Sustainability compels present generations to make use of natural resources in a manner which does not compromise the ability of future generations[1] to live the kind of life they would want to live[2]. This notion is perhaps of greatest relevance to cities and towns as they represent the biggest footprint, par excellence, of mankind on the natural systems upon which he has to rely for his existence.

 

The first generation of postcolonial cities and towns in Africa are indeed a product of the extractive footprinting once established by the colonial administrations in order to service the economies of their motherland. Accordingly, these cities were created in a context which prohibited the installation of an industrial base. The 2004/05 State of the World抯 Cities Report rightfully points out that 揝ub-Saharan Africa is exceptional in the sense that it is occurring largely without industrial and economic growth? Indeed, Africa has become the fastest urbanizing continent with rates of urbanization exceeding 4 to 5%[3] annual growth in many cities.

 

While urbanization in advanced economies has occurred as a result of economic growth, African cities continue to grow, despite falling wages, currency devaluations, retrenchments in the public sector, rising petrol and food prices, inflation and rising unemployment. Disturbingly, most of this growth happens in the form of rising poverty, informal settlements and slums, with the number of slum dwellers being estimated to reach 332 million by 2015. As a renowned author puts it:

 

 

With the above analysis in mind, urban sustainability in the context of African cities must be understood as a deliberate and massive approach to significantly reduce the politically explosive dimensions of rising poverty in urbanizing areas for the security of the World. This must be done in a manner which prevents or reduces damage to the natural systems of urbanizing areas (ecological footprint). Contrary to the widely prevailing misinterpretation of sustainability as an summation of development and impact mitigation, the African scenario is about a deliberate and deterministic, rather than probabilistic approach to development. The latter is not just about expanding the material choices of the urban poor, but it is about doing it via:

 

a)    making technological choices that favor constant dematerialization, reduction of resource usage in production and recycling and the use of renewable sources of energy,

b)    influencing the behavioral pattern of present and future generations towards such choices.    

 

Indeed, technology makes it possible today for entire communities to meet all the material needs by reusing the solid and liquid wastes, using renewable energies to meet most of the needs instead of burning fossil fuels, polluting the air, preserving instead of cutting down forests and natural vegetation, overexploiting water supplies and conserving, instead of decimating other living species[5].

 

Another striking feature of urbanizing Africa is that more than ever, African city administrations, planners and built environment professionals are increasingly becoming out of touch with the reality of city making. Many UN reports are unanimous on the findings that informality has become the driving force in city making[6]. The increasing rates of informality in African cities stand as testimony to the fact that Africa抯 urban dwellers, whether we want it or not, are becoming the true architects, planners and urban designers in our cities. The phenomenon of slums and informal settlements find expression in the mushrooming of settlements at the periphery of large cities whereby the majority of structures and shacks are made out of precarious items such as empty cans, cartoons, stones, corrugated iron, disposed plastic bags, etc, often recycled from open waste disposal sites. In the early stages of post-independence, urbanisation was merely driven by the rural-urban migration phenomenon, which saw large numbers of rural residents flocking into cities in order to seek employment, have better access to health, education and other opportunities that are linked to urbanization.

 

In contemporary African cities, urbanization is no longer a one-way process, but rather a more sophisticated and multifaceted phenomenon. Besides rural areas, cities have become net recipients of in-migration from other smaller intermediary cities from people who are on-the-move for better opportunities. Cities, especially those with well performing economic and governance systems such as Johannesburg also attract significant in-migration from other countries of the African sub-regions. The irony of good urban performance is that the few cases available on the continent bear the seeds of its perpetual challenge. The lower the number of good performing cities on the continent, the higher is the risk of these few becoming victims of their own success. Urbanisation in Africa is therefore also to be understood as a perpetual challenge, whereby every capacity increment which results in improvements triggers multiple additional pressures and challenges to the existing capacity of the city administration to deliver services. This has resulted in congestion, environmental pollution, soil erosion, fragmentation and cost inefficiencies through urban sprawl, etc.

 

 

  

The total pattern of initiatives to address the challenge of urban sustainability on the African continent points to four types of responses, namely:

 

(i)            metropolitanisation of existing large cities,

(ii)           satellite extensions in the hinterland of existing metropolitan cities,

(iii)          creation of new capital cities in greenfield areas, and

(iv)         renewal of existing capital cities through a range of major built environment operations and infrastructure recalibration projects.

 

Metropolitanisation mainly occurs in the form of organic expansion of existing capital cities through the phenomenon of urban sprawl. In some cases, well formulated strategies and urban design templates are prepared to define and harden the urban edge in order to promote densification of the built up areas and thus, create urban efficiencies. But often, these plans fail to cope with the pace of urbanization, thus becoming obsolete before being implemented.

 

Yaounde and Douala are part of a balanced network of cities across Cameroon, but their functional specialization as administrative and economic capitals is increasingly pushing them towards metropolitanisation. The dominant pattern of this metropolitanisation is expressed through urban sprawl. Here, urban sprawl has embraced dimensions that have prompted the two cities to embark on new plans and projects that seek to service land within the periphery of the cities for residential purposes.

 

Nairoibi: East Africa抯 regional hub and portal is to receive major investments that will attract metropolitan status to Kenya抯 capital city. During the recent World Urban Forum the government of Kenya signed an agreement with the United Nations to embark on a massive upgrading plan that will see the city of Nairobi achieving metropolitan status by 2030. Measures to ensure environmental sustainability are crucial in this endeavour as they will assist to maintain the profile of Kenya as a touristic attraction, with Nairobi as a gateway that will globally compete with other touristic attractions.  

 

When Lagos sneezes urban Africa catches flu: The six largest city in the World and former capital city of Nigeria has achieved a megacity status with its population totaling 16 million inhabitants. Still in Nigeria alone, forecasts predict that by 2010, other Nigerian cities such as Kano, Kaduna and Port Harcourt will also be achieving megacity status. Here the challenge of urban sustainability finds expression in terms of economies of piracy, burgeoning crime, social exclusion, air pollution and hazardous waste disposal, substance abuse, and decaying infrastructure.       

 

 

Satellite extensions are another type of response by the city authorities designed to accommodate and channel the peripheral growth of the main city towards secondary centres with a minimum degree of functional autonomy but interrelated and interconnected with the metropolis. Conceptually, such centres are designed to accommodate the excess population growth in secondary centres and thus, mitigate the pressure of in-migration within the core city. They are designed to gravitate around the main city in a 20-40 km radius. Generally, such projects fall within the ambit of national governments for their funding. Their realization often requires an injection of large amounts of capital investments in infrastructure, the installation of decentralized administrative services and socio-economic amenities, for which funding is barely available in the necessary quantity and space of time for their completion. With the exception of South Africa satellite towns have long been conceptualized and planned for in numerous African metropolitan areas, but they remained artistic impressions in the plans, thus maintaining their semi-rural status because the requisite funding could not be leveraged to lend meaningful traction to their implementation. The consequence of starting such initiatives without the requisite funding to sustain it can easily expose the earmarked areas to be overtaken by informal land transactions and disorderly growth. Yaounde is a case in point, where some semi-rural centres are planned to become satellite extensions, but the complexity of land tenure patterns between customary and modern systems, together with the abovementioned resource constraints further complicate the rapid feasibility of secondary urban centres as a response to urban sustainability challenges.   

 

 

The creation of new capital cities: Internationally and on the African continent, numerous examples such as Brasilia (Brasil), Putrajaya (Malaysia), Rabat (Morocco), Dakar (Senegal), stand are illustrations to the fact that new capital cities have been adopted as a response to the challenge of urban sustainability. Such projects have always been part of a national initiative to balance current pressures on the established post-colonial cities across the country抯 network of cities. The concept of new capital cities came about as a result of decaying old capital cities not offering the requisite capacity to accommodate influx and associated pressures on the existing infrastructure. They are usually part of a national initiative to promote a balanced urbanization and harmonious territorial development, thereby justifying the topic of the Fourth World Urban Forum which has been held a few days ago in Nanjing. The creation of new cities usually seeks to ensure that the total pressure of urbanization is spread across an entire network of cities. Often, this is done in the pursuit of functional specialization amongst the cities themselves (administration, economy, culture, tourism, etc). Some of the most recent cases which obey this logic on the African continent are: Abuja (Nigeria), Yamoussoukro (Cote d扞voire) and Lompoul (Senegal). The latter is the third time in a row within 50 years that Senegal decides to build a new capital city as a result of Saint Louis (1957) and subsequently Dakar facing serious sustainability challenges. Although Lompoul is still in a planning stage, the strategic design options warrant a closer look as they incorporate strong elements of sustainability, based on lessons from elsewhere:

(a)  The first feature is that Lompoul will be built in relative proximity (40 km distance) to Dakar, the current capital city, unlike Yamoussoukro[7] (Cote d扞voire) that was built within a distance of 250 km from Abidjan.

(b)  The second feature is that the new city will progressively occupy a total area 5000 - 20.000 ha within a period of four years, hence the urban edge is defined right at the stage of project inception.

(c)  The use of green belts, natural air circulation and lighting, preservation of natural ecosystems, including the notion of urban forests will be promoted to enhance the sustainability profile of the new city.

(d)  Other built environment features entail the use of environment friendly technologies in public buildings, the creation of multi-functional spaces that with a unique offering in recreational, cultural, business and touristic facilities.

 

 

Renewal of decaying capital cities: Numerous urbanizing agglomerations and metropolitan cities on the continent that were inherited from the colonial administrations are showing signs of distress on their physical fabric. This distress takes the form of chronic traffic congestions due to a limited and dilapidated road network, aging water and sanitation equipment, overflowing sewer treatment plants, frequent power outages as a result of outdated and low capacity infrastructure, hazardous disposal of solid waste due to the saturation of existing facilities. Let alone the fact that many African cities are frequently caught unprepared to host large numbers of refugees and desperate migrants who are escaping areas of political turmoil, wars and violence, the physical distress also pervades the well-being of the social fabric in the form of recurrent outbreaks of re-emerging infections and waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, amibiasis, malaria, etc. One major trend in responding to this situation is that all the five African sub-regions are currently witnessing medium-to large scale urban renewal initiatives. These measures often have in common the aim to restore livability in the cities through a mix of capital investment projects, combined with a range of urban management and beautification initiatives that seek to address the economic, ecological and social sustainability challenges faced by these cities. Typical illustrations for this category are Nouakchott (Mauretania), Yaounde and Douala (Cameroon), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Blantyre (Tanzania), Lilongwe (Malawi), including numerous townships in South Africa, where multiple capital investment projects are being implemented simultaneously.  

 

 

 

In general, the above responses to the challenge of urban sustainability require a major injection of resources into urban areas. These responses represent a new type of footprint that seeks to reclaim the threatened values of urban spaces as sites of innovation, wealth creation, cultural emancipation and democratization. Many actors are involved in this grand project, but they differ in strength and influence. The fact that nearly all the cities on the continent report informality as the major threat to their efforts, shows that urban dwellers are the major driving force in Africa抯 today抯 city making efforts. In order to reclaim the values of the city, this driving force needs to be acknowledged as a first step towards restoring urban sustainability. Urban dwellers owe they leading role to the fact that they are more effective in dealing with the key bottlenecks to urban sustainability on the continent, which we now turn on. 

 

 

 

To Sum up, there are three essential bottlenecks to the challenge of urban sustainability:

 

(i)            the supply and management of serviced land for housing at a pace equal or higher to demand dynamics,

(ii)           mainstream finance (community savings, mortgage lending, value capture on land, etc),

(iii)          the institutional and managerial capacity of city administrations to provide enabling conditions for joint accountability and participation of urban residents in the mainstream economy.

 

Over and above, the challenge of urban sustainability is a problem which cities on the continent experience at the dimension of scale. To deal with them effectively requires that proven responses, and concepts be elevated to scale. However, due to the above bottlenecks and the lagging political will in numerous countries, urban sustainability on the continent remains trapped in insular and recurrent pilot operations which are too limited in scope to create a sustainable impact. Indeed, today抯 urban sustainability initiatives on the African continent are still trapped in insular pilots that are incremental and repetitive in nature, with the problem that they do little in the way of creating the conditions for sustained local enterprise that could actively participate in the maintenance of the urban environment via formal contracting with local authorities.

 

 

 

During the last fourty years numerous initiatives were taken by African countries at the local level to address the issue of urban sustainability. Amongst them were the following:

The challenge with these initiatives is their perpetual pilot nature and the fact that they remain insular in their coverage. In Africa, the question pertaining to MAINSTREAMING has barely been politically elevated at the national level. Due to many reasons and the overwhelming dimension of the challenge, the city-wide application of some promising initiatives has not yet received a sustained political attention at the metropolitan level.   

 

The following challenges are widely recorded as being notorious for urban sustainability in African cities:  

?nbsp;        Mobilizing finance for urban sustainability (resourcing)

?nbsp;        Mainstreaming from insular projects to city-wide interventions (from scope to scale)

?nbsp;        Elevation of urban sustainability in national and continental agenda-setting processes and platforms

?nbsp;        Activating urban social capital in city-making and maintenance (joint accountability)

?nbsp;        Balancing the imperatives for quick and effective results with management capacity (agency based delivery vs delivery via city administrations)

?nbsp;        Intelligent use of urban land markets (value capture for sustainability) 

?nbsp;        Transforming the planning practice from administering sterile regulations and pilots to the steering and management of flux and ?I>urban transition?/I> towards economic growth and sustainability.

 

 

?nbsp;        To deepen our understanding of the success factors for China抯 coping strategies with the high pace of urbanization

?nbsp;        To understand China抯 incentive schemes for the leveraging of private investment

?nbsp;        To understand the role played by China抯 civil society in city making and the upkeep of the urban environment

?nbsp;        To understand the cost efficiency base of China抯 large infrastructure projects (cheap labor, state subsidies or material management?)

?nbsp;        Continuous dialogue on China抯 technological innovations for urban sustainability 

 

 

?nbsp;        Africa抯 terms of engagement on capacity issues in the context of international cooperation on urban sustainability

?nbsp;        Communicate with Chinese practitioners on the importance cultural and performance considerations of public infrastructure (roads, sporting facilities, place-making infrastructure, etc)

?nbsp;        Discuss the mutual understanding of experiential forms of exchange such as staff and research internships between African and Chinese practitioners and academics   

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

SIMONE, ABDOUMALIQ (2002). PRINCIPLES AND REALITIES OF URBAN GOVERNANCE IN AFRICA - UN-HABITAT GLOBAL CAMPAIGN ON URBAN GOVERNANCE

 

2. FOX, WILLIAM F. (1994). STRATEGIC OPTIONS FOR URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT (UNDP, WORLD BANK) URBAN MANAGEMENT PROGRAMME PUBLICATION SERIES, NO 17.

 

3. DAVIS, MIKE. (2006) PLANET OF SLUMS

 

4. KESSIDES CHRISTINE. LA TRANSITION URBAINE EN AFRIQUE SUBSAHARIENNE, IMPACTS SUR LA CROISSANCE 蒀ONOMIQUE ET LA R蒁UCTION DE LA PAUVRET?(URBAN TRANSITION IN SUB SHARAN AFRICA ?IMPACT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH AND POVERTY REDUCTION), THE CITIES ALLIANCE.

 

5. PERNEGGER, LI. (2006). DRAFT FRAMEWORK FOR URBAN MANAGEMENT COORDINATION ?CITY OF JOHANNESBURG (UNPUBLISHED)

 

6. FARVACQUE-VITKOVIC, CATHERINE. GODIN, L. (1998). THE FUTURE OF AFRICAN CITIES - CHALLENGES AND PRIORITIES FOR URBAN DEVELOPMENT

 

7. KRUSE,C. MANDA. (2005) LESSONS IN URBAN MANAGEMENT - EXPERIENCES IN MALAWI 2000- 2005 - MALAWIAN-GERMAN PROGRAMME FOR DEMOCRACY AND DECENTRALISATION (MGPDD)

 

8. CRANKSHAW, OWEN. (2006). SOUTH AFRICAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY VOL 37, NO 1, 2006 JOURNAL OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

 

9. RAKODI, CAROLE. (1997). THE URBAN CHALLENCE IN AFRICA ?GROWTH AND MANAGEMENT OF ITS LARGE CITIES.

 

10. PRAHALAD,CK. (2005) THE FORTUNE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID ?ERADICATING POVERTY THROUGH PROFITS

 

11. SWILLING, M. VAN DONK, M. PARNELL. S. PIETERSE, E. (2008) CONSOLIDATING DEVELOPMENTAL LOCAL GOVERNMNET ?LESSONS FROM THE SOUTH AFRICAN EXPERIENCE

 

12. UNHABITAT - MCDONALD, DAVID A. (2000) ON BORDERS - PERSPECTIVES ON INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

 

12. DURAND-LASSERVE, A. CLERC. (1995). CITIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, INTEGRATION OF IRREGULAR SETTLEMENTS ?CURRENT QUESTIONS IN ASIA AND LATIN AMERICA, PRATIQUES URBAINES 12, JANUARY 1995

[1] This section paraphrases the ?I>Brundtland Report?/I> which laid the foundation for the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio, Brazil on sustainable development.

[2] Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom. 2005

[3] Excluding Nigeria where urbanization rates are estimated at close to 6% p.a.

[4] Mike Davis. Planet of Slums.

[5] Mark Swilling. Local Governance and the politics of sustainability in: Consolidating Developmental Local Government (M. Van Donk, S. Parnell & E. Pieterse). 2008

[6] According to the 2003 UNHABITAT report entitled The Challenge of Slums, the least developed countries account for more than 75% of the one of six billion people leaving in slums worldwide!

[7] Senegal has benchmarked its project against numerous international and regional case studies, one of the findings being that because of the long distance between Yamoussoukro and Abidjan, it has been difficult for the new capital city to achieve the performance and urban efficiencies that underpinned its creation. The pressures on Abidjan remained unchangeably high, further exacerbated by the lagging decision to effectively transfer the country抯 administrative functions to the then newly built Yamoussoukro.