Table 1.1: Projected Population Dynamics of Africa’s Ten Most-populous Cities (in 2015), 1985-2025 (in thousands) Urban Agglomeration
1985
1990
1995
Lagos
3,500
4,764
5,983
Cairo
8,328
9,061
9,707
Kinshasa
2,722
3,520
4,493
Khartoum
1,611
2,360
Abidjan
1,716
Dar es Salaam
2000
2005
2010
2015*
2020*
2025*
7,281
8,859
10,788
13,121
15,825
18,857
10,170
10,565
11,031
11,944
13,254
14,740
5,414
6,766
8,415
10,312
12,322
14,535
3,088
3,505
3,979
4,516
5,161
6,028
7,090
2,102
2,535
3,028
3,545
4,151
4,923
5,896
6,971
1,046
1,316
1,668
2,116
2,683
3,415
4,395
5,677
7,276
Johannesburg
1,773
1,898
2,265
2,732
3,272
3,763
4,114
4,421
4,732
Nairobi
1,090
1,380
1,755
2,214
2,677
3,237
3,958
4,939
6,143
Kano
1,861
2,095
2,339
2,602
2,895
3,271
3,902
4,748
5,724
Cape Town
1,925
2,155
2,394
2,715
3,100
3,492
3,810
4,096
4,388
Source: World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision, UNDESA, New York, 2012 * Projections.
trajectories that can be sustained in social, economic and political terms.28 Achieving that objective is indeed critical, since there simply cannot be sustainable development without sustainable urbanization. Urban competitiveness and the need to build adaptive capacity and resilience29 in a future of steadily more-restricted access to resources and increased frequency as well as severity of calamitous events, will dictate the continent’s success or failure in the 21st century. There can be a global leadership role for Africa in developing truly sustainable urban concepts and models that can subsequently spread from Africa to other parts of the world.
The Sustainability Transition
More than a quarter of the 100 fastest-growing cities in the world are in Africa. In absolute terms, these growth rates are surpassed only by Asia’s. By 2050, Africa’s urban dwellers are projected to have increased from 400 million to 1.2 billion.30 The urbanization level (40 per cent in 2010) is projected to rise to 50 per cent by around 2035 and just under 58 per cent by 2050.31 The ability of African cities to cope with these numbers is questionable since they generally lack the institutional and infrastructural capacity to absorb the additional urban dwellers. It is, therefore, likely that the majority of these new urban dwellers will reside in slums and/ or informal settlements.32 Resource depletion levels in African economies are high, whether in mining for minerals and oil (reducing energy and raw materials), or agricultural practices (lessening soil quality and water availability). At the heart of this lie the vulnerabilities of undiversified economic growth and the inability to adapt to new global challenges. The Republic of South Africa is particularly vulnerable to resource depletion. By 2060 it might be a resource scarce economy, which might necessitate a spatial transition to a predominantly coastal economy.33 Presently, most of its infrastructure is built around inland mining operations such as those in Gauteng, an urban province which hosts around 70 per cent of the country’s workforce and produces around 33 per cent of national GDP.34
THE STATE OF AFRICAN CITIES 2014
regional urban system of the metropolis, especially when the requisite infrastructure linkages are in place. Likewise, the clustering of people and economic activities, along major logistical arteries (especially roads) radiating from and connecting separate metropolitan areas, leads to the gradual building-up of the urban fabric along these infrastructure connections. Where the metropolitan cores are arranged in a linear fashion, as along coastal or pan-African or other major highways, the outcome will be a ribbon-shaped urban growth pattern (referred to an urban development corridor) that can stretch over long distances. Over time, such urban development corridors will typically also grow in perpendicular directions. Significant new urban nodes can thus come into being, especially where major infrastructure branches off the highway. If multiple metropolitan areas are not positioned in a linear format, as in the case of Gauteng Province in South Africa, the urban fabric will expand and join in multiple directions to form a dense cluster of settlements of all size categories, from metropolises to villages, in a mega urban region (MUR): a vast regional urban system with large to very large population counts. Invariably composed of multiple municipalities, townships and settlements, all these newly emerging concentrations establish urban configurations at regional scales and may have population numbers equivalent to megacities without being referred to as such. The mega-urban region of Gauteng with its aggregate population of well over 12 million is, therefore, a de facto megacity. Likewise, the EMRs of Addis Ababa, Alexandria, Dar es Salaam, Kenitra-El Jadid and Tangier, as well as the transboundary urban system of Kinshasa-Brazzaville, could soon qualify as de facto “megacities” if a wider concept than that dictated by somewhat artificial administrative municipal boundaries is taken into account. Due to their rapidly increasing population and spatial sizes, as well as their large economic significance, agglomerated and regional urban systems are key entry points for the critical directing of Africa’s urban transition towards growth
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