lead must start and the solutions to urban sustainability be spread to other parts of the world. Cities can lead the transition to social, economic, ecological, physical and political sustainability.37 However, in such a context, the thrust towards industrialization cannot ignore the role that urbanization must play in structural transformation. The exception to this remains where the large, emerging urban consumer class is concerned, because it may contribute to creating strong domestic demand which, in turn, can stimulate urban economies and job creation. African cities should actively explore and embrace diverse growth opportunities, decoupled where possible from unnecessary resource exploitation and ecological degradation.38 This would enable them to implement a sustainable development trajectory.
The Political Transition
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CHAPTER ONE
Lagos, Nigeria. ©Nick M. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
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The changing structure of global markets includes the growth of the middle class worldwide,35 a dominance of future global trade by developing countries and continued price volatility of commodities. New technologies emerging in the green technology sector will likely benefit Africa and its cities in particular. Large- and small-scale infrastructure choices will have to be made to meet growing demand and resource constraints. Physical drivers of change, including those of a climatic nature, large infrastructure deficits,36 as well as land and water shortages are likely to reduce production capacities and increase the costs of land and water supply. Because of their rapidly increasing populations, spatial sizes and huge economic significance, African cities are key channels for leading the world in the transition to sustainable economic growth trajectories. It is in Africa’s cities that this
In the late 1950s, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and the “radical” Casablanca Group of African countries proposed a far-sighted plan for rapid pan-African unification under a federal government, a single market and a common foreign policy.39 Perhaps these goals were premature, as even the far more advanced political, economic, industrial and social systems of Europe would take another 30 years to accomplish anything near such a feat.40 Today, some 50 years later, this unfulfilled pan-African vision continues to feed political debate across the continent. PanAfricanism is now more important than ever, because a block of more than one billion people must have more negotiating power than individual nations or their comparatively small sub-regional cooperative groupings. Nevertheless the realization of pan-Africanism remains elusive, among other reasons because many nations continue to struggle with building their post-independence statehood. Although the number of democratically-elected African governments is now steadily increasing, many countries experience institutional and governance fragilities. In some even state legitimacy is contested, evidence of which are the “growing pains” that appear to accompany political and social transformations. Expectations were high in newly-independent Africa. The continent saw itself as destined for an era of unprecedented economic growth, development and prosperity.41 It was thought that only strong state power and planning could provide the rapid changes required to achieve these aims. This perspective not only justified greater government control, it was also considered critical to building true nation states from immensely diverse sociocultural systems. However, under the subsequent military and strong-man regimes of post-independence Africa, further statehoodbuilding efforts were often left unattended because institutional and governance shortfalls could be ignored or simply overruled. Consequently, nation- and statehoodbuilding; modernization; the envisaged rapid shift from lowproductivity agriculture to high-productivity manufacturing; and the creation of significantly increased urban employment