Luanda: the many facets of an African city undergoing transformation

As African cities are on the frontline of a poly-crisis (Allouche et al 2023), the need for local action becomes more apparent. Local government authorities (LGAs) are uniquely positioned as crucial actors to address resource security, climate change, and rapid urbanisation by proactively developing policies and initiatives tailored to meet these challenges. This paper argues that the circular economy (CE), a concept focused on production and consumption, provides an overarching approach for LGAs to address many interlinked crises they face, and can subsequently be championed as a core strategy to meet sustainable development goals. The paper further unpacks the challenges LGAs face in interpreting and applying CE principles. The paper makes use of a hybrid qualitative methodology, combining a deductive analysis of CE literature with inductive analysis of insights gathered from the African City officials through the African Circular Cities initiative. The thematic analysis was guided by Braun and Clarke’s (2006 Qual. Res. Psychol. 3 77–101) six-phase approach, allowing the emergence of key themes. Through analysis of the connections between the CE and traditional climate resilience, mitigation and adaptation efforts, this paper identifies potential barriers and opportunities for CE implementation in African cities and provides a 12-point approach for the adoption of CE through the lens of African LGAs. The paper also offers future research suggestions to advance CE adoption in African cities. By implementing context-relevant solutions, African cities can move from linear approaches to more circular solutions of production and consumption and address not only climate change but also mainstream sustainable urban practices.

In an increasingly connected and digital African city it is crucial to identify the opportunities and challenges related to new technologies in cities to ensure that they do not create new inequalities and exclusions but contribute to the well-being of all. Governance is at the heart of this endeavour and local governments should put in place regulatory frameworks to ensure that one is left behind in African smart cities. Universal access to urban services driven by emerging technologies, the digital divide, digital inclusion, and digital rights, are all issues that emerge from the digital transformation of territories. As part of the African Cities Lab Summit 2023, young researchers met for a workshop lasting for an hour and a half on the impact of digital technology deployment in African cities. The aim was to analyze the impacts and societal challenges posed by the deployment of digital technologies in African cities in a local and global context and then to formulate recommendations for local governments. This paper summarizes the results of the discussions.

The growing urban population in most African cities is creating pressure on basic services infrastructure. Expansion of basic services infrastructure in most of the major cities and small towns in Africa has not matched the growth in urban population. This has resulted in most basic service providers, such as water service providers, being overwhelmed by the rapidly growing demand for services, especially in low-income and informal settlement areas where more than 90 per cent of the urban population reside. Using data from various sources, this article illustrates the growing challenge posed by inadequate water services infrastructure in the midst of the rapidly growing urban population. The article argues that this mismatch between the growing demand for water services and the capacity on the part of the service providers does not only create a crisis of access to water, but has serious political costs if not addressed in the medium term. In order to avoid both the service crisis and the political backlash this may entail, mobilising massive resources to maintain and expand the existing networks to unserved or poorly served areas should be one of the top priorities in many African cities and towns. Mobilising the resources required to meet the growing demand for services will remain a challenge that many African countries and cities have to face.

Assessment of street forest characteristics in four African cities using google street view measurement: Potentials and implications

Non-linear effects of meteorological variables on cooling efficiency of African urban trees.

Urban built structures and lifelines in African cities are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather-related events such as flooding. This chapter provides an overview of the activities and the findings related to the vulnerability to flooding of the urban built environment in the context of the CLUVA project. First, the urban hotspots to flooding for the built structures and the lifelines are identified for three African case study cities. In the next step, a probabilistic methodology is employed in order to perform micro-scale evaluation of building vulnerability and risk to flooding for the case study city of Dar es Salaam based on historical rainfall data. This methodology is developed specifically for vulnerability assessments based on incomplete knowledge and relies on various data-gathering techniques such as orthophoto boundary recognition, field surveys and laboratory tests. The micro-scale evaluation of the building vulnerability is also performed using rainfall data for a projected 1-year interval in 2050. The results in terms of economic loss and number of people affected are discussed and compared to the evaluation performed based on historical rainfall data. In this comparison, the negative effect of urbanisation on flooding risk is emphasised. The findings presented in this chapter can be translated into strategic adaptive measures for urban structures and lifelines to flooding.

Precision approaches to food insecurity: A spatial analysis of urban hunger and its contextual correlates in an African city

African urban areas and cities are primarily seen as vulnerable to climate change. Apparent attempts to get required policies have led to the widespread proliferation of overlapping and duplications of policies. Using a policy coherence framework, this study aims to synthesise the coherency of climate adaptation and urban policies in Ghana. The study used content analysis of existing policy documents to understand if specific variables are explicit, implicit or not mentioned in four urban and climate change policies in Ghana. It was found that there is a minimal degree of coherence only in the adaptation measures, but there is a general lack of coherence in the motivation and implementation. This can be attributed to radically different current institutional arrangements for urban planning and climate change, inconsistent use of data and terminologies, and lack of embracement of innovations in urban planning in African cities. The findings suggest that attention must be given to integrated collaborative adaptation planning to address these impediments in urban planning context of African cities.

Data sourcing challenges in African nations have led many African urban infrastructure developments to be implemented with minimal scientific backing to support their success. In some cases this may directly impact a city’s ability to reach service delivery, economic growth and human development goals, let alone the city’s ability to protect ecosystem services upon which it relies. As an attempt to fill this gap, this paper describes an exploratory process used to determine city-level demographic, economic and resource flow data for African nations. The approach makes use of scaling and clustering techniques to form acceptable and utilizable representations of selected African cities. Variables that may serve as the strongest predictors for resource consumption intensity in African nations and cities were explored, in particular, the aspects of the Koppen Climate Zones, estimates of average urban income and GDP, and the influence of urban primacy. It is expected that the approach examined will provide a step towards estimating and understanding African cities and their resource profiles.

The key urban food governance question in African and other Southern cities is understanding the role that appropriate infrastructures could play in delivering positive outcomes in the urban food system. This chapter looks at urban food governance needs in African cities and reflects on the governance actions required in order to respond to wider food system changes and challenges. It argues that food in the African city is a public good and discusses the role that a state (and city government) should play in enabling access. The chapter finds that the normalization of food poverty, the absence of agency, the limited political weight of urban areas, and resource constraints, mean that citizens are unlikely to mobilize to contest food poverty and insecurity, and this absence of civic action means that the state is unlikely to see urban food issues as political, requiring a proactive city or state level response. Shifting the focus from food projects to seeing food as a lens to understand the role that infrastructure plays in food system outcomes opens up new areas for urban governance in planning, health, retail and other areas where city governance actors have a direct mandate.

Reviewed by: The African City: A History Carolyn E. Vieira-Martinez The African City: A History. By Bill Freund. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 224 pp. $84.00 (cloth); $22.99 (paper). At first glance this book appears to be designed to introduce students to a history of African cities, including all the theoretical and practical complexities that go along with attempting such a broad synthesis in slightly more than two hundred pages. The breadth and depth of Freund’s references are impressive. In six chapters he presents a chronological survey, beginning with the pre-urban “agro-towns” of the southern continent and ending with a discussion of the relationship between globalization and the largest settlements in Africa today. The chapter titles are a good indicator of the contents: “Urban Life Emerges in Africa,” “African Cities and the Emergence of a World Trading Economy,” “Colonialism and Urbanisation,” “Cities in Revolt,” “The Post-Colonial African City,” and “Globalisation and the African City.” A bibliography of selected readings at the end of each chapter directs the reader to excellent resources for further study. This book is so naturally designed to serve students that before I had finished chapter 3, I found myself absentmindedly composing the course syllabus that emerged from these pages. As I traced the narrative in terms of the presentation given and the resources that students might need, I found a remarkable strategy hidden beneath the prose. Consider the subject at the heart of each chapter, and the changing lens the author provides. In the first chapter “urban life emerges” across the African continent. This chapter appears to start the book’s chronology, but internally the story line jumps forward and backward, moving from time to time and place to place across the continent; governed by neither time nor geography the reader is introduced to the variety of reasons that cities were born. Moving from Mbanza Kongo to Great Zimbabwe to Kumbi Saleh by way of Freund’s writing is a little like flying across the [End Page 136] topography, stopping to observe at a reasonable distance wherever and whenever activity is noted. In the second chapter the perspective becomes more intimate. The reader is familiarized with each settlement and introduced to their personalities. Turning away from a view of the African landscape as a whole, the lens is focused now on the cities, and the spaces between fall from consideration. Cities arose, expanded, and became parasitic or predatory, and some, like Grahamstown, were even “able to exploit” opportunities as if human (p. 62). In the third chapter the text is less concerned with the cities encountered, reviewing instead the ways in which these cities have been historically understood. In Freund’s view African cities were created by colonialism, unchanged by colonialism, or occupy a position somewhere between these extremes. In the colonizers’ view some cities were chosen as a focal point (Bulawayo), and others were created to serve new forms of exploitation (Port Said). In the anthropological view of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute the cities were detribalizing, for linguists they were innovative spaces, and for a few Francophone writers the model of the modern city was becoming African. In this literature review Africans participated in the story but clearly were not in control. For example, “as colonial states created social services and allowed for the emergence of a new African leadership, the sites where such elites could make a living were disproportionately urban” (p. 94). It is not until chapter 4 that the full weight of the analysis is directed at the lives lived in African cities. Words are not wasted attempting to identify causation, precipitating factors, or underlying meanings. Drawing on a variety of the best recent scholarship the book presents, as if through a string of vignettes, what happened and where. In the final two chapters the book turns from historical research to the social sciences, analyzing the past, present, and future of African cities. According to Freund the hope that urban development will be a “modernizing” influence on Africa has “faded painfully” (p. 142). Administrative centers grew fastest after independence, evidence of the pivotal economics of bureaucracy in some cases and the continued military insecurity...

This chapter explores the relationship between the growth, urban form, and structure of African cities, from ancient to modern times, the concomitant responses from public sector authorities to manage urban growth and the resultant patterns of real estate investment and property development. African cities and towns are characterised by patterns and trends of property development that have been influenced by a multitude of factors, including their historic origin, geographic location, urban form and structure, resource hinterland, colonial and political past, demographic profile, as well as their unique economic and social dynamics. The pattern of real estate investment in African cities has since the early stages of settlement development been swayed by the interests of powerful political elites whose concerns always trumped the welfare of the broader urban population. Patterns of urbanisation and modernisation in African cities have taking a particular form, given its colonial history and tendency to follow trends that have emerged in developed countries. The pattern of skewed access to wealth in favour of the few is evident in the highly disparate access to and control of fixed assets such as property. The control and main features of the real estate markets in African cities represent the outcomes of powerful economic, social, and political forces at play, in broad terms, the “formal and legal” interests of established elites that can be tracked back to pre- and post-colonial times; in contrast with the “informal and illegal” concerns of the majority, local urban communities. The development problems and challenges faced by the majority, predominantly urban poor population, have become endemic and entrenched. These include rapid urbanisation driven by high rates of rural-urban migration and high levels of unemployment, inequality, and poverty. The analysis shows that although the wealth created in African cities through property development has multiplied, the shift from public to private benefit has escalated during the colonial and post-colonial period. The origin of efforts at managing the growth of settlements can be traced back to earlier periods of colonisation that, to a large extent, favoured “formal and orderly” developments and scorned “informal and disorganised” patterns of developments. African cities struggle to fashion planning and property development approaches that are appropriate and responsive to the contextual realities of the continent. It is argued that unless urban growth management practices and real estate investment can converge on the critical challenges facing African cities, the social, spatial, and economic structural problems will not be addressed and will deepen.

Through the lens of city diplomacy, this study examines the role of the creative economy in urban development within African cities. With urbanization rapidly transforming African cities into dynamic economic hubs, they face challenges such as unemployment, infrastructure deficits and social inequality. City diplomacy, the active engagement of cities in international partnerships, allows these urban centres to address local issues while positioning themselves as influential players on the global stage. This study employs urban informality and city diplomacy theories to explore how African cities harness the creative economy — including sectors such as arts, media, design, and culture — as a panacea to sustainable growth, social cohesion and cultural revitalization. Through thematic analysis of case studies, the research demonstrates the creative economy’s impact on economic diversification, job creation, and tourism. Findings reveal that city diplomacy, when integrated with creative industries, not only strengthens international collaborations but also promotes cultural exchange, technological innovation and resilience in African cities. The study concludes that there is a need for strategic city diplomacy to elevate African cities as key cultural and economic hubs that can contribute more meaningfully to the global economy while advancing sustainable urban development. It is recommended that African city governments should implement supportive policy frameworks, invest in creative infrastructure and foster public-private partnerships to maximize the creative economy’s potential. Additionally, digital platforms and cultural exchanges are essential for boosting the global visibility of African cities and the sustainability of the creative industrie

* 1. Africa's urban revolution in context - Edgar Pieterse and Susan Parnell * 2. Conflict and post-war transition in African cities - Jo Beall and Tom Goodfellow * 3. Sub-Saharan African urbanisation and global environmental change - Susan Parnell and Ruwani Walawege * 4. Linking Urbanisation and development in Africa's economic revival - Ivan Turok * 5. Religion and social life in African cities - Carole Rakodi * 6. Feeding African cities: the growing challenge of urban food insecurity - Jonathan Crush and Bruce Frayne * 7. Transport pressures in urban Africa: practices, policies, perspectives - Gordon Pirie * 8. Decentralisation and institutional reconfiguration in urban Africa - Warren Smit and Edgar Pieterse * 9. The challenge of urban planning law reform in African cities - Stephen Berrisford * 10. The education and research imperatives of urban planning professionals in Africa - James Duminy, Nancy Odendaal and Vanessa Watson * 11. Filling the void: an agenda for tackling African urbanisation - Edgar Pieterse * 12. Infrastructure, real economies and social transformation: assembling the components for regional urban development in Africa - AbdouMaliq Simone * 13. National urbanisation and urban strategies: necessary but absent policy instruments in Africa - Susan Parnell and David Simon * 14. Urbanisation as a global historical process: theory and evidence from sub-Saharan Africa - Sean Fox * Postscript: Building new knowledge and networks to foster sustainable urban development - Thomas Melin

African cities are growing rapidly into inefficient, unsustainable, resource-starved ecosystems that negatively affect the local economy and food production. Food as a critical resource needs to be produced and managed more efficiently by local communities in the urban area. Urban smart farming (USF) has emerged as an important mechanism to address these challenges to achieve sustainable, resilient, and inclusive cities. USF has the potential to be the industry 4.0 green revolution in agriculture, which embodies innovative digital technologies. However, it is unclear how local African communities and key stakeholders perceive this novel solution and if they are willing to engage in its uptake. This study examines the relationship between the perceived benefits and challenges of USF and the willingness of local African communities to actively participate in USF projects as a potential mechanism to improve local economy and food production. To assess this relationship, a causal model was developed. In this causal model, the local economy and food production were defined as dependent variables. The conceptualized model and the inherent causality between the constructs were validated through a survey administered among African cities’ residents. The results of structural equation modelling indicate a significant positive impact of perceived benefits of USF as well as the willingness of African communities to engage in this technology on local economy and food production. Only minimal adverse effects of the perceived challenges of USF on the local economy and food production have been found. The study concludes that the benefits and willingness of local communities are the key drivers for implementing urban smart farms in African metropolitans. Therefore, it is recommended to focus on the benefits and the motivation of local communities in African cities where USF shall be further developed, rather than on the barriers. The validated causal model can be used as a framework to facilitate the adoption of USF in Africa and consequently enhance the local economy and food production in African cities.