and it is the result of dictatorship, corruption and decades of negative growth throughout the region. Rising unemployment has been emerging as one of the most important challenges facing urban dwellers in the sub-region. However, new investments are reaching the region in tandem with revenues from new business opportunities, mineral wealth and other exports. Most Central African countries do have funds and access to technologies to vastly improve on existing deep urban poverty, massive slum proliferation and low quality of life for the majority of the urban dwellers. What they need is the will of their political leaders to invest in the welfare of their citizens.
Southern Africa
executive summary
Southern Africa, the most urbanized region in sub-Saharan Africa, is projected to reach an overall region-wide urban majority around the end of the current decade. Nevertheless, in 2011, only Angola, Botswana and the RSA had urban majorities. The other countries, apart from Swaziland, are expected to reach that point by 2050. Urbanization has progressed unevenly, between and within countries, and only Lesotho recorded a decline in urbanization levels since 2001. To some extent, the buoyancy of global mineral and oil prices due to Chinese and Indian demand, cushioned most of the region’s economies from the worst vagaries of the world recession from 2008, although the current Chinese slowdown is rippling through the minerals sector. Capital cities, such as Maputo and Luanda, have been experiencing construction booms linked to foreign investment and increased trade. Key tourist centres, those with diversified urban economies and those cities, such as Cape Town, with innovative or distinctive niches in the world economy, have even experienced growing prosperity, despite persistent, sharp, intra-urban inequalities. Southern Africa and its cities are extremely vulnerable to climate change impacts. Temperature increases and weather variability threaten to directly or indirectly disrupt systems critical to the survival of its cities. The sub-region is warming and increased droughts are likely in the future. It is helpful to distinguish between coastal and inland cities in terms of existing and expected principal climate change impacts and vulnerabilities and to prioritize the formulation of appropriate local responses. Flooding from sea level rise, coupled with increasingly severe and possibly frequent storm surges, and salinization of coastal aquifers are among the most prominent challenges facing coastal cities, whereas water shortages (especially in western parts of the region, in cities like Bulawayo, Gaborone, Windhoek and Upington), heat island effects and changing disease epidemiologies are key challenges for inland urban areas. As a result, some innovative measures are already evident. With increased prevailing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, food security is likely to become an increased concern across much of Southern Africa. Encouragement of non-polluting forms of urban and peri-urban agriculture and forestry may contribute to local food security, especially for some of the urban poor, enhance livelihoods and contribute
to urban greening initiatives with climate change mitigation benefits. However, in many of the region’s urban areas, this would require regulatory change, as part of a broader rethinking of inherited urban planning regimes to promote urban sustainability with greater equity and resilience. Such reorientations would also help to reduce social and economic vulnerabilities and promote urban human security. More broadly, effective urban governance is crucial to ensure successful interventions aimed at climate change mitigation and adaptation since key greenhouse gas emission sources and many of the major impacts of environmental change are manifest in urban areas. Nevertheless, effective action requires multilevel governance, with local, regional, national and probably also supra-national authorities playing complementary roles in accordance with their respective powers. Political will and leadership at each of these levels is a prerequisite for appropriate outcomes. Despite the region’s economic success in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, relative to other countries south of the Sahara, widespread inequality characterizes the primary condition of Southern African cities. Growth in the sub-region has typically resulted from urban economies but has failed to raise regional living standards and income levels as expected. Instead, rapid growth in GDP has rendered these urban societies vastly unequal and deeply fragmented. While the percentage of people living in slums and informal settlements in Southern Africa is generally lower than the rest of the continent - except for Angola, Mozambique and Zambia - urban planning efforts in Southern African cities face key challenges in common with other sub-regions: urban sprawl; substantial housing backlogs; poverty and inequality; segregation; slum and informal settlement proliferation within city centres and on the urban peripheries; as well as inadequate infrastructure and service provision. In turn, these have consequences for current urban governance regimes in the sub-region. These revolve around ensuring democratic participation; alleviating poverty and inequality; improving urban service provision; overcoming patterns of urban segregation; mitigating xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiments; coping with local unrest; achieving cohesion between dual formal and informal systems of governance, trade, service provision, e.g. transport; and improving the fiscal autonomy of local governments. To most of these, climate change adds another layer of complexity and vulnerability. One way forward is through multifaceted interventions aimed, for instance, at promoting more rapid and efficient public transport, thereby integrating urban areas more effectively and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by people switching from private vehicles. Agents of change in Southern Africa are diverse, including the private sector and public private partnerships as well as civil society. The large youth bulge and high levels of youth unemployment constitute both a challenge and opportunity for the sub-region; that is a labour pool for growth and a potential base for political transition towards stronger democratic practices.
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