Box 1.9: Improving Local Food Resilience
Local food resilience is critical as African cities are heavily dependent on imported food (from rural areas or abroad) and therefore susceptible to exogenous shocks. Urban agriculture in Africa is largely informal and unplanned, while cities expand on the valuable agricultural land that feed them. African cities can support and encourage urban agricultural practices that draw on the vast amounts of local organic waste and biomass in cities to improve soil quality and nutritional content of produce. Urban governance is critical to improving
Opportunities
food security in African cities. Zoning of agricultural lands; formalizing informal urban agriculture; improving irrigation for urban farmers (including support for women farmers and youth); skills development and training; agricultural credit support for urban farmers; funding local advice and support agencies; as well as support for “upstream” (compost and fertilizer production) and “downstream” activities (markets, cold chain storage, solar fish drying systems) can all help improve critical
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Improve integration in leadership and institutions through thematic and iconic programmes and projects. These might include large public transit system projects, which capture citizens’ collective imagination about the possible futures that the city holds, and radically transform access and the urban spatial fabric. In cities where tourism is critical (e.g. Cape Town, Dar es Salaam and Mombasa), and is largely dependent on ecological features and eco-tourism attractions, thematic programmes which focus on urban ecosystem management can play a large role in integrating sectors such as urban waste and agriculture.
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Ensure the existence of strategic sectorial, institutional, local community, and other intermediaries for innovation and integration through partnerships, participatory mechanisms and processes. Sustainable development requires cooperation between urban governance, the private sector and civil society in order to actualize sustainability. Typically, intermediaries should focus on broad-level, interstitial or niche activities. These include participatory governance programmes, urban laboratories and observatories, as well as thematic and iconic projects that facilitate integration between sectors and arms of governance. They would typically innovate at all levels of society, from discursive and policy niches to process, system and technology innovations, as well as innovations in business models (e.g. microcredit innovations), cooperative (non-profit) models, as well as innovations in non-governmental and community organizations and their operation.
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Improved monitoring and evaluation of urban sustainability. Understanding resource flows and changes in demand for services, materials, goods and so forth that unfold in African cities is critical, especially because there are high levels of unplanned development
THE STATE OF AFRICAN CITIES 2014
Integration There are interactions between food, energy, water, waste and transport systems that can be exploited for green growth. Material and waste flows from each sector can be taken up in other sectors, closing material flow loops and engendering closer cooperation and “clustering” between different sectors of the city. The key requirement in respect of achieving sustainability in African cities is integration.166 In order for whole systems to be sustainable, there needs to be integration between the different subsystems and functions, controls and processes. The integrated approach is in keeping with the post-2015 development agenda (see Box 1.10). Achieving this integration is critical for urban sustainability, in particular where a variety of often conflicting development actions can emerge. There are a number of success factors that can play a vital role in developing world city transitions to resource efficiency (decoupled urban growth) and sustainability at whole system scale. These success factors include and depend on: • integration between different sectors and scales of governance (especially between formal and informal systems) • focusing on tackling the “urban divide”; • improved governance systems and decision-making; • identifying and implementing smart growth and smart urban design; • reliable logistics and spatial planning; • adequate finance and funding; • appropriate technology transfers and skills development; • and the capacity to innovate and implement solutions that fit local contexts.168 Integration between these objectives is hence critical for urban sustainability in Africa. The following elements are proposed to aid decisionmakers, urban planners, developers and communities to achieve this integration:169
urban food and nutrition security. At the same time, they would create new services and employment, especially through recycling and reuse linkages between different sectors. All this will require knowledge transfer and training to improve agricultural methods for small scale and urban farmers, and partnerships between farmers, civil society and NGOs as well as government agencies, to create and ensure supportive measures for urban agriculture.
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