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African Cities and the Development Conundrum pdf

AFRICAN CITIES AND THE DEVELOPMENT CONUNDRUM
Book Title African Cities And The Development Conundrum
Book AuthorTill Förster
Total Pages348
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LanguageEnglish
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African Cities and the Development Conundrum

Edited by Carole Ammann – Till Förster

AFRICAN CITIES AND THE DEVELOPMENT CONUNDRUM

Africa is urbanising faster than any other continent. The stupendous pace of urbanisation challenges the usual image of Africa as a rural continent.

The sheer complexity of African cities contests conventional understandings of the urban as well as standard development policies. Lingering between chaos and creativity, Western images of African cities seem unable to serve as a basis for development policies.

The diversity of African cities is hard to conceptualise—but at the same time, unbiased views of the ur-ban are the first step to addressing the urban development conundrum.

International development cooperation should not only make African cities a focus of its engagement— it should also be cautious not to build its interventions on concepts inherited from Western histories, such as the formal/informal dichotomy.

We argue that African cities are more appropriately regarded as urban grey zones that only take shape and become colourful through the actors’ agency and practice.

The chapters of this special issue offer a fresh look at African cities, and the many opportunities as well as limitations that emerge for African urbanites—state officials, planners, entrepreneurs, development agencies and ordinary people—from their own point of view: they ask where, for whom and why such limitations and opportunities emerge, how they change over time and how African urban dwellers actively enliven and shape their cities.

The Urban Challenge in Africa

Cities produce a difference—and they accommodate difference. African cities are no exception. They rather seem to accelerate processes of differentiation to a degree that makes it difficult to conceive them as an entity, to understand their social complexities and, not least, to govern them.

The pace of urbanisation in Africa currently exceeds that of all other continents. Soon, more Africans will live in cities than in rural areas. As reliable statistics are hard to establish, estimations vary, but 2030 seems to be a safe bet for the turning point (un desa, 2014; UN-Habitat, 2008, 2016; adb, 2016a; also Chapter 6, this issue).

Other estimates claim that the watershed could already be reached by 2022—a mere blink of an eye from a historical perspective.1 To some extent, this incredible acceleration is due to the belated beginning of mass urbanisation in Africa (see below).2 But besides its historical framework, urbanisation in Africa today presents multiple challenges, which—regardless of its inherent problems—also find expression in Sustainable Development Goal (sdg) number 11, from the UN (2015).

African urbanism is a challenge for our scholarly understanding of social change, the status of such cities and what they are about to become, and their role in national, regional and world development, and last but not least, contemporary African cities raise questions of how they can be governed and planned. As conventional forms of governance often fail, new, ‘…hybrid institutional forms have to be developed’ (Smit and Pieterse, 2014, 160). African cities thus challenge conventional concepts of development and social theory. Mario Pezzini, director of the OECD development centre, says that ‘it is not possible to separate these issues’ (The Guardian, 2016; adb, 2016b, 143–189). Social theory and development practice have to be thought of as one.

Cities and their relationship with their hinterland must be understood in their full complexity—else all attempts to govern them will fail. Hence the significance of the urban and urban studies for the national, regional and eventually global future (Pieterse, 2008; Parnell and Pieterse, 2014).

Very much the same holds true for development agendas. Ignoring the urban dimension would mean conceiving the future without one of its most important, if not the most important of its dimensions. Cities can drive development by providing education, work and consumption opportunities.

At the same time, they can also drain their hinterland by drawing resources into the exploding African megacities: rural areas lose their best minds as they move into cities—very much as the global North attracts the best brains.

For many, cities are at the centre of new world geography (Robinson, 2005). They are also the sites where new social theories have to prove whether and how they can be translated into policies that advance the lives of ordinary people. Without thorough, empirically based and theoretically informed

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