djibouti line and Addis’ LRT. As much as the new strategic relationship between China and Ethiopia has unlocked rail infrastructure and operations, it has also created a new technological dependence on China. Most troubling for Ethiopia’s government today may be servicing ERC’s external debt, which stands at 7–8 per cent of Ethiopia’s GDP12. As a result, China recently agreed to extend the repayment period for the Ethiopia railway loan from ten to 30 years. To generate additional revenues, ERC is accelerating efforts to capture land values via TOD around the newly created stations – a process that once again has exposed the urgency of better integrating transport infrastructure provision and urban development. Ethiopia’s railway revolution is an instructive case for acknowledging the political economy, governance agenda and planning rationale of a developmental state. In future, the role of railways to enable particularly favourable urban form, intensity and high levels of accessibility may prove to be as important as narrower concerns over transport economics. Railways’ stubborn demand for the concentration of urban activities and keeping cities together may well be their primary long-term benefit and a key factor for overcoming poorly planned, dispersed urban development. A return to substantial rail investments, particularly in a developing-world context like Ethiopia, is therefore nothing less than a game changer for urbanisation and managing urban change. 1. Kassahun, M. and S. Bishu, The Governance of Addis Ababa Turn Around Projects: Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit and Housing. Partnership for African Social and Governance Research, 2015. 2. Agence France-Presse, ‘Next stop the Red Sea: Ethiopia opens Chinese-built railway to Djibouti’, in the Guardian. 6 October 2016. 3. AfDB, Rail Infrastructure in Africa: Financing Policy Options. 2015, African Development Bank. 4. Briceno-Garmendia, C. and V. Foster, Africa's infrastructure: a time for transformation, in Africa development forum. 2009, World Bank: Washington, D.C. 5. Lall, S.V., J.V. Henderson, and A.J. Venables, Africa's cities: Opening doors to the world. 2017: The World Bank. 6. Baum-Snow, N., et al., ‘Roads, Railroads, and Decentralization of Chinese Cities’. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2017. 99(3): pp. 435–448. 7. US State Department, Ethiopia: Investment Climate Statements for 2017. 2017. 8. Sennoga, E.B., et al., Ethiopia 2016 – African Economic Outlook. 2016. 9. Government of Ethiopia, Growth and Transformation Plan 2010/11– 2014/15. 2010. 10. Terrefe, B., The 'Renaissance' Railway: Infrastructure and Discourse in EPRDF's Ethiopia, in Oxford Department of International Development. 2018, Oxford University: Oxford, UK. 11. Hackenesch, C., Ethiopia, in The EU and China in African Authoritarian Regimes. 2018, Springer. pp. 99–147. 12. Bonsa, J., ‘Ethiopian Rail Corporation's Dept: How Big Is It?’, in The Ethiopian Reporter. 2017. Philipp Rode is the Executive Director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age, and Co-Director of the Executive MSc in Cities at the LSE. 17 GLOBAL CHALLENGES URBANISATION TRENDS Eduardo López Moreno Since 1990, the world has seen an increased gathering of its population in urban areas. This trend is not new, but has been marked by a remarkable increase in the absolute numbers of urban dwellers – from a yearly average of 57 million between 1990 and 2000 to 77 million between 2010 and 2015. In 1990, 43 per cent (2.3 billion) of the world’s population lived in urban areas; by 2015, this had grown to 54 per cent (4 billion). By 2050 there will be 6.3 billion people living in urban areas, nearly seven out of ten inhabitants. This increase has not been evenly spread throughout the world. Different regions have seen their urban populations grow more quickly and virtually no region of the world can report a decrease in urbanisation. The fact that more and more people live in urban areas is no longer seen as a development scourge. Although Asia has not yet achieved an urban transition (at 48 per cent urban), it generated close to 33 per cent of world output in 2010. Africa, as one of the least urbanised regions in the world at 40 per cent urban, also observes a positive link between urbanisation and economic development, with cities contributing between 50 and 70 per cent to the continent’s GDP. Other regions’ earlier processes of urbanisation have historically been associated with industrialisation and modernisation. Urbanisation and economic growth are inextricably linked; as a country becomes more urban, it becomes more developed. Urbanisation constitutes a transformative force, with cities becoming a positive and potent force for addressing sustainable economic growth, development and prosperity, and for driving innovation, consumption and investment in both developed and developing countries. Beyond any reasonable doubt, increased urbanisation is expanding societal, economic and political progress. Cities are progressively turning into centres of political and cultural life and urban agglomerations are connecting people and places in new and better ways. Due to their densities and economies of scale and agglomeration, cities are visible and invisible strings that connect all development sectors, with the capacity to address many of the global challenges including air pollution, climate change, poverty, inequality, unemployment and environmental degradation. If they are well planned, built and governed, cities can be real drivers for sustainable development. Urbanisation is slowing Lagos Island from Makoko: Over 1,000 people enter Lagos every day, many ending up in informal settlements like Makoko. Built on stilts, the de facto self-governing fishing village is also a significant source of cut timber. At the end of the 1950s urbanisation in Africa reached its peak, at 2.85 per cent. Today urban population growth is 1.06 per cent per year. This makes Africa the second-fastest urbanising continent after Asia, which is growing at 1.47 per cent. In the last 20 years (1995 to 2015) Africa’s urban population has doubled from 236 million to 472 million. The sub-Saharan Africa region, which is growing faster, saw its urban population double from 2000 to 2015, reaching 471.6 million. In less than three years Africa’s urban population will be larger than the total urban population of Europe (559 vs. 555 million people in 2020). Asia, despite being less urbanised than most other regions today (48 per cent), is home to 54 per cent of the world’s urban population, followed by Europe and Africa (13 per cent each). It is expected that in two years, Asia will achieve its urban transition with 2.34 billion people living in urban areas. Nearly two-thirds of this urban population will live in India and China. Growing inequality Cities are developing and providing benefits, goods and services to many inhabitants. However, they are also failing to cater for the needs of all residents, creating entire areas of deprivation and concentrated disadvantage. Despite the opportunities urbanisation represents, many cities today fail to make sustainable space for all, not just physically, but also in the civic, socioeconomic and cultural dimensions attached to collective space. Growing inequality, social exclusion and spatial segregation continue to have an impact on people’s lives in most of the world’s cities. In the last 20 years, seven out of ten cities in the world have grown more unequal, even in traditionally more egalitarian nations, with income and wealth increasingly concentrated. All these forms of exclusion disproportionally affect women, youth, older persons, migrants and other marginalised groups. Housing, once considered a development asset, has largely become a speculative asset, and remains generally unaffordable in both the developing and developed world with 1.5 billion people living in inadequate housing in 2016. Although the proportion of people living in slums decreased from 28 per cent in 2000 to 23 per cent in 2014, the absolute number continues to increase, reaching 883 million urban dwellers. The majority of the 25 million refugees and 40 million internally displaced people in the world live in urban areas, often under difficult conditions. Global trends threaten sustainability Although urbanisation is not uniform, the experiences of diverse cities around the world exhibit some remarkable similarities. Cities are generally developing in a discontinuous, scattered and low-density form that is not sustainable. Expanding far beyond formal administrative boundaries into endless peripheries, many cities in the world have a high degree of fragmentation and vast wasted spaces that make them consume more energy, produce more CO2 emissions and increase the cost of the provision of infrastructure and public goods. An outward expansion with low densities tends to affect the environment and intensify social and economic inequalities. Three global trends are threatening the sustainability of cities: Sprawl is becoming more prevalent – once associated with the suburban growth pattern of North American cities, in the last 25 years different forms of sprawl are taking place in cities in both developed and developing countries (see page 20). This phenomenon is triggered by residential preferences for a suburban lifestyle, housing affordability strategies, speculative behaviours and peri-urban poverty. Poor land regulations, weak planning practices and advanced commuting technologies and services support this type of growth. Residential densities are drastically reducing – from 1990 to 2015, residential densities declined worldwide by 40 per cent. This reduction undermines opportunity for prosperity and sustainability, constraining the provision of public goods. Urban growth is unplanned – despite impressive technological advances, more mature and solid public institutions, better forms of urban management and, in some places, more robust civil society, urban planning has not been able to make good use of city assets and resources, including land, to harness the potential of urbanisation. Exclusionary mechanisms and different forms of hidden power prevent urban planning from responding adequately to the majority of residents, creating enclaves of prosperity for specific areas of the city and particular interest groups. Surprisingly, spatial planning is declining all over the world, with random development, informal growth and inadequate urban layouts becoming the norm. Sustaining positive change in cities The New Urban Agenda (NUA), adopted in Habitat III Quito (2016), is a global milestone that presents a roadmap towards sustainable urban development. Well planned and managed urbanisation can accelerate development in all countries, creating conditions for sustainable growth and shared prosperity. However, this can only be achieved if the NUA is implemented at all levels of government, with a prominent role given to cities, following an inclusive and participatory process of prioritisation and strengthened ownership. An enabling environment and enhanced international cooperation and partnership are critical for this agenda to support transformative change in every city – big or small. The NUA is an accelerator for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which includes strong urban components. Effective implementation requires a wide range of approaches, including mobilisation of financial resources, innovations, enhanced advocacy, awareness and focused capacity development. It also requires effective spatial planning and management, including the use of territorial approaches, a sound regulatory framework, a clear city vision and strong leadership. Mechanisms to learn from experience and effective monitoring systems that can track changes, identify unsustainable practices and assist in implementing timeous corrective measures are paramount. Eduardo López Moreno is Director of Research at UN-Habitat and has authored several editions of the World Cities Report. LOCKING-IN CITIES Nicholas Stern and Dimitri Zenghelis Almost as striking as the current enormous influx into cities across the globe is the dramatic slowdown in urbanisation that will follow. It took 200 years for the urban share of the world’s population to rise from 3 per cent to 50 per cent, from a few million people to 3.5 billion in 2010. After more than doubling over this century, in all the centuries that follow we may add at most another billion. This makes the current global urbanisation era not just immense, but also a brief, once-in-history phenomenon. The choices around investment and design of new and existing cities are effectively determining the infrastructure, technologies, institutions and patterns of behaviour that will define the functioning of our cities and the future of the planet. There is a very narrow window of opportunity to help plan and design this future. The world’s infrastructure will more than double in the next 20 years. These investments will determine whether we have cities where we can move and breathe. If new cities are built over the next two or three decades on a carbon-intensive, resourcehungry model, based on sprawling urbanisation, all hope of meeting ambitious targets to limit climate risks will be lost. Such a path would also risk stranding physical and human assets that become redundant and hard to replace or update in a world that is transitioning to low-carbon technologies to produce goods and services. This could leave cities and countries struggling to meet their resource needs and unable to compete in global markets. The scale and pace at which the world is becoming a network of cities and the fact that cities are at the heart of the process of human innovation, resource efficiency and prosperity puts the economics of urbanisation and urban change centre stage. Sustainable cities, involving communities enabled and committed to self-improvement, have been shown to be the most cost-effective way to provide basic services, opportunities and a high quality of life. But tackling difficult social challenges and generating inclusive growth relies on creating an environment in cities that fosters and empowers innovation. The required investment and the financing for such activities are often beyond the resources of city halls and will need partnerships with central government and the private sector. Often, the necessary skills and leadership are scarce. Cities and prosperity Urbanisation, innovation and productivity growth go hand in hand. The richest nations, such as the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and South Korea, are more than 80 per cent per cent urbanised. ©Yann Arthus-Bertrand 18 19 The correlation between urbanisation and prosperity is tight (see page 24), leading many observers to agree that important agglomeration economies – benefits from clustering people together – exist in cities. The clustering of people generates higher productivity and higher wages. But urbanisation carries its own problems, including pollution, congestion, poor health, crime and waste. Unregulated, unplanned, urban sprawl might appear to be the cheapest option in the short run, as it requires minimal institutional interference, infrastructural provision and urban planning. But the medium- and long-run costs to society, the economy and the environment can be dire. Unregulated cities will be less attractive, more polluted, congested and inefficient in the use of resources. Evidence shows they will fail to prosper, to attract skilled workers, to promote creativity and to enhance the returns to human capital. Growth theories have shown that innovation is stimulated by learning, experience and sharing of knowledge, and through working with other people and new machines. It should be no surprise that much of this happens in dense cities. Such innovation allows us to get more out of the resources we have, enabling society to use resources more efficiently and more sustainably. Indeed, studies find a close connection between wealth creation, efficiency and urbanisation. Yet despite this mounting evidence, national policymakers have often failed to recognise adequately the importance of cities in generating the ideas and innovation that drive national productivity growth. This lack of understanding can inhibit the ability of city governments to collaborate effectively with the private sector and national government to deliver for all citizens, including those in non-urban regions. Many studies underestimate pollution effects. The European Environment Agency estimates that premature deaths resulting from PM2.5 and NO2 air pollution totalled 510,000 in 2012 in Europe alone. The World Resources Institute values the health impacts of PM2.5 exposure (including premature deaths) in China at 10 per cent of annual GDP. Building for the future The urban form we lock into over coming decades will determine cities’ openness and resilience to changes. The development of clusters is ‘path-dependent’. Unlike manufacturing, which is increasingly located outside cities, idea-oriented industries tend to cluster in urban centres. Patterns of urban mobility, production and behaviour can shape a city’s fortunes for centuries to come. Mistakes or shortcuts made in planning risk locking in infrastructure, institutions and behaviours that can make cities ill-placed to take advantage of structural transitions such as those taking place in low-carbon energy and transport networks. Examples include the costly, traffic-clogged Bandra Worli sea link in Mumbai, the alienating and polluting Segundo Piso urban highway in Mexico City and the sprawling car-dependent suburb of Victorville, 161 kilometres north-east of downtown Los Angeles, which suffered population decline and the demolition of new homes after fuel prices doubled. Resilient and dynamic urban infrastructure should allow for unexpected future developments. For example, consideration must be given to how autonomous, predictive, on-demand mobility affects the need for fixed mass-transit infrastructure. 20 New technologies have the potential to enhance the efficiency of infrastructure and the scope for participation via shared ownership, not just in housing, energy and mobility but also in health, education and security. Moreover, now is a good time to invest in sustainable urban infrastructure that generates wealth. In many countries, real interest rates are negative. This means that essentially interest-free public borrowing can fund investment in housing, railways, broadband networks, schools or power networks, valuable assets that can be set against public debt. In cities, key policies for the future include the deployment of advanced technologies like fast broadband networks and electric vehicle infrastructure; or it might require investment in basic road, rail and bus rapid-transit provision, water and waste infrastructure and higherdensity housing. A key challenge to creative and effective action is that some of the poorest cities in the world are also the fastest-growing, and lack the resources and capacity to prevent locking into structures that are inefficient, unreliable and polluting. City governments can struggle to directly access capital: according to the Coalition for Urban Transitions, in developing countries only 4 per cent of the 500 largest cities attain an investment grade rating. This poses a challenge for national and local policymakers. Climate change and sustainable infrastructure is now a priority for regional development banks and the World Bank, which are scaling up programmes to assist cities in developing countries with low credit ratings. At the same time, if capital is available at low cost and tailored to the purposes and risks involved, there is real potential to avoid the mistakes of the past and to build attractive, liveable, clean, innovative and productive cities. Successful urbanisation is not just about infrastructure; it is also about skills. Investment in talent and skills (from job training programmes to secondary education) helps raise wages, attract talent and promote urban growth. It also improves the flow of information vital to civic inclusion and open, accountable governance. Locking in infrastructure, institutions and behaviour The consequences of bad government and inaction over planning and urban design can last centuries. Because infrastructure becomes entrenched, the pattern of development of infrastructure builds on what went before, or becomes locked in. For example, the form and location of many modern road and rail networks and office developments in London were influenced by choices made by Roman conquerors 2,000 years ago. Lock-in is not confined to physical capital; human and cultural capital is affected too. Researchers working in Italy found that regional differences in social capital (levels of cooperation, participation, social interaction and trust) – dating back at least as far as the twelfth century – determined cities’ ability to function effectively today, more so than governance reform in the 1970s. Once the urban population is stable, road, rail and utility networks have been laid and cultures and institutions have become entrenched, it will be much harder to reform or retrofit urban infrastructure. A sprawling city entrenches car-based cultures and institutions that are hard to retrofit once built, as the example of Victorville amply shows. The opportunity of sustainability The good news is that meeting these climate and sustainability targets is possible in a way that greatly enhances our wellbeing and how we live in new cities over a whole range of dimensions, and in a way that stimulates global productivity and wealth. Innovative, well-run cities are uniquely placed to tackle major global challenges. This is why the December 2015 Paris Agreement also aimed to bring into the story policy action of city actors. At the Habitat III cities conference in Ecuador in October 2016, global leaders signed into force the New Urban Agenda, which set out a vision for urban transformation based on compact cities with public transport. The big innovation of the Paris Agreement is that it is based on voluntary contributions. This reflects the growing appreciation of both the opportunities associated with a low-carbon transition and the recognition that action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is in the self-interest of individual cities and nations. For cities to deal with these challenges, there must be continued innovation in governance and learning. To learn from each other and demonstrate the benefits of sustainable planning and decarbonisation, national and urban policymakers must build on and utilise city networks such as C40, ICLEI and UCLG. Cities are at the heart of human development, innovation and productivity growth. Cities that are poorly planned will fail to grow and risk leaving humanity with a costly and potentially deadly climate. Humanity has a narrow time frame in which to plan and design its urban future. It is our responsibility to ensure that this opportunity is not squandered. Nicholas Stern is Chair and Dimitri Zenghelis Senior Visiting Fellow, Grantham Research Institute at the LSE. This abridged essay first appeared in Shaping Cities in an Urban Age. NEW URBAN PERIPHERIES 28 per cent of cities, the new urban peripheries were at least triple their pre-1990 areas. The extent of cities is thus expanding at a significantly faster rate than their populations. Average densities of cities are declining over time, despite a near consensus among urban planners the world over that cities need to stop expanding and densify existing footprints. Indeed, average densities in cities – the ratios of the population and the area of their urban extents – are in significant decline. Population and urban extent average annual growth rates (1990–2015) Cities in all countries (200 cities) Cities in developed countries Cities in developing countries 3.8% 1.1% 4.7% Urban expansion 5.6% rate (1990–2015) 2.4% 6.7% Population growth rate (1990–2015) Change in average density (people per hectare) (1990–2015) Mapping and measuring urban expansion Using satellite imagery, we can identify the new urban peripheries of cities for the first time. In 2010, there were 4,231 cities in the world with populations of 100,000. We focused on a sample of 200. (Methodology and data at atlasofurbanexpansion.org.) We define cities as contiguous built-up areas and the open spaces within them. Cities are thus defined by the limits of their built-up areas. A city can span numerous municipalities. São Paulo, Brazil, for example, extends across 31 municipalities. In many cities in the global sample, urban peripheries added to the city after 1990 are larger in area than their pre-1990 areas. The new (1991–2014) urban periphery of Accra, for example, was 5.5 times its pre-1991 area. In 64 per cent of the cities in the global sample, the new urban peripheries were larger than their pre-1990 areas; in 1. the share of the built-up area for roads in new urban peripheries (21 per cent) was similar to the share in older parts of cities (21 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa it was significantly lower than on the peripheries of all cities in the world at 16 per cent. 2. the share of the roads less than 4 metres wide increased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was higher in new urban peripheries (31 per cent), on average, than in older parts of cities (23 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa it was 36 per cent. Two findings relate to the walkability of urban neighbourhoods, typically measured by the average size of blocks and by the share of four-way road intersections. These two measures, which are inversely correlated with each other, are associated with the increase in walking distance resulting from the layout of streets. The higher the average block size and the smaller the share of four-way intersections, the greater the multiple between actual walking distance between two locations and the shortest distance between them. 3. average block size increased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was higher in new urban peripheries (5.6 hectares), on average, than in older parts of cities (3.3 hectares). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa, average block size (4.7 hectares) did not increase significantly during the 1990–2014 period. Shlomo Angel We suspect that most urban planners and policymakers – at the local, national and international level – are not fully aware of the extent to which urban peripheries are growing and are unsure of the quality of the urban fabric in these new urban peripheries. This essay reports on these matters using satellite and census data for a global sample of 200 cities, including 18 cities in sub-Saharan Africa. The first part of the essay introduces a set of findings from newly generated maps and measures of the new urban peripheries of cities, areas built between 1990 and 2014. We find massive expansion coupled with a significant reduction in average population densities. The second part of the essay compares the quality of the urban fabric in these new urban peripheries with areas of cities built before 1990. We find significant declines in the worldwide average quality of urban footprints in the newly built areas and similar declines in cities in sub-Saharan Africa. The first set of findings pertains to the amount of land dedicated to roads: Cities in all countries (200 cities) Cities in developed countries Cities in developing countries People per hectare (1990) 90 31 111 People per hectare (2015) 52 22 66 The quality of the urban fabric in new peripheries Comparing the quality of the urban fabric in the areas of cities built before and after 1990 required the random spatial sampling of ten-hectare locales distributed through the global sample of cities and using high-resolution satellite imagery to analyse these locales. This procedure, largely undertaken in preparation for Habitat III – with the collaboration of UN Habitat and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy – allowed us to arrive at ten important findings. 4. the share intersections that were four-way decreased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was lower in new urban peripheries (10 per cent), on average, than in older parts of cities (14 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa it was not significantly different from the share in the peripheries of all cities in the world at 9 per cent. Three findings pertain to arterial roads, the wide roads that make up the intra-city transport network, typically the network that connects commuter residences to their jobs and that carries most public transport vehicles. The absence of a dense network of arterial roads increases walking distance to public transport on these roads, makes them more congested and greatly increases commuting times, making cities less productive and less inclusive. 5. the share of roads more than 16 metres wide decreased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was lower in new urban peripheries (7 per cent), on average, than in older parts of cities (10 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa it was significantly lower than on the peripheries of all cities at 3 per cent. 6. the density of all arterial roads, not just roads more than 16 metres wide, declined significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was lower in new urban peripheries (1.3km/km2), on average, than in older parts of cities (1.9km/km2). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa it was significantly lower than on the peripheries of all cities at 0.9km/km2. 7. share of the area within walking distance of arterial roads decreased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was lower in new urban peripheries (84 per cent), on average, than in older parts of cities (91 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa it was significantly lower than on the peripheries of all cities at 77 per cent. Finally, three findings pertain to residential layouts. We distinguished three types of layouts: areas that were not laid out at all, areas that were laid out in informal land subdivisions and areas that were laid out in formal land subdivisions or housing projects. We also measured the share of layouts that were gridded. There is great value in laying out residential communities – whether formally or informally – before they are settled. Layouts increase the value of properties, facilitate the provision of infrastructure services and reduce their cost and accelerate the transformation of informal settlements to regular urban neighbourhoods. The cost of installing infrastructure services in Brazilian favelas like Rio de Janeiro’s Matinha favela that were not laid out before they were occupied was estimated at three to nine times the cost of installing them ahead of time. In contrast, squatter settlements that were laid out in advance, like Comas in Lima, Peru, were quickly transformed into ordinary urban neighbourhoods, increasing greatly in value. 8. the share of residential areas that were not laid out before they were occupied increased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was higher in new urban peripheries (32 per cent), on average, than in older parts of cities (22 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa it was higher at 43 per cent. 9. the share of residential areas in informal land subdivisions increased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was higher in new urban peripheries (32 per cent), on average, than in older parts of cities (20 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa that share was significantly higher than the share on the peripheries of all cities at 47 per cent. 10. the share of built-up areas that were gridded was very small and still decreased significantly during the 1990–2014 period. It was lower in new urban peripheries (2 per cent), on average, than in older parts of cities (5 per cent). On the peripheries of cities in sub-Saharan Africa that share was lower, but not significantly lower than the share on the peripheries of all cities at 0.8 per cent. These ten findings, taken together, suggest that the quality of the urban fabric in newly settled areas is not improving, but rather deteriorating, a realisation that should alarm planners and policymakers and draw attention to the high costs of continuing along this path. Conclusions The urbanisation challenge is now, first and foremost, a challenge for less-developed countries. An estimated 33 per cent of the projected increase in the world’s urban population between 2015 and 2050 will be in cities in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. The intervention in the rapid urbanisation process must be limited, targeted and tailored to available capacities and resources. Focusing on urban form and the territorial organisation of cities, it needs to attend to several key issues: • Lower densities and incomplete arterial road networks make public transit less feasible, leading to higher energy use and higher greenhouse gas emissions. • Cities with inadequate protection of open spaces – where urban development is not allowed – have smaller capacities for carbon sequestration, higher occupation of flood-prone areas and steep slopes and weaker protections of areas of high environmental risk. • Inappropriate regulation of land use and land subdivision in cities prohibits densification and the creation of mixed-use neighbourhoods. Over-strict and inappropriate regulation keeps informal settlements invisible and limits their contribution to orderly urban expansion. Rapidly growing cities can become more productive, more inclusive, more sustainable and more climate-resilient. But this requires addressing declining densities, the scarcity of arterial roads, inadequate protection of vulnerable open spaces, poor and ineffective drainage networks and inappropriate regulation of land use and subdivision. Shlomo Angel is Professor of City Planning at The Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University. This essay includes contributions from Alejandro M. Blei, Patrick Lamson-Hall, Nicolás Galarza and Yang Liu. AGENCY OF INFORMALITY David Satterthwaite Upgrading is a term given to government measures to improve housing and community-related infrastructure and services (such as piped water, sewers, drains, household waste collection and healthcare) to settlements considered (or officially designated as) ‘slums’ or illegally developed. Many include measures to provide inhabitants with secure tenure. Some also support improvements to housing. Upgrading represents a different approach to improving housing conditions for low-income groups as it accepts the validity of upgrading ‘illegal’ settlements, structures and land uses. Globally, we have nearly 50 years of experience with government-led upgrading programmes. One of the earliest and among the best-known is the Kampung Improvement Programme in Indonesia, initiated in informal settlements in Jakarta and Surabaya in 1969 with the support of the World Bank. By the mid-1970s, many other governments were implementing upgrading schemes, although some continued to bulldoze informal settlements (typically those in valuable locations) and continued with (mostly ineffective) public housing programmes. Viewing documented experiences with upgrading up to the present, we can see large differences in what upgrading provided, what it cost per house, who implemented and paid for it and the extent to which it engaged the population and served their needs. Where upgrading works well, it greatly improves housing conditions and access to services. It removes or reduces the risk of eviction. It builds on the investments that those living in informal settlements had made before upgrading and, crucially, it does not require residents to move (with all the costs this brings, as well as disruptions of social networks and almost always with less favourable locations). But care is needed in upgrading schemes in order not to impose costs that cannot be afforded – such as payment for water, sanitation and electricity after upgrading – and to ensure good maintenance and repair for community infrastructure and services. Government-led upgrading Government-led upgrading ranges from rudimentary (e.g. some investment in drains and provision of public taps), which costs less than US$100 per household, to comprehensive (e.g. provision for piped water and sewers, storm drains, paved roads, electricity, securing tenure, community facilities and sometimes income generation or support for house improvement or extension), which can cost several thousand dollars per household. No matter the range, all upgrading programmes supported by local government are valuable as an indication of the acceptance of the residents’ right to live there. The form of government-led upgrading varies, with some projects displacing residents when the whole point is not to do so. An assessment of India’s Basic Services for the Urban Poor programme in 11 cities found that many upgrading schemes involved clearing the site and constructing small contractor-built apartments rather than supporting households to make incremental improvements to existing housing and involving residents in the design and decision-making process. In many such schemes, former residents do not receive accommodation in the ‘upgraded’ settlement. In Latin America, there seems to be an acceptance by many local governments that upgrading informal settlements is the conventional policy response – a remarkable departure from policy responses in the 1960s and 1970s of bulldozing or ignoring them. This policy change was in part the result of political changes brought about with the return to democracy and the strengthened capacities of city governments, including elected mayors. These were in turn often supported by participatory budgeting. Community-led upgrading There are many urban initiatives in Latin America, Asia and Africa that contribute to upgrading but are not labelled as such. The hundreds of community-designed and -managed toilet blocks and washing facilities in informal settlements in Mumbai would not be labelled as upgrading because they are not addressing housing. However, the last 20 years have brought an increase in documentation of upgrading, from city or national federations of slum/shack dwellers. There are 32 such federations, all of them members of an international network managed by Slum/ Shack Dwellers International (SDI). 21 One of the main constraints on upgrading informal settlements is the lack of data and maps, or even street names. The federations collect data and prepare detailed digital maps of every informal settlement and plot boundaries. This is presented back to residents to engage them in designing the intervention. These citywide maps help establish official recognition by city authorities of needs, and provide the basis for negotiating in situ housing upgrades. For example, the Epworth Local Board (Harare, Zimbabwe) used the enumeration conducted by the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation to develop an in situ upgrading plan for an area with high levels of informal housing. The community data were superimposed on satellite images and linked to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) spatial data, informing the regularisation of plots for more than 6,500 households. In Pune, India, the in situ upgrading in Mother Teresa Nagar managed by Mahila Milan (Women Together, a federation of women’s savings groups) was complicated by the high density and difficulties entailed in reblocking the site to allow for the installation of trunk infrastructure. Architects worked in consultation with each household to design their units. Two thousand individual house plans were prepared and sanctioned by the local government. Some of the housing plots were too small to upgrade, so their inhabitants were rehoused in apartments in threestorey buildings within the settlement. Another constraint on upgrading is lack of funding. The Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) developed a novel way to catalyse community-driven upgrading. ACCA has supported over 1,000 small community upgrading projects and more than 100 larger housing initiatives, working in 165 cities in 19 nations, by providing community organisations with up to US$3,000 and the flexibility to choose what to do with it. The small budgets give them the opportunity to think about what is possible and what other resources can be mobilised. The most popular interventions have been improvements in water, sanitation, drainage, solid waste management, electricity, street lights and community centres. In each city, community organisations undertaking ACCA-supported initiatives present their work to city government. In most of the cities, some kind of joint working group has been established at the city level to provide a platform for community networks, city governments, civic groups, NGOs and academics to plan and manage the upgrading and city development fund process and to identify responses to land issues. Community development funds have been established in 107 cities. Co-production: government and community working together There is a recognition among community leaders that getting upgrading at scale needs the support of local governments. One of the most ambitious upgrading initiatives that centres on co-production is the Baan Mankong (‘secure tenure’) programme implemented by the Thai government’s Community Organisations Development Institute (CODI). This channels government funds in the form of infrastructure subsidies and housing loans direct to community organisations in informal settlements. Community organisations plan and carry out improvements to their housing or develop new housing. This includes negotiating to purchase or lease all or part of the site from the owner. From 2003 to 2011, CODI approved 858 projects in more than 1,500 22 communities in 277 urban centres, covering more than 90,000 households. Overall, CODI and the organisation out of which it developed (the Urban Community Development Office) has provided loans and grants to community organisations that have reached 2.4 million households since 1992. CODI has particular significance in four aspects: the scale; the extent of community involvement; the extent to which it seeks to institutionalise community-driven solutions within local governments; and how it is funded by domestic resources through a combination of national government, local government and community contributions. Some of the most successful upgrading programmes have been driven by local NGOs working with residents and their organisations, who then built partnerships with local governments. This is because community-driven upgrading without government support inevitably comes up against the need to integrate with citywide systems. One of the largest and most successful programmes bringing together household, community investment and government investment was initiated by the Pakistani NGO the Orangi Pilot Project-Research and Training Institute. It began supporting households in an informal settlement in Karachi with more than 1 million inhabitants, to plan, implement and finance toilets in the houses, underground sewers and neighbourhood collector sewers. Then the organisation showed how it was possible for local governments to plan, finance and implement the larger ‘external’ trunk sewers, into which the neighbourhood sewers feed, and ‘end-of-pipe’ treatment plants. In more than 300 locations in Pakistan, communities have financed, managed and built their own internal sanitation systems. Local governments were then able to install the external systems (the big pipes) as they no longer had to fund and manage the ‘small pipes’. National and local funds for local upgrading There is a growing awareness of the need to match the growth in the competence and capacity of community organisations with the flexible funding they need to expand the scale and scope of what they do and to support partnerships with local government. The issue is how to set up national or local funds to support community-driven, local government-supported upgrading at scale. Many of the SDI federations have developed their own funds with savings from their member savings groups but also funds through which external (local, national and international) support can be directed and managed. The Kenyan federation Muungano wa Wanavijiji (‘United Slum Dwellers’) has the Akiba Mashinani Trust to raise and manage bridging finance. The Trust has provided almost 7,000 households with loans for shelter upgrading. The National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda and the government of Jinja town have set up a Community Upgrading Fund to support initiatives prioritised by low-income communities. In many of the cities involved in the ACCA programme described above, new local funds have been developed, jointly managed with local government. Some countries have started with national funds, such as the Urban Poor Development Fund in Cambodia and CLAFNet in Sri Lanka, and 70 cities have started with city-based funds (as in cities in Nepal, Myanmar and Vinh, Vietnam). Expanding scale and scope It is clear that meeting many of the Sustainable Development Goals’ demands for universal basic services coverage by 2030 in urban areas will depend on successful upgrading in informal settlements. But as with the SDGs, the UN’s New Urban Agenda hardly mentions civil society and the innovation, resources and capacities local organisations can bring and have brought to upgrading; the New Urban Agenda does not mention mayors at all. As acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, upgrading also has importance for locally driven disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, since high-quality urban infrastructure and services and better housing are at the centre of reducing risks from extreme weather. Upgrading can also support low carbon emissions, as most upgrading takes place in dense clusters of housing able to support high levels of walking, bicycling and public transport. But, at present, the international funds that are meant to support climate change adaptation do not see informal settlement upgrading as a priority and lack the structures to engage with local governments and local civil society organisations to make this happen. The potential is there for a very large expansion in upgrading, with local government and community support. David Satterthwaite is a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Visiting Professor at the Development Planning Unit, University College London. This is an abridged version of an essay appearing in Shaping Cities in an Urban Age. ON HOLD IN JAKARTA AbdouMaliq Simone Every afternoon two dozen middle-aged men huddle at one of the several coffee shops in the underground mall of one of the most infamous vertical housing developments in Jakarta, Kalibata City. A pervasive air of melancholy is punctured only by passing security guards, or when everyone proceeds to the outdoor smoking area a few metres away. Like so many Jakartans these days, these men are on standby, constantly browsing WhatsApp and seemingly assembled to disperse on important missions at a moment’s notice. But these missions never seem to materialise and so they appear stuck in an interminable wait. The complex where this waiting occurs falls under a kind of dictatorship of the developer. Its 13,000 units were almost all sold prior to construction on government land by real estate company Agus Podomoro and equipped with public subsidies – this complex was intended as ‘affordable housing’. The complex is six years old and replete with an array of infrastructural problems. The internal sewage-processing system has collapsed, with waste being dumped into a nearby lake. Elevators are often broken; the complex won’t last more than a decade without significant reconstruction, which, given the temporality of the 30-year lease, is unlikely. Owners of the mostly minimal-size apartments are reduced to owning the ‘airspace’ of the unit and are compelled to pay escalating surcharges for maintenance and water. Given this situation, most of the complex is managed by an unofficial system of internal brokerage and subcontracting where flats are occupied according to every conceivable duration. The objective is to squeeze as much money out of the place as possible given the prevailing atmosphere of temporariness. While Kalibata is perhaps the most cosmopolitan place in this vast urban region, it is impermeable to official scrutiny. Police, parliamentarians, ambulance drivers, firefighters must all defer to the developer’s security for any ‘official’ entry. Even when owners occupy their own units they have no definitive rights over them. At the same time, the developer concedes to, ignores or cultivates intricate networks of local control that manage the apportionment of apartments and spaces to temporalities of tenancy, commercial interests, social types, licit and illicit trades. Allotment is not static or final, but a constantly oscillating process of ‘give and take’. Large measures of dissimulation are involved, as in the example of one broker constituting a fake outpost of the immigration department, replete with ‘officials in uniform’ and ‘real documentation’, in a move to clear out African migrants from three floors of one of the 22 buildings. While local governance in Jakarta requires a democratically elected leader to represent 100 household units, the developer has basically made a deal with the district government staff to pay them to serve as the leaders, even though the developer then precludes them from entering the complex to perform official duties, which include the registration of births, deaths and marriages and voting registration. In part, these multiple sovereignties persist because there is no public overarching framework capable of coordinating these spatial economies and the power of developers is largely reproduced because they have become the primary funders of political competition, at both municipal and national levels. The men huddled in the coffee shop exude a sense of defeat. They are the crews who have attempted to bring the conditions of owners and tenants to public attention, have attempted to craft local versions of class action suits and have attempted to deliver public letters to agency heads only to be blocked by security guards and municipal police in the interests of maintaining public order. Yet they are also reluctant to leave, to sell their non-asset homes. After all, larger volumes of a highly tentative middle class are being folded into these highly formatted, constrained and uncertain spaces. Their lure is based partly on locational advantages – proximity to trains, jobs and amenities – that are being diminished as each new development haemorrhages increased volumes of automobiles on to already gridlocked traffic, rendering even the shortest commute sometimes a matter of hours. The lure is also based on the increasing labour intensity that characterises everyday management in the so-called ‘popular’ residential districts of the urban core and its near periphery. The logistics of circulation – how to get from one place to another, how to order some commodity or service – are constant preoccupations and sources of income. In a region with too many cars, too few public transport options, people are investing in cars and motorbikes to earn extra income driving for application-based transport services. The demands of being at the right place at the right time – something discernible only through incessant circulation rather than rational planning – flood the available pathways, slowing movement and amplifying the urgency of speed. The rakyat – the majority of poor, upper-poor, working- and lower-middleclass residents who have always lived in close spatial, if not cultural, proximity – in the past could largely be indifferent to the large-scale developments of the city. They felt secure in their porous enclosures that fostered heterogeneous economies and provisions of care, yet at the same time enabled large measures of household autonomy and privacy. Collective entanglements were less a matter of absolute survival than a means of keeping up with the volatilities of urban life, making them work as resources for new ways of building, exchanging and cooperating. For a long time they knew the official public realm and its institutions were not for them, even as they accorded them cursory respect and let them believe that they constituted effective authorities. With income streams that could be ploughed back into local districts to fund initiatives under the radar, residents could successfully create the impression that they were resource-scarce as a veil for uniquely localised practices of accumulation. Of course dissimulation cuts both ways and is at the root of rampant contemporary deceptions. One of the primary deceptions operates under the rubric of ‘citizenship’ and ‘social inclusion’ as a means on the part of governing apparatuses and their machines of accumulation to more effectively control populations who have long had to ‘go their own way’, build their own infrastructures of everyday life to endure. Under the auspices of availing different scales of credit, enterprise development, job training and affordable housing, poor and working-class residents of Jakarta and many other cities in the Global South are not only being folded into long-term debt obligations, but their opportunities and capacities for managing street-level markets and businesses, as well as collaborative networks of various service provisions, are attenuated. Experiments afloat In the rush to become a modern Asian city and as an expression of the power that private real estate developers have long held in Jakarta, the massive roll-out of ‘affordable’ apartments was initially imagined by many across the city as a kind of destination, the spatial embodiment of new modes of being urban, of greater autonomy and individual initiative freed from the increasingly labour-intensive efforts needed to sustain neighbourhood collective life. For, this collective life was being made subject to increasing pressures from competing trajectories of interest, money and use. But these ‘destinations’ have proven only temporary. For the reasons I have identified in my discussion of Kalibata City, they could never constitute more than a transitory vehicle. For many young professionals, the wheeling and dealing of mega-apartmentcomplex life has served as a way to explore how to avoid the entrapment of regular wage labour, and has provided ways of earning money that allow them time and opportunities to participate more broadly in activist, sectoral and interest-based networks that may have little to do with each other, and where profession is not the coordinating mechanism of linkage. Even for workingclass residents, needing multiple jobs in order to make ends meet, these apartment complexes have been domains from which to ‘spread out’ into the wider surrounds, as the complexes operate as repositories of information and contacts. Yet these expenditures that risk dispossession, these proximities and feelingout of attachments, the working-out of conditions to coexist, the obligations to extend one to another and to continuously invent new terms for collaboration, are the grounds of urban sociality. Part of the ways in which the majority will be able to re-institutionalise their own remaking is to occupy the variegated residual built environments of the urban core, the peripheral towns and the half-abandoned industrial estates. Almost everyone I know is looking for somewhere else to go. Somewhere a little more secure, with more space, that is affordable, and not a ‘million’ miles from the city. They are ‘bumping’ into each other all the time, and even though they work out their individuated ‘solutions’, along the way increasing numbers of them are considering how they might more collectively acquire or build something more representative of their needs and imaginations. Increasing numbers are studying land, real estate and building. More are looking into how to acquire old neighbourhoods in nearby cities connected by train lines in ‘bulk’, and how to think about high density in different ways. For the blanketing of Jakarta’s region with mega towers, commercial storage spaces, industrial zones and shopping malls will never provide residents with a place to live, to inhabit. Jakarta is still replete with substantial zones of viable residential and commercial infrastructure that could be subject to the retrofitting, adaptations and employment generation necessary to manage volatile environments and climate. The Indonesian state ambivalently pursues one of the costliest infrastructure projects ever – a gigantic sea wall viewed as the only means to rescue the northern half of the city. But this money could theoretically be converted into a wide range of sociotechnical dispositions whose implications would themselves go a long way toward mitigating the envisioned disaster motivating such a massive project. Meanwhile, everything is on hold, as are, seemingly, most residents’ lives. Not on hold in terms of their doing nothing, for they avidly pursue project after project. But, rather, on hold from either submitting themselves to a specific future or from resigning themselves to a debilitating cynicism. They are also on hold because they do not know what will constitute effective political vernaculars, or what kinds of mobilisations are possible. AbdouMaliq Simone is Research Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Visiting Professor at the African Centre for Cities. This abridged essay first appeared in Shaping Cities in an Urban Age. 23 DATA The following pages present new research undertaken by LSE Cities over the past two years on African cities and brings together comparative data and evidence collected since 2005 through the Urban Age research programme. The section provides a global overview of contemporary urbanisation, focusing on the demographic, economic and spatial development of cities worldwide. From an analysis of global trends, which highlights the unequal distribution of population and economic growth, the levels and patterns of urbanisation – covering Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas – are compared.The changing connectivity between African cities and international centres is also explored.The section includes detailed city-specific analysis of selected sub-Saharan African cities – Addis Ababa, Accra, CapeTown, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Lagos and Nairobi – comparing quantitative and spatial data with other cities of the developing and developed world. Patterns of urban expansion, form, density, mobility, social indicators and governance structures provide an objective account of the particular dynamics of urban growth in different parts of Africa. LSE Cities ResearchTeam Philipp Rode, Executive Director Rosie Havener, Data and Research Coordinator Peter Griffiths, Managing Editor Alexandra Gomes, GIS and Data Analyst Muhammad Adeel, Research Officer Marco Di Nunzio, Research Officer Rebecca Craig, Researcher Tim White, Researcher Fizzah Sajjad, Researcher DYNAMICS OF URBAN GROWTH The maps below chart the population and economic growth of a selection of world cities. Population size and growth for cities over 750,000 people is illustrated from 1990 to 2030. The dynamics of recent and future population and economic growth are unequally distributed across the globe, with steep increases forecast in parts of Africa and Asia and a levelling-out in other regions of the world. The numbers in the upper map indicate growth per hour driven by natural HOW LARGE CITIES ARE GROWING birth rates and migration. The map illustrates that some of the cities predicted to be among the largest in the world in 2030 were no more than villages and small towns in 1990, while a handful are expected to shrink. Patterns of economic growth, in the lower map, are shown for global cities between 2012 and 2030, with dark orange representing the highest GDP growth rates. There is significant overlap between cities and world regions experiencing rapid population and projected economic growth, though population size and past economic performance are not the only drivers for the intense levels of projected GDP growth in rapidly urbanising regions. Income is dramatically enhanced as people live closer together, taking advantage of more efficient infrastructure and access to jobs and benefiting from shared resources and public services, including schools, hospitals and community facilities. WHERE CITIES ARE GROWING High Low City, country Projected average annual population growth % (2015–2030) Average annual population growth % (1990–2015) Population of urban agglomeration (2015) 5.0 5.0 5,116,000 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Population of urban agglomeration (2030) 10,760,000 Projected average annual real GDP growth % (2012–2030) Luanda, Angola 4.3 5.5 5,506,000 10,429,000 7.7 Lagos, Nigeria 4.1 4.1 13,123,000 24,239,000 6.6 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 3.9 2.4 3,238,000 5,851,000 7.7 Kinshasa, DRC 3.6 4.6 11,587,000 19,996,000 7.2 Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire 3.1 3.4 4,860,000 7,773,000 5.9 Khartoum, Sudan 3.1 3.1 5,129,000 8,158,000 5.9 Xiamen, China 3.0 7.7 4,430,000 6,911,000 7.3 Dhaka, Bangladesh 2.9 3.9 17,598,000 27,374,000 6.9 Karachi, Pakistan 2.7 3.4 16,618,000 24,838,000 6.5 1990 2.6 6.5 5,472,000 8,098,000 6.6 Chittagong, Bangladesh 2.6 3.2 4,539,000 6,719,000 6.6 Delhi, India 2.3 3.9 25,703,000 36,060,000 7.0 Mumbai, India 2.1 1.9 21,043,000 27,797,000 +21 1 5 10 4.4 23,741,000 30,751,000 6.8 2.1 9,897,000 12,221,000 4.7 Johannesburg, RSA 1.4 3.7 9,399,000 11,573,000 4.2 Bogotá, Colombia 1.4 2.9 9,765,000 11,966,000 3.9 Atlanta, United States 1.2 3.4 5,142,000 6,140,000 2.8 Istanbul, Turkey 1.1 3.1 14,164,000 16,694,000 4.8 Mexico City, Mexico 0.9 1.2 20,999,000 23,865,000 2.8 São Paulo, Brazil 0.7 1.4 21,066,000 23,444,000 3.5 London, United Kingdom 0.7 1.1 10,313,000 11,467,000 2.8 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 0.6 1.1 12,902,000 14,174,000 2.4 Paris, France 0.6 0.6 10,843,000 11,803,000 1.5 Hong Kong, SAR China 0.5 1.0 7,314,000 7,885,000 3.0 New York, United States 0.4 0.6 18,593,000 19,885,000 2.9 Berlin, Germany 0.2 0.2 3,563,000 3,658,000 1.3 -1.6 Seoul Beijing Delhi +51 +12 +9 +44 +60 +41 Dhaka +65 Shanghai Guangzhou Mumbai Kampala Addis Ababa +27 +16 +47 Nairobi Dar es Salaam Kinshasa +25 São Paulo Hourly Growth + – 1.7 1.4 +13 Rio de Janeiro 20 6.7 Shanghai, China Lagos Accra +18 Lima 2030 (calculated between 1990–2030) Lima, Peru +56 +6 Bogotá 2015 +75 Karachi Population 9.8 Suzhou, China +42 Mexico City 8,616,000 6.5 Tbilisi Istanbul +24 +60 -0.3 Cairo 5,650,000 13,033,000 +29 Atlanta 5.4 8,741,000 Paris +11 2.8 3.2 Budapest Bucharest New York Surat, India 2.7 Kharkiv -0.3 -0.6 +7 +11 -0.6 Berlin London (millions) Lahore, Pakistan +1 +10 7.8 +6 Cape Town People per hour People per hour 0 4,000 km ECONOMIC GROWTH Moscow We would like to thank the following organisations for their assistance in obtaining data: URBANISATION VS GDP New York Los Angeles Beijing Istanbul Tehran Madrid Dallas 100% Brazil South Korea Mexico Peru Colombia Turkey United Kingdom United States France Germany Accra Average annual GDP 40% 20% Abidjan Douala Mumbai Hong Kong Dhaka Addis Ababa Ho Chi Minh City Kuala Lumpur Kampala Nairobi Kinshasa Lima China Nigeria Angola Bangladesh SudanPakistan India Tanzania Ethiopia Fortaleza (growth forecast 2012–2030) 10% DRC Lagos Bogotá South Africa Ghana Shanghai Doha 60% Côte d’Ivoire Tokyo Chongqing K ara chi Khartoum Dakar Mexico City Japan 80% Ürümqi Delhi Cairo Hong Kong 0% Luanda Dar es Salaam Jakarta Brasília Johannesburg Rio de Janeiro São Paulo Santiago Population Kenya (millions) Cape Town Perth Sydney Buenos Aires Uganda 0 1 $100 GDP per capita (US$, PPP) Africa 24 London Paris Chicago Riyadh Urbanisation level (annual percentage of population residing in urban areas) Addis Ababa Masterplan Project Office; Central Statistical Agency, Ethiopia (CSA); Centre for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN); CLUSTER – Cairo Lab for Urban Studies; City of CapeTown; DataFirst, University of CapeTown; Data For All; DigitalTransport 4 Africa; DLR – Earth Observation Center; East Carolina University; Ethiopian Railway Corporation; Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC), Addis Ababa University; European Commission, Joint Research Centre; GoMetro; Nairobi City County Government; National Bureau of Statistics,Tanzania; Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (Nigeria); International Growth Centre (IGC); Institute forTransportation and Development Policy (ITDP); Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA); Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA); Statistics South Africa (StatsSA);Takween Integrated Community Development;Tufts University; Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS); University of Lagos; University of Nairobi; WhereIsMyTransport; World Bank; World Resources Institute (WRI). Seattle Europe $1,000 Asia $10,000 Latin America & the Caribbean Northern America $100,000 5 10 20 $1,000,000 0 Oceania Urban Age/LSE Cities analysis based on data from Oxford Economics and UN DESA (World Population Prospects) 4,000 km 25 WHERE PEOPLE LIVE AFRICA AFRICA 42% Urbanised Distribution of population by density range (per cent of population) 3.5 million people up to 1 39.5 million 1 to 10 178.7 million 10 to 100 360.1 million 100 to 1,000 417.4 million 1,000 to 10,000 190.0 million over 10,000 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% cent at 1,000–10,000 pp/km2), this is low in comparison to the other world regions, where nearly half of the population lives at an equivalent density (with South and East Asia at 45.2 per cent; Europe at 46.2 per cent; South America at 49.4 per cent). In Africa, there are fewer higher-density areas, with concentrations around major cities such as Lagos, Cairo, Johannesburg, Khartoum, Nairobi and Addis Ababa. The percentage of the population living at low densities is the highest in Africa, with 18.6 per cent living at levels under 100 pp/km2, compared to 6.9 per cent in South and East Asia, 14.2 per cent in Europe and 13.8 per cent in South America. South and East Asia feature far higher SOUTH & EAST ASIA 44% Urbanised Distribution of population by density range (per cent of population) 2.8 million people up to 1 25.6 million 1 to 10 246.8 million 10 to 100 1.2 billion 100 to 1,000 1.8 billion 1,000 to 10,000 730.7 million over 10,000 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% SOUTH & EAST ASIA Tunis Algiers 50% In addition to the maps, bar charts illustrate the density range inhabited by proportions of the population in each of the global regions. Africa, the largest of the four regions, is experiencing a period of intense growth. While the urbanisation level is the lowest of the four at 42 per cent, this is set to rise dramatically. Despite low urbanisation levels, the percentage of the population living at the highest densities (over 10,000 pp/km2) is 16 per cent – not far behind South and East Asia (18.3 per cent) and over three times that of Europe (4.9 per cent). Though the largest share of the population in Africa lives at high density (35.1 per Density (people/km2) square kilometre (pp/km2), in Africa the threshold is much higher at 1,019 pp/km2. In rapidly urbanising countries in Asia, density thresholds are even higher: 1,433 pp/km2 in China and 4,128 pp/km2 in India. To more accurately compare settlement structures globally, the following maps compare density levels between four regions – Africa, South and East Asia, Europe and South America – highlighting in red areas with densities over 1,000 pp/km2, rather than applying regional thresholds. In these maps, land is coloured on a spectrum based on population density, where light grey represents areas of the lowest densities and red the highest, up to 170,000 pp/km2. Density (people/km2) Europe, North America and South America are the most urbanised continents on the globe, with 74 per cent, 82 per cent and 84 per cent of people respectively living in cities, towns and other urban settlements; while Africa is around 42 per cent and Asia 49 per cent urbanised. Each continent displays very different patterns of urbanisation, reflecting diverse histories, cultures and geographic constraints. However, these figures reflect differences in what types of settlements and density levels are considered urban by the public authorities in the different nations and regions of the world. For example, while the density threshold for urban areas in Europe is relatively low at 314 people per Casablanca Cairo Ürümqi Beijing Seoul Khartoum Tokyo Dakar Kano Ouagadougou Shanghai Lahore Chongqing Delhi Addis Ababa Abidjan Accra Jaipur Lagos Taipei Karachi Guangzhou Dhaka Douala Kolkata Hong Kong Kampala Mumbai Nairobi Kigali Yangon Kinshasa Manila Bangkok Mbuji-Mayi Chennai Dar es Salaam Luanda Ho Chi Minh City Colombo Blantyre Lusaka Kuala Lumpur Harare Antananarivo Jakarta Johannesburg Ambient population density Ambient population density Durban (people/km2) (people/km2) 1 1 170,000 170,000 0 26 1,000 km Cape Town Port Elizabeth 0 1,000 km Urban Age/LSE Cities analysis based on data from UN DESA (WPP) and Landscan 2016TM High Resolution Global Population Data Set 27 EUROPE 74% Urbanised Distribution of population by density range (per cent of population) 2.2 million people up to 1 17.2 million 1 to 10 79.0 million 10 to 100 240.9 million 100 to 1,000 320.7 million 1,000 to 10,000 34.1 million over 10,000 0% 10% EUROPE 20% 30% 40% 50% levels of density (over 10,000 pp/km2) – a third of that in Africa. Europe also contains a greater concentration of cities with over 500,000 people and a large number of highly connected smaller cities and towns across parts of western Europe, reflecting its unique history founded on the power and autonomy of relatively small city-states, regions and nations. South America features the largest proportion of the population at the highest density levels, with 74.4 per cent of the population living at densities over 1,000 pp/km2, including the largest global share of densities over 10,000 pp/km2 (25.0 per cent). High-density areas are clustered around large cities such as São Paulo, Lima, Buenos Aires and Bogotá, located along continental edges known as the ‘populated rim’. Though the Andes mountains and the Amazon in central parts of South America limit urbanisation, the expansion of slums into valleys and along steep slopes, followed by waves of incremental upgrading and formal service provision, has seen cities overcome topographic constraints. South America features significantly fewer people living at the mid-range density of 100–1,000 pp/km2 (11.89 per cent), nearly a third of the proportion seen in the other world regions. SOUTH AMERICA 84% Urbanised Distribution of population by density range (per cent of population) 2.6 million people up to 1 18.8 million 1 to 10 35.0 million 10 to 100 Density (people/km2) high density levels, with the smallest proportion of the population living at the lowest densities and less than half the share of the population than in Europe living at densities under 10 pp/km2 (6.9 per cent vs 14.2 per cent). South and East Asia’s urbanisation level of 44 per cent does not reflect the reality of high-density living in the region, as much of South and East Asia is considered rural where equivalent densities would be considered urban in Europe (314 pp/km2). In Europe, there is a more decentralised form of urbanisation, with over half (51.1 per cent) of Europe’s residents occupying densities over 1,000 pp/km2, but only 4.9 per cent of the population living at the highest Density (people/km2) population densities across vast territories, as well as the emerging presence of large urban agglomerations such as Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Kolkata in addition to the established mega-cities of Tokyo, Shanghai, Jakarta, Delhi and Seoul. There are extensive concentrations of higher-density areas that are transforming from agricultural to urban economies in the regions stretching from Hong Kong to Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta and along the River Ganges from Lahore in Pakistan to Dhaka in Bangladesh. Over 90 per cent of the population live above 100 pp/km2, as indicated by dark grey areas. Rapid demographic and economic growth account for South and East Asia’s 48.4 million 100 to 1,000 201.5 million 1,000 to 10,000 101.9 million over 10,000 0% SOUTH AMERICA 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Caracas Bogotá Quito Fortaleza Lima Helsinki Brasília St. Petersburg Oslo Stockholm Rio de Janeiro Moscow São Paulo Manchester Amsterdam Berlin Warsaw London Kiev Paris Santiago Buenos Aires Montevideo Bucharest Barcelona Rome Istanbul Madrid Lisbon Ambient population density Ambient population density (people/km2) (people/km2) 0 28 Athens 1 1 170,000 170,000 1,000 km 0 1,000 km Urban Age/LSE Cities analysis based on data from UN DESA (world population prospects) and Landscan 2016TM High Resolution Global Population Data Set 29 FLIGHT PATTERNS The map of African commercial aviation has been transformed beyond recognition since the turn of the millennium. From very few international flights within the continent, and routes beyond the continent restricted almost entirely to century-old paths of colonial influence to European metropoles, Africa has quickly become criss-crossed by intra-continental flights run by African airlines, and connected by a widening range of intercontinental routes served by African and other non-European airlines. Breaking from decades of strict regionalism, airlines now race with each other to open non-stop services from east Africa and a range of cities over the full spread of the continent. More airlines connect more cities across Africa, and across the oceans, than ever before. Significant growth has occurred in Addis Ababa and Nairobi, alongside more established hubs in Johannesburg and Cairo, with growth in connections to Asia – particularly to China and India – and continued growth to state-sponsored hubs in the Middle East. Trade figures over a similar period mirror this trend, with export and import growth between Africa and China and India almost doubling. There are opportunities to reposition Africa more centrally in global trade networks by increasing connectivity with the Americas. While Africa commands only 1 per cent of the global air travel market, Africa’s busiest route between Cape Town and Johannesburg ranks in the top ten busiest routes globally. In the next 15 years, growing demand along this route will require an additional 970 new passenger aircraft. Government-supported airlines, often charged with expanding the brand profile of countries, have had mixed success. The growth of Ethiopian Airlines has benefited from its geographical positioning between African and Asian expansion, while South African Airways has required considerable public support and Nigeria’s state carrier ceased operations in 2003. Oslo Dublin Amsterdam Brussels Shannon London Frankfurt Paris Toronto Vienna Marseille Rome Madrid New York Istanbul Barcelona Washington Beijing Lisbon Malta Casablanca Atlanta Beirut Tripoli Agadir Cairo Dakar Monrovia Abuja Accra Abidjan Lagos Douala Juba Bangui Arua Gulu Kampala Jinja 120 Goma Wajir Mogadishu Singapore Samburu Musoma Lamu Kigali Nairobi Seychelles Dar es Salaam Luanda Comoros Lubumbashi Mayotte Non-stop routes Regional distribution of non-stop routes 2017 2017 (change since 2002) Africa Addis Ababa Dembi Dolo Brazzaville Kinshasa AFRICA'S MOST CONNECTED CITIES Passengers Sana’a N'djamena Libreville City Hanoi Bangkok Ouagadougou Flights within Africa 100 Hong Kong Mumbai Niamey Bamako São Tomé and Príncipe 80 Guangzhou Muscat Hyderabad Khartoum Freetown 60 Sharjah Jeddah Cotonou 40 Shanghai Delhi Abu Dhabi 2017 2002 20 Dammam Doha Riyadh Madinah (million passengers per year on non-stop routes) 0 Chengdu Kuwait Sharm El-Sheikh PASSENGER TOTALS Rank by passenger totals Zurich Milan Banjul Flights between African & non-African cities Stockholm Middle East Lusaka Harare Asia (other than Middle East) Europe North & South America Nampula Oceania Antananarivo Windhoek 1 Johannesburg 31,785,959 93 71 (+5) 6 (+2) 4 (-2) 7 (-4) 3 (0) 2 (0) 2 Cairo 24,188,465 97 31 (+3) 30 (+5) 8 (+1) 26 (-5) 2 (+1) 0 (0) 3 Addis Ababa 14,573,658 108 69 (+38) 12 (+7) 11 (+8) 13 (+10) 3 (+3) 0 (0) 4 CapeTown 13,547,622 35 25 (+9) 2 (+2) 1 (+1) 7 (+4) 0 (-2) 0 (0) 5 Casablanca 12,965,183 113 53 (+28) 7 (-1) 2 (+2) 46 (+22) 5 (+3) 0 (0) 6 Algiers 11,942,586 94 43 (+3) 6 (+1) 4 (+3) 39 (+9) 2 (+2) 0 (0) 7 Nairobi 11,383,428 82 62 (+21) 10 (+4) 5 (+4) 5 (-1) 0 (0) 0 (0) 8 Lagos 8,767,772 43 31 (+2) 4 (+2) 1 (+1) 5 (-2) 2 (+1) 0 (0) 9 Tunis 7,669,908 82 34 (+22) 8 (+2) 2 (+1) 37 (-1) 1 (+1) 0 (0) 10 Durban 7,323,183 15 14 (+14) 1 (+1) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (-11) 0 (0) 15 Accra 4,530,734 36 24 (+9) 2 (+1) 1 (+1) 7 (+1) 2 (0) 0 (0) 16 Dar es Salaam 3,941,284 42 33 (+9) 5 (+1) 1 (+1) 3 (+1) 0 (0) 0 (0) 33 Kampala 2,412,841 27 21 (+3) 3 (+1) 1 (+1) 2 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) Mauritius Walvis Bay São Paulo Maputo Johannesburg Durban Cape Town NON-STOP ROUTES (2017) Port Elizabeth Number of passengers on non-stop routes Internal 2,412,841 – 5,000,000 5,000,001 – 10,000,000 10,000,001 – 14,573,658 76 – 200,000 200,001 – 500,000 Addis Ababa Nairobi Accra Lagos Cape Town Kampala Dar es Salaam 500,001 – 7,658,325 FLIGHT NETWORKS (2002-2017) Passengers per year on non-stop routes 76 – 200,000 Non-stop routes 2002 200,001 – 500,000 Non-stop routes 2017 500,001 – 7,658,325 Non-stop routes discontinued 2002 – 2017 ADDIS ABABA ACCRA CAPE TOWN DAR ES SALAAM KAMPALA LAGOS NAIROBI Non-stop routes: 42 (2002), 108 (2017) Non-stop routes: 24 (2002), 36 (2017) Non-stop routes: 21 (2002), 35 (2017) Non-stop routes: 30 (2002), 42 (2017) Non-stop routes: 22 (2002), 27 (2017) Non-stop routes: 39 (2002), 43 (2017) Non-stop routes: 54 (2002), 82 (2017) 0 30 2,000 km For more see: LSECiti.es/AirborneAfrica Urban Age/LSE Cities analysis based on OAG schedules dataset 31 COMPARING CITIES The Urban Age has collected data on major urban centres since 2005, creating a comparative framework to better understand how different cities across the globe perform against a range of social, demographic, economic, spatial and environmental parameters. Over the last two years, the Urban Age lens has focused on a number of African cities – Accra, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Lagos and Nairobi – in an effort to capture some of the characteristics of the continent’s new phase of urban development. The new data presented below alongside comparative cases from Asia, the Americas and Europe provides a quantitative and objective overview – not a ranking – of the complex dynamics of 16 cities from highly diverse political, economic and demographic contexts. The development trajectories of these cities highlight some striking differences – especially when it comes to population growth (combining natural birth rates and migration) for 2015–2030. Dar es Salaam leads the African cities with 48 people/hour, while Delhi will add 74 additional residents every hour, followed by Shanghai at 50. Growth rates have slowed in many European and North American cities, even though New York and London both have a reasonable growth rate of 8–9 people/hour after an extended period of decline. Seoul, reflecting South Korea’s very low birth rate level, is only anticipating one person/hour in future years. Today, around 40 per cent of Africans are urban dwellers – about 500 million people. The urban agglomeration of Lagos alone accommodates 21.5 million people, compared to 5.6 million in Singapore and 14.2 million in Istanbul. Increases in the urban population have varying implications for the urban form, density and lived experience in each of these cities. In Kampala, the population of the urban agglomeration has tripled to 2.1 million and density Current population in the administrative city (millions) Current population in the urban agglomeration (millions) ADDIS ABABA 3.3 3.4 ACCRA 2.1 2.4 CAPE TOWN 4.0 3.7 2017 2014 DAR ES SALAAM 4.4 KAMPALA 32 Average hourly population growth of urban agglomeration 2015 to 2030 (people/hour) has doubled to 12,605 people/km2 since 1990, with many living in low-rise, overcrowded informal settlements as in many other African cities. However, overall levels of density remain low compared to many Asian cities like Delhi (32,078 people/km2) or Seoul (22,925 people/km2). Many African cities will experience unprecedented economic growth in the coming decades. Ethiopia is moving at a fast pace from a predominantly rural economy to an urban one, though Addis Ababa still features the lowest GDP per capita of the 16 cities (US$1,427) – approximately half that of Accra, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. In comparison, New York (US$69,915) and Singapore (US$66,864) top the list, followed by London (US$57,157). People living in these three cities are many times wealthier, on average, than in other world cities such as Istanbul (US$24,867) and Mexico City (US$19,239), who in turn are significantly wealthier than the average resident of Cape Town (US$14,086). Though Cape Town boasts a significantly higher GDP per capita than the other African cities, its level of income inequality – indicated by the Gini coefficient – is approximately twice that of Dar es Salaam and nearly equal to Lagos, the most unequal of the 16 cities. Cape Town is followed closely by Addis Ababa, São Paulo and Delhi, with Shanghai and London featuring the most equitable income distribution of the sample. Unemployment rate is a key indicator of how economic growth impacts on society. Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Addis Ababa feature some of the highest unemployment rates – between 21 per cent and 26 per cent – aligning with fast hourly regional growth rates. Much of the unemployment is associated with a lack of formal jobs, particularly for the 12 million young people entering the labour market across Africa every year. In Kampala nearly half of the population (46.3 per cent) is under the age of 20, which could Administrative city area (km2) Average density of built-up administrative area (people/km2) GDP per capita in urban area ($, PPP) Percentage of country’s GDP produced by the metro region Unemployment rate (%) 23 520 15,574 1,427 44 21.2 9 143 9,665 3,141 17 6 2,461 8,277 14,086 5.7 48 1,631 14,233 1.5 2.1 17 194 LAGOS 7.9 21.5 26 NAIROBI 3.1 4.2 LONDON 8.7 12.3 2015 2014 ISTANBUL 14.9 14.2 NEW YORK 8.5 18.6 2015 2014 MEXICO CITY 8.9 SÃO PAULO transport modal shares at 57 per cent and 31 per cent respectively. In comparison, São Paulo, at 465 cars/1,000 inhabitants, has the highest car ownership rate of the 16 cities, leading to a high level of traffic congestion and long average daily commutes. Motorisation rates also contribute to severe air pollution in Delhi, where a car ownership rate of 140 cars/1,000 inhabitants adds to the highest PM10 level of the sixteen cities at 229 µg/m3. Annual PM10 levels skew higher in African cities on average (Lagos 122, Cape Town 98). Per capita CO2 emissions are the highest in Shanghai (13.1), followed by Singapore (9.3). Though Asian cities increasingly account for a higher share of per capita carbon emissions, urban dwellers in the Global North still pollute approximately five times more than their counterparts in the South, with the lowest per capita emissions shown in Lagos (0.04) and Accra (0.05). Population under 20 (%) Life expectancy (average) Murder rate (homicides per 100,000 inhabitants) Percentage of daily trips made by public transport Percentage of daily trips made by walking & cycling Car ownership rate (per 1,000 inhabitants) 0.61 38.1 63 5.5 31 54 40 66 1.17 7.2 0.41 38.5 2010 URBAN AREAS, GHANA 2010 62 1.3 73 13 71 98 0.05 26 24.9 0.61 37.2 67 65.5 37 21 205 30 7.8 2,915 31 21.5 0.34 42.8 62 12.8 57 28 73 64 0.06 12,605 1,735 49 13.0 0.39 46.3 59 12.0 15 70 25 170 0.40 3,449 8,131 2,058 28 8.3 0.64 41.9 55 1.3 58 27 88 122 0.04 28 718 22,204 2,591 25 26.0 0.59 39.0 63 6.1 40 47 110 33 0.18 8 1,595 6,586 57,157 23 6.3 0.34 24.5 82 1.1 29 32 303 22 4.8 18 5,469 17,193 24,867 57 15.5 0.39 31.3 77 4.7 35 48 145 53 3.3 9 787 20,713 69,915 2014 2014 6 4.2 0.55 24.4 81 3.9 60 11 215 16 5.5 20.8 20 1,483 14,006 19,239 39 5.8 0.44 34.6 76 8.8 50 31 294 42 2.8 11.9 20.8 17 1,523 13,994 20,650 36 9.3 0.60 29.5 76 14.2 43 29 465 35 1.4 DELHI 18.6 25.0 74 1,465 32,078 12,747 17 3.7 0.60 37.1 72 2.7 49 32 140 229 1.1 SEOUL 10.3 25.3 2015 2014 1 606 22,925 34,355 47 4.2 0.41 18.0 84 0.8 66 N/A 222 46 3.7 SHANGHAI 20.0 23.0 50 6,249 7,852 24,065 2014 2014 4 4.1 0.32 16.0 83 0.7 25 40 69 84 13.1 SINGAPORE 5.6 5.6 7 719 15,866 66,864 100 2.1 0.43 21.7 83 0.3 61 9 170 30 9.3 2015 2010 2017 2012 2015 2015 2009 2016 2016 2015 2010 2014 2017 2015 2013 2016 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS GIS 2013 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2015 2014 2013 2014 2009 2011 2010 2015 2018 2018 2015 2016 2012 2017 2014 2018 City income inequality (GINI Index) UN international alert level: 0.40 put pressure on the unemployment rate (13 per cent) as more young people seek work. In the nine cities outside of Africa, residents now expect to live to at least the age of 72, with people in London, New York, Shanghai, Seoul and Singapore enjoying a life expectancy of 80 years or above (even though there are significant variations within cities themselves). Life expectancies in the African cities are lower, with Lagos representing the lowest life expectancy at 55 years. African cities are only beginning to invest in public transport development, with most urban mobility dependent on unplanned, informal transport and walking. Kampala features the highest percentage of trips made by walking and cycling (70 per cent) and the lowest modal share for public transport (15 per cent), due to minimal transport infrastructure. Dar es Salaam and Addis Ababa have implemented mass transit infrastructure, with the addition of Bus Rapid Transit and Light Rail Transit contributing to high public 2011 2006 2013 2007 2006 2016 1999 2010 2010 2014 2010 2010 2012 2003 2005 2015 2007 2011 2012 2014 2006 2009 2011 2011 2010 2010 2010 2011 2015 2005 2012 Measurement methodologies and calculations may vary and are not always directly comparable between cities. 2012 2016 2012 2012 2008 2009 2014 2013 2012 2014 2010 2010 2014 2013 2015 2000 2009 2015 2005 2010 2009 2012 2014 2008 2014 2011 2012 2012 2012 2013 2014 2010 2006 2015 2010 2010 2014 2013 2014 2011 2014 2011 2012 2013 2016 2009 2012 2010 2006 2015 2010 2010 2014 2013 2014 2011 2014 2011 2012 2013 2016 2009 2012 2012 2010 2011 2010 2010 2011 2010 2014 2012 2013 2011 2011 2011 2013 2013 2015 Annual mean PM10 levels (ug/m3) WHO PM 10 guideline level: 20 µg/m3 2005 2015 2015 2006 2013 2006 2009 2013 2012 2014 2014 2014 2012 2014 2013 2013 CO2 Emissions (tonnes per capita) 2010 2009 2007 2009 2012 2009 2008 2011 2008 2011 2012 2009 2008 2008 2011 2013 33 RESIDENTIAL DENSITY Residential density is a fundamental measure of urban structure and determines the efficiency of a city’s urban footprint, underpinning economic productivity, environmental sustainably and social inclusion. Higher urban densities can improve service delivery efficiency, promote urban vitality and facilitate more sustainable public transport, walking and cycling. Where residential and employment densities converge, the competitiveness offered by high-density environments is maximised. These advantages depend, however, on effective city management and urban design that minimises the negative costs of overcrowding and pollution. Density, shown below by the number of people living in each square kilometre of a 100 x 100 kilometres urban region, is driven by topographical or land constraints, the provision of infrastructure and by inherited traditions of urban development. Density differs widely, from the high densities in central parts of Cairo, Seoul and Kinshasa to the relatively low densities in Accra, Kampala and London. London’s low residential density requires an extensive and capital-intensive public transport network to enable millions of employees to flow efficiently in and out of central business districts on a daily basis. London’s Metropolitan Green Belt has restricted the city’s outward expansion and promoted ADDIS ABABA ACCRA CAPE TOWN DAR ES SALAAM KINSHASA LAGOS Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 48,743 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 24,794 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 62,951 34 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 14,507 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 42,241 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 52,579 Outside administrative area intensification, whereas Accra, like many other cities, has sprawled significantly, taking up five times more space than in 1990. Suburbanisation and sprawl result in far lower densities in most cities, with unbuilt or protected green space also a contributor. Lagos is unusual in that the mega-city has not only sprawled substantially, but also seen an increase in density in recent years. The planned implementation of Bus Rapid Transit along Dar es Salaam’s growth corridors, with regionally coordinated policies to coordinate growth, may help reduce sprawl. Regional coordination is critical; however, cities unable to maintain resident populations centrally or within administrative boundaries have an increased challenge of managing and financing urban facilities and infrastructure. While most cities have higher central densities, Cape Town’s inner-city densities are unusually low despite the city’s major transport infrastructure converging centrally. Yangon, New York City, Dar es Salaam and Karachi show how topographical constraints drive densities, with the cities expanding around historic port activities. The similarity between the density profile of Mexico City’s consistently low-rise typologies and Rio de Janeiro, whose skyline is peppered with towers, shows how high-rise building does not necessarily create higher density, especially when individual towers are surrounded by large areas of unused space. Similarly, Delhi’s remarkable residential density – it is composed principally of three- to four-storey buildings and one-floor shacks – is far higher than New York’s, whose tall apartment blocks are often over 20 storeys high. Cairo stands out as of one the densest urban environments on the globe, with low levels of open space for many of its residents living in at times overcrowded conditions. LONDON NEW YORK SEOUL KAMPALA DELHI KARACHI YANGON NAIROBI RIO DE JANEIRO MEXICO CITY SHANGHAI High density Low density Within administrative area High density Low density CAIRO Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 153,606 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 14,663 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 62,671 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 18,769 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 66,151 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 32,416 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 38,242 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 50,084 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 31,598 Urban Age/LSE Cities analysis based on data from the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC); Addis Ababa Masterplan Project Office; International Growth Centre; City of CapeTown; JICA; University of Lagos; Dataforall.org; ClusterCairo;YCDC; DIVA-GIS Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 84,086 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 37,273 Peak density within admin. area (people/km2): 77,726 35 URBAN EXPANSION These maps illustrate the horizontal growth of cities since the early 1990s (also see page 20). They also document the relationship between the city’s administrative boundary and the built-up area in which people live. The darker orange areas highlight the variety of ways cities have expanded since 1990 in response to diverse planning regimes, geographic constraints, competing economic drivers and traditions of building form and culture. As cities grow, governing them becomes more complex and less efficient when their administrations have limited power and where urban footprints extend beyond administrative boundaries. Kampala represents an extreme case, with a significant proportion of its predominantly informal growth occurring outside the official city limits – though this misalignment City boundary 1990 1990-2015 0 BUILT FORM already existed in 1990. In Cape Town, the municipal boundary extends far beyond the built-up area, ensuring areas of growth are maintained within the administrative area, while mountains further limit growth. In Nairobi, a shift towards car-based transportation with heavy investment in highway development has contributed to outward expansion far beyond the city’s administrative borders, though protected green areas have limited southward expansion. Similarly, urban growth in Dar es Salaam has occurred primarily along four arterial roads that lead from the city centre to the peripheries. Mass transit improvements such as new Bus Rapid Transit routes are being developed along these arterial pathways, designed to control sprawl and promote intensification of inner urban areas. In Rio de Janeiro, natural barriers constrain urban growth, but a large proportion of the residents are under the control of the regional state, rather than the city. The city-state of Singapore has remained more compact due to sustainable policies that have promoted building on reclaimed land, a reduced dependency on private car use and the integration of public transport with high-density, mixed-use development. Though Kuwait’s planned expansion has remained within city limits, the low-density and low-rise pattern of growth, based on cheap oil and private cars with no investment in mass transit infrastructure, causes significant congestion. Buildings Open space 20 km ADDIS ABABA CAPE TOWN DAR ES SALAAM 62% of metropolitan population within admi