displaced persons. Within cities conflicts over belonging, indigenous claims to land ownership, trading rights, as well as religious differences, manifest in contestations that can at times turn violent and where foreign refugees and economic migrants are targeted.
Eastern Africa
executive summary
Eastern Africa is the world’s least urbanized but fastest urbanizing sub-region. By the end of the current decade its urban population will have increased by 50 per cent and the total number of urban dwellers in 2040 is expected to be five times that of 2010. It follows, therefore, that Eastern Africa will face huge challenges associated with massive urban population increases; monumental new and additional demands for the provision of adequate and affordable housing and urban services; and, perhaps most importantly, urbanbased income-generation opportunities. Impacts of continued rapid growth of Eastern African primate cities include acute housing shortages, traffic congestion, pollution and uncontrolled peri-urban sprawl. Significant interventions are currently under way to redevelop existing urban areas and/or establish satellite cities at some distance from the capital to geographically disperse urban population and economic growth. Those in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, for example, have already sparked fierce public debate around matters of equity. Although Eastern African governments should be commended for their renewed attention and commitment to urban planning to address the unfolding urbanization processes in the region, catering preferentially for the residential and office needs of the wealthier sections of urban populations is likely to backfire. The needs of the poor should be incorporated through equality- and human rights-based urban interventions. In terms of regional economic vulnerabilities the subregion’s mining potential remains unrealized and the agricultural sector is far more important. The latter has not been severely impacted by the global financial crisis, but is extremely vulnerable to climate change impacts. Prospects offered by the recent discoveries of hydrocarbons in Eastern Africa promise a radical change in the macroeconomic fortunes of the countries within whose boundaries, or waters, they fall. One of the most important regional projects has been the resuscitation of the Eastern African Community in 2000. This has subsequently expanded to include Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan, while Malawi may be considered for future membership. Comprehensive, sequenced road and rail plans have been advocated to link Eastern Africa’s economic centres, in effect transforming the whole region into a coastal economy and liberating much of it from many of the constraints and expenses associated with being landlocked. The success of these plans could obviously have a transformative effect on the overall shape of Eastern Africa’s urbanization patterns. The region’s cities exhibit high levels of poverty and inequality and fast growth of slums and informal settlements.
Against a background of high levels of literacy and political engagement this may lead to greater contestation with the state in respect of greater political change that goes beyond service delivery concerns. Climate change increases various threats in a sub-region where economies are vulnerable due to their dependence on smallholder agriculture and pastoralism. The countries of the Horn are particularly vulnerable to deteriorating conditions in an already marginal environment. Further consequences of food insecurity and inter-communal violence contribute to internal displacement and refugee flows, many of these towards “emergency” informal settlements, which soon become established as informal urban communities. Coastal cities are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, from rising sea-levels and extreme weather events that threaten fragile physical defenses as well as the eco-systems that draw international tourism. Inland cities too, experience water shortages associated with periods of more prolonged drought, which also have a severe effect on hydropower production upon which the sub-region’s energy supply is heavily dependent. Water and energy are two of the areas in which the most pressing need for regional integration has been felt. The Nile Basin Initiative and Lake Victoria Basin Commission are two of the principal mechanisms through which regional collaboration has been sought, and these have contributed immensely to understanding the cross-border impact of policy decisions on irrigation, power and urban water supply. It is important, on the other hand, not to allow the imperative of regional cooperation to create a planning environment in which an obsession with macro-projects comes to dominate urban thinking. As it is, urban planners in Eastern Africa are heavily influenced by the normative orientations of urban planning in the Global North. Yet the direct transplanting of the master planning approach into Eastern African planning contexts ignores the fact that the majority of growth in Eastern African cities occurs in slums and informal settlements. In such circumstances master planning may directly contribute to further social- and spatial marginalization or exclusion from the urban fabric. Building regional coherence around an environmental agenda for Eastern African cities, while desirable, may prove difficult to realize in the short term. Keeping accurate records is perhaps a first step in quantifying and analyzing the scale of the challenge. Formalizing informal processes, and building in sufficient checks and balances to ensure that exploitation and corruption is minimized, are key priorities. Achieving this may require a radical decentralization of powers at local, municipal levels to enable community level self-organization and appropriate self-regulation of these processes. This needs to be accompanied by a concomitant devolution of controls over revenue collection and expenditure. It is important to reconsider how bottom-up systems of governance might be implemented in the short and medium terms, with a view to assimilating them into larger formal systems of governance in the future. Failing the introduction of such an approach,
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