Vicious cycle of residents’ low expectations undoing of towns

An aerial view of Nairobi city. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Despite high urban growth rates and rapidly growing urban populations, African countries have been unable to harness the benefits of urbanisation.
  • Africa is the least urbanised continent but has among the highest urban growth rates, at around four per cent a year.

Urbanisation has been associated with high levels of human development and economic prosperity. The most urbanised regions in the world also tend to be the most developed and the most economically productive.

In the highly developed countries, cities account for up to 80 per cent of the gross domestic product.

Africa is the least urbanised continent but has among the highest urban growth rates, at around four per cent a year. Currently, there are 472 million Africans living in urban areas; and this number is expected to double in 25 years.

However, despite high urban growth rates and rapidly growing urban populations, African countries have been unable to harness the agglomeration benefits of urbanisation, particularly the economies of scale that make basic services and infrastructure more affordable for people concentrated in the large, densely populated areas.

The reason for this, says a new report, is that not only are African cities disconnected from one another, but African city dwellers are not adequately connected to one another as well.

Africa’ Cities: Opening Doors to the World, published by the World Bank, says that African cities are characterised by three features that constrain their development.

One, investments in infrastructure and industrial and commercial structures have not kept pace with concentrations of people.

Two, most African cities have developed as collections of small, fragmented and unconnected neighbourhoods that lack reliable and affordable transport, which makes it difficult for people to move around easily and also limits job opportunities.

EXPENSIVE CITIES

Commuters in Nairobi, for instance, spend a large part of their time getting to work because the road network is not sufficient to carry the large number of commuters. Roads in Nairobi occupy a far lower share of urban land than other cities in the world.

Three, African cities are expensive to live in. City dwellers in Africa pay 35 per cent more for food, 55 per cent more for housing and 42 per cent more for transport than city dwellers in low-income and middle-income countries elsewhere.

Food and housing

Although the World Bank report claims that this impacts labour costs of private firms, thereby making African cities uncompetitive (an erroneous assumption because the private sector in Africa is not known to adjust salaries to cost of living, especially for low-income wage earners), the fact that a majority of African urban dwellers spend a large proportion of their incomes on food and housing means that they have little left over for other purposes, including investments in property, further education or business.

The report also makes some assumptions that fail to take into consideration the political dynamics and reality of African cities. For instance, it states that up to $1 billion has been “lost” due to the failure to convert the Kibera slum in Nairobi, which sits on prime land close to the city centre, from informal to formal uses.

PRIVATE INVESTMENT

The report (like many others of its kind continues to claim that Kibera is the largest slum in Africa) also over-estimates the population of this informal settlement to be 600,000 even though the 2009 Kenya population census put it at about 200,000.

The authors fail to recognise that slums such as Kibera are the result of lack of public and private investment in low-income housing and that poorly serviced slums remain the only housing option for the urban poor because other cheap housing options simply do not exist.

Furthermore, most African cities are not planned – many have grown spontaneously and haphazardly. Even when there are plans, they are largely ineffective because they do not reflect the reality on the ground.

For instance, if planners in Kenyan towns understood that a large proportion of people in urban areas walk to work (because they cannot afford public transport), they would be ensuring that there are more and wider pavements and more affordable mass public transport. Urban planners are also in short supply in Africa. According to the report, in 2011 there were only 194 accredited urban planners in the whole of Kenya, compared to 1,690 in South Africa.

The fundamental reason that African cities remain so dysfunctional, says the report, is because “Africa’s urban dysfunction is self-perpetuating”.

Urban dwellers do not demand better housing and services and expect little from the authorities, which leads of a vicious cycle of low expectations, little infrastructure investment and low productivity.