Urban informalities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): A solution for or barrier against sustainable city development

Abstract

• The roles of informalities in the sustainable city development agenda are unclear. • The paper reviews informalities’ roles through the lens of sustainable development. • The results reveal a double-pronged role of informalities in sustaining cities. • Accordingly, the hostile policies on urban informalities are ill-suited. • Regularisation is crucial to promoting informalities’ promising roles in cities. The roles of urban informalities in the advancement of the sustainable city agenda are contested in conventional literature. However, the contestation does not take account of the entire dimensions of sustainable cities. To present a holistic argument, the present study examines the roles of informalities in advancing the sustainable city agenda in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by using the sustainable development prism as the analytical framework. A Boolean search methodology was adopted to obtain relevant literature written in the English language from repositories such as Scopus, JSTOR, and ProQuest. The results of a synthesis of the literature suggest that informalities play double-pronged roles in the pursuit of the sustainable city development agenda in SSA. Overall, the emergence of informality is as a result of the failure of the formal systems. They provide employment, secure household income and savings, support national income, provide household basic needs (water access and waste management), and enhance civic engagement. However, informalities contribute to social and gender inequality, insecurity, congestion, and pollution. Based on their positive roles in the advancement of sustainable cities, we recommend a rejection of the prohibitive policies and attitudes towards informalities and call for regularisation as an approach to address the associated ills.