With 68% of the global population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, efforts to address the risks posed by the climate crisis need to consider the realities of the billions across the world living in these built-up areas.

This marked urbanisation will see an expected increase of 2.5 billion people living in urban areas, with around 90% of this growth happening in Africa and Asia – a subject we have explored previously on our blog.

City-level climate adaptation, urban climate justice and other intersecting topics formed the basis of a number of discussions at COP26 and in events running parallel to the global conference.

David Dodman – director of the human settlements research group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) – attended COP26 and participated in multiple official and side events. We caught up with him to hear his thoughts on the urban agenda at COP26, what can be done at the city level to create large-scale impact, and what he hopes to see at COP27 in Egypt next year.

Urban highlights from COP26

• Addressing urban informality and inequality through climate justice was the focus of a panel event that David Dodman participated in alongside Rose Molokoane from Slum Dwellers International (SDI), FCDO’s Rubbina Karruna and Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Mayor of Freetown, among others. The session was convened by the Commonwealth Local Government Forum (CLGF), Cities Alliance and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Watch it here. 

• Advancing equity in cities was the topic of discussion for a World Resources Institute event, which focused on how to shape more equal cities through inclusive climate action and Covid-19 recovery. David Dodman and ODI’s Sarah Colenbrander took part, along with others from the international urban research community. Watch it here. 

• The health-climate nexus was explored in a Resilience Hub discussion, hosted by Mott Macdonald and featuring speakers including IIED’s Alice Sverdlik and secretary general of the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA), Wisborn Malaya. The session is available to watch via the Resilience Hub virtual platform (registration required).

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Photo credit: Abenaa / Getty Images. Kroo Bay is a coastal informal settlement in Freetown, Sierra Leone that is impacted by flooding.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Hannah van Rooyen, African Cities Research Consortium digital communications officer

More than 1 billion people around the world currently lack access to adequate and affordable housing – a figure expected to triple by 2030. During this period, climate-related threats to the lives and livelihoods of urban residents are projected to increase, with decisions made around the location, design and construction of housing set to profoundly shape our collective future.

And yet, there are real tensions between different goals and an alarming disconnect between housing and climate agendas. These tensions were the focus of a recent workshop hosted by the African Cities Research Consortium, as part of the Innovate4Cities 2021 Conference – co-hosted by UN-HABITAT and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM).

Organised by The University of Manchester, ODI, Reall, and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the event brought together a range of stakeholders to discuss housing reform in the global South, with a goal of exploring holistic interventions to secure a “quadruple win”: low-carbon, climate-resilient housing for all, delivered in ways that strengthen local economies.

The African Cities Research Consortium’s CEO Diana Mitlin introduced the session, framing the workshop with the question: how do we enact housing reform with four potentially competing priorities that we need to shift onto a more complementary platform? Climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, economic transformation and poverty reduction were the four priorities up for discussion.

Noting the timely nature of the workshop with COP26 on the horizon and emphasising the urgent need for a low-carbon transition, Diana Mitlin stated that we are already facing the need to adapt to climate change and seeing the consequences of inaction on our city streets – with flooding, high temperatures and other impacts.

Covid-19 has exacerbated and highlighted the need for enhanced productivity among low-income communities, she noted, with large numbers in informal work and struggling to get the basic incomes they need to survive.

She added: “We urgently need a new path that will enhance the economic development options facing those who live in towns and cities in the global South… Our collective task is to work out ways to simultaneously address those four priorities, each of which has to be recognised as of prime importance for a global agenda.”

After being divided into breakout rooms to discuss the four topics of climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, poverty reduction and economic transformation, the wider group came back together to summarise and discuss the takeaways from each conversation.

Climate mitigation

Led by Flavio Coppola (Carbon Free Energy in Cities) and Laetitia Pettinotti (ODI), the group highlighted the mitigating potential of increasing densities near transit nodes in order to promote the use of mass transit, but pointed out associated risks of displacement, an increase in heat island effect and gentrification.

Upgrading and retro-fitting informal settlements was another key topic of conversation, with Laetitia Pettinotti emphasising the importance of land rights and including communities in upgrading processes. Other ideas included waste management improvement as part of a wider circular economy, and the “win win” opportunity of urban green spaces in terms of nature-based solutions and improving health.

Climate adaptation

David Dodman (IIED) and Clare Wildfire (Mott MacDonald) guided the adaptation discussion, highlighting security of tenure as a key priority for the group – enabling gradual adaptation that homeowners can control, and providing a safe and secure baseline for development.

Also covered was the importance of service provision, with primary education and healthcare central to creating underlying community resilience and ensuring the ability to recover from any shocks that do happen. Transport networks were also noted as being fundamental to relocation success, providing viable links with accessible jobs in areas earmarked as safe.

Poverty reduction

Diana Mitlin (The University of Manchester) and Sazini Ndlovu (Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation) led the poverty reduction group, setting out the agreement that informal settlement upgrading is critical to addressing the housing needs of low-income groups. Royal Mabakeng (Namibia University of Science and Technology) also raised the question of how government can become a catalyst to enable people to drive their own housing development, and how more funding can reach communities directly, supporting them to improve their dwellings and enabling the government to focus on infrastructure investment.

Issues of resource scarcity, improved tenure security and bulk infrastructure to enable networked services were set out as three key considerations, along with the consensus that low-income groups need to be seen as partners and able to collaborate with local government.

Economic transformation

Guided by Donovan Storey (REALL) and Sumedha Naik (Syntellect, India), the economic transformation group highlighted the need to incorporate finance within development plans at the earliest possible stage, to ensure inclusivity and that improvements in the build environment can be maintained – noting that the question of affordability is often left until the end.

The need for much more dialogue to break through siloes and integrate sources of finance was also explored, along with the importance of focusing on affordable housing, services and infrastructure in conjunction to meet other felt needs in low-income communities.

Arising from these discussions, three cross-cutting priorities were identified and explored further by the wider group:

1. Legal land titles

Royal Mabakeng pointed out that legal titles are not always the answer with low-income groups and what people most need is security of tenure. There was general agreement that those who feel secure and have land rights are more likely to invest in their own homes and communities.

2. Affordable resilient housing materials

David Dodman noted that despite poor construction and ventilation worsening the effects of heat for city dwellers, the availability of building materials and technologies that residents can use to alleviate these has been low on the agenda until now. Diana Mitlin and Royal Mabakeng further commented that it seems difficult to get resilient building materials that are also affordable for low-income households and many informal settlement dwellers.

3. Urban green spaces

Green spaces proved a hot topic on which to close the session, with participants noting the various benefits they can serve for urban cooling, flood prevention and mitigation, sports fields and urban agriculture, and other global agendas including biodiversity. Donovan Storey noted that a key challenge exists around how we value urban green space, and that while something like a road or a shopping mall has an intrinsic value within a city, a much broader approach is needed to prove the tangible benefits of green spaces.

Amidst the wide-reaching discussions and myriad priorities to consider, one message was abundantly clear: there is an urgent need for a global agenda that integrates poverty reduction with climate change resilience within cities.

The main discussion from the Innovate4Cities event is available to watch via YouTube.

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Photo credit: Abenaa / Getty Images. Kroo Bay is just one of Freetown’s many coastal informal settlements that is prone to flooding.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

What do you think is the most important aspect that IIED brings the consortium?

IIED brings researchers with a huge amount of expertise across the thematic areas of the project. We also have experience in getting a wide variety of people with different academic backgrounds to work together, helping ensure that the various partners collaborate effectively and contribute complementarily to research efforts.

Although environmental risk is not the key focus of this project, IIED brings a solid understanding of these issues and how they can affect many other areas of development – such as understanding climate change resilience in the context of African cities – which is a useful addition to the programme.

“We are attempting to highlight the connections between cities, why these connections exist, and how this knowledge can be applied to effect change in the cities.”

What do you think is most interesting about ACRC’s approach to urban development?

Our programme follows a key hypothesis that that cities are made up of systems. While this statement is well accepted, it often falls into a general, ‘everything is connected’ narrative. We have the time and resources to really unpack this point in a useful way. Instead of just looking at individual, narrow events, we are attempting to highlight the connections between cities, why these connections exist, and how this knowledge can be applied to effect change in the cities.

ACRC does not make a claim for total universality of application, as we are analysing a range of different settings and cities, which gives the statement ‘cities of systems’ serious explanatory power.

What do you think is the most crucial challenge for development in African cities?

The most crucial challenge is the balance between economic competitiveness and inclusiveness. African cities need to attract investment and they need to create jobs, which does require a vibrant economy. However, the extent of the social and infrastructural challenges for the majority of people living in these cities is so massive that they cannot be resolved by simply stating that we will rebuild the economy and everything else will benefit simultaneously.

So the challenge for city leaders, national governments, and researchers who provide evidence to support development, is to get that balance right. They need to boost cities’ economies while at the same time addressing the pervasive issues of poverty and marginalisation.

“The most crucial challenge is the balance between economic competitiveness and inclusiveness.”

What is the most exciting thing for you about this project?

The fact that this is genuinely a ‘consortium’ effort is really exciting. The level of expertise that we will be drawing on, and the length of time that we have to grapple with challenges and contradictions, should generate an unprecedented level of analysis of African urban systems. It’s also great that the timeframe allows us to try out numerous solutions, enabling us to tie together the problem analysis and the implementation of responses.

Read more from IIED:

• Outside the large cities
• Informal settlement data and local community responses to COVID-19 and climate risks
• Getting attention to a much-neglected health agenda: occupational health and safety
• Rethinking humanitarian aid for refugees as investment in urban water and sanitation

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Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

“Forget planning, politics first.”

As part of the Development Studies Association Annual Conference, the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) hosted a roundtable discussion exploring ‘The political opportunities and obstacles associated with Africa’s urban challenges’.

Bringing together the expertise and perspectives of grassroots social movement leaders and academics, the discussion strongly emphasised the need to rethink the conventional African urban development trajectories of imposing infrastructures and urban models that do not address the needs of the majority African urban citizens. Instead, the panellists advanced the necessity of working with the informal settlement residents, informal/popular economic actors and the natural environment to address African urban challenges.

The panellists identified that African cities are faced with housing, transport, education, health, food security and employment related challenges. Joseph Muturi provided an example of Mukuru informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, which has only two legally recognised schools serving more than half a million people. He also noted that they found hundreds of informal schools and health centres staffed with unqualified professionals in their assessment of the settlement.

In most parts of Africa, development priorities and policy responses to urban challenges are shaped by city managers, urban professionals, politicians and developers, with urban development planning mostly focused on infrastructural expansion with minimal input from, or benefit to the majority urban poor. For example, Shuaib Lwasa of Urban Action Lab stated how many African urban governments invest heavily in motorised transport infrastructure, which mainly serves less than 10% of city dwellers.

The panellists highlighted political exclusion as the major obstacle to addressing urban challenges in African cities. One such group facing persistent political exclusion is refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs), who are considered transient residents despite their permanent resident status. As a result, tens of thousands of refugees and IDPs live in African cities – mostly in informal settlements – without the necessary support or full citizenship rights. Lucy Earle of IIED stated that in Mogadishu, Somalia, for example, IDPs are denied voting and other citizenship rights, which exposes them to forced eviction as land value increases.

Political competition to control urban rents for personal enrichment and patronage was discussed as another key barrier to addressing African urban challenges. Many African politicians consider urban services, infrastructures and land as private or group asset accumulation sources. This has led to intense political competition to control these resources, resulting in poor service delivery and skewed resource allocation.

Even democratic multiparty electoral competition has limited effect in ensuring accountability of politicians, the panellists noted, due to entrenched identity-based political mobilisation of the majority illiterate electorate. Notably, the representatives of social movements on the panel expressed that the tendency of some politicians to prioritise personal enrichment from every project has made it difficult for them to build long-lasting partnerships with authorities to address the needs of the urban poor.

The roundtable also highlighted the increased recognition among many African governments of the role that urban centres and urbanisation play in their national development plans. For example, Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai of the University of Ghana Business School talked about the increased political significance of urban centres, especially Accra and Kumasi, in Ghanian party politics, national development planning and resource allocation.

However, the panellists also identified four significant limitations with this increased emphasis on urbanisation in Africa. Firstly, most national development plans view urban and rural areas as distinct spatial categories and fail to consider the particular features of peri-urban spaces.

Secondly, there is a tendency to focus on large and capital cities at the expense of secondary cities and smaller towns, which are rapidly urbanising.

Thirdly, in most parts of Africa, urban local governments are constrained from allocating resources based on local priorities, due to limited fiscal decentralisation. Patience Mudimu, director of Dialogue on Shelter, noted that limited fiscal decentralisation in cities administered by an opposition party tends to exacerbate the discord between the city and national government, with significant adverse impact on service delivery, citing Harare, Zimbabwe as an example.

Finally, most African national development plans heavily emphasise flagship infrastructure-led development without considering the needs of the majority of urban residents living in informal settlements. Accordingly, the panellists suggested rethinking how urban development is integrated into national policy formulation and development planning.  

The panellists underlined the necessity of doing urban development differently by shifting the focus from infrastructure-led to people-centred development, and capitalising on the creativity and improvisational skills of the majority urban poor. People-centred development involves bringing excluded segments of the urban population (such as slum dwellers, refugees and IDPs) to the table, to set the development agenda for their settlement and cities.

However, inclusive development and participatory planning should not be done as a box-ticking exercise, by inviting a few community leaders into five-star hotels for photo opportunities. Instead, the urban poor need to be in charge of collecting and analysing information about their communities and prioritising their development needs. Joseph Muturi shared his experience of the Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) in Nairobi, Kenya, to demonstrate the potential of informal settlement residents and their grassroots organisations in planning the largest informal settlement upgrading projects ever in collaboration with multiple development partners.

Crucially, with the advent of Covid-19 health emergencies and climate change impacts, the panellists also emphasised how urban development planning also needs to be geared towards building the environmental and socio-economic resilience of communities.

Overall, the roundtable enabled the panellists to talk about the key urban challenges facing African cities, share their own experiences of addressing them, and provide ACRC with examples of avenues to do urban development differently. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the panel is that African urban socio-economic problems are political, and so the solutions must also be political

Panellists

> Patience Mudimu (Director, Dialogue on Shelter, Harare)
> Joseph Muturi (grassroots leader from Kenya, chairperson of Slum/Shack Dwellers International)
> Shuaib Lwasa (Urban Action Lab, Makerere University, Global Adaptation Centre)
> Lucy Earle (IIED)
> Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai (University of Ghana Business School)

Convener

> Diana Mitlin (Professor of Global Urbanism, The University of Manchester and CEO, African Cities Research Consortium)

Photo credit: Muungano wa Wanavijiji / Know Your City TV. Ongoing removal of housing structures located on roads by residents to pave way for construction of road network at Mukuru Kwa Reuben.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

This blog considers what we know about Africa’s 100 largest cities – responding to the third blog in this series, which looked at what we don’t know. This is with a particular focus on the drivers and other influences that shape contemporary urban change.

The next blog in this series looks at how the lack of data on cities is invisibilising them and their populations’ needs.

Africa’s 100 largest cities

The distribution of the 100 largest cities in 2020 across countries is set out in Table 1. Forty-one countries have one or more of the 100 largest cities; 22 countries have one, and all but one of these are national capitals.

The concentration of the 100 largest cities in South Africa and Nigeria is not surprising, as they have the largest national economies. Egypt and Morocco are among the next largest; between them, these four nations have 40 of the 100 largest cities.

Capitals

Thirty-nine of the 100 cities are national capitals, while 43 are state or regional capitals, which means more than four-fifths of the 100 cities are national or regional capitals. The biggest cities that are not national capitals are: Dar es Salaam, Durban, Lagos, Johannesburg, Alexandria, Abidjan and Kano. But several of these are former capitals (Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Alexandria) or, in the case of Abidjan, a de facto capital.

Capitals are relocated when it suits those in power to do so – as discussed in the second blog in this series – usually for political or military reasons. The French created Niamey as the capital of Niger in 1905, then shifted the capital to Zinder in 1912. In 1926, prompted by Zinder’s proximity to the Nigerian border and its distance from French-controlled ports, they moved the capital back to Niamey.

Box 1: Basic data on the 100 cities

Range in population size

From the three most populous:

• Al-Qahirah (Cairo, Egypt) with 20. 9 million inhabitants;
• Lagos (Nigeria) with 14.4 million;
• Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) with 14.3 million

To the three least populous:

• Benguela (Angola) with 0.72 million;
• Oshogbo (Nigeria) with 0.71 million;
• East London/Buffalo City (South Africa) with 0.71 million.

Share of Africa’s urban population

The 100 cities had a total population of 242.5 million in 2020, out of a total urban population for Africa of 587.7 million. There are thousands of urban centres not in the top 100, whose combined population was 345.2 million in 2020.

Range of ages

From the three oldest: Tunis (Tunisia), Tripoli (Libya) and Al-Iskandariyah (Alexandria, Egypt), founded centuries BCE.

To the three newest: Abuja (Nigeria), Nouakchott (Mauritania) and Enugu (Nigeria), founded since 1950.

When cities were founded

Of the 71 cities for which we have dates:

• 14 were founded during the 20th century (all but three between 1900 and 1950);
• 26 were founded during the 19th century (14 of these between 1880 and 1900);
• Two were founded in the 18th century, five in the 17th century, four in the 16th century;
• 20 were founded before the 16th century.

Economy

We assume that these 100 cities have a large share of Africa’s economy, although there is no data on this. But we can see a diverse range of economic changes. Many of the 100 cities have undergone rapid economic growth, driven by oil and gas production, extraction of precious metals, jewels and other valuable mineral resources, and by the local demands these create for producer and consumer goods and services.

The inhabitants of these resource-rich regions usually derive little benefit, however. This underlies political tensions that fuel conflict and often generate large numbers of refugees and internally displaced populations.

Many large cities have ports that are (or were) important parts of the economy. Some served as provisioning centres – for instance, large fleets would routinely stop at Dakar on their outward and return journeys from India, to repair, collect fresh water and trade for provisions with the local people.

Cape Town was developed by the Dutch East India Company to play a comparable role for Dutch ships sailing to East Africa, India and the Far East. Today, most of the largest ports are within the 100 cities: Durban, Mombasa, Lagos, Abidjan and Tangier.

Tourism is important in many coastal cities and historic cities, especially in northern Africa and also, among the 100 cities, Cape Town, Mombasa and Zanzibar. Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia have the highest international tourist arrivals in Africa. Eight of our 100 cities feature in a list of top 100 cities ranked by international visitor numbers (including for tourism and business): Cairo, Johannesburg, Marrakech, Cape Town, Casablanca, Durban, Accra and Lagos.

Some cities, such as Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Abidjan, have become concentrations of international agencies. This gives rise to a concentration of highly paid international agency staff, whose demand for goods and services can intensify a city’s population growth. Ironically, most of these agencies do not fund initiatives in their city where most of the population lives in informal settlements with very inadequate service provision.

Aerial view of Dar es Salaam. Photo credit: Moiz Husein / iStock

Many cities lost out to colonial rule, but some grew rapidly as centres of administration and control. Dar es Salaam’s size and status were reinforced by its role as the administrative and commercial centre of German and then British colonial rule. After the French took Algiers in 1830, they made it their military and administrative headquarters. The Belgian government established Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) as its capital. Lilongwe and Kaduna were founded by the British and became important colonial administrative centres. Maiduguri was founded in 1907 as a military outpost by the British. 

Transport

New technologies transformed transport for people and goods – providing higher speeds and carrying capacities, better access to those wanting to travel or to send or receive goods, and lower costs. The development of transport infrastructure provided the means to extract valuable resources from the locality. But local populations often derive little or no benefit from this process.

At different times and places, camels, boats, ships, railways, roads, highways, bridges, pipes and air travel served the movement of people and/or goods and supported cities. Sometimes they competed (for example, road versus rail), and sometimes they complemented each other (such as roads serving railways, railways serving ports, and ports as provisioning centres for ships). Telecommunications systems have become essential for all cities to serve the movement of data and internet access.

Generally, transport costs became lower as new modes of transport were introduced. Demand for goods and for travel interacted with changing transport modes and costs. Camels across the Sahara could only take high-value, non-perishable goods, due to the time needed and the limits of camels’ physical capacity. So trade using camels would specialise in high-value, mostly light goods – spices, kola nuts, salt.

As described in an earlier blog, many cities grew as centres supporting camel caravans. But to note the obvious, camels were not used to transport coal, as it is too heavy and low value – railways were much faster and able to deal with large volumes and heavy weights of low-cost goods. Enugu could only exploit its coal when the railway arrived.

Some cities drove these changes, others were founded to serve them. And politics along with (external and internal) demand for resources shaped everything. Half of the 100 cities have ports, most have airports. 

Heavy investments in railways in much of colonial Africa brought new economic activities to cities that were on the railway system. Many of these railways were built to exploit and export valuable resources, and were also important for both colonial administrations and the quick movement of troops. National armed forces were concentrated in many cities, swelling local populations and economies.

Agriculture

Many cities’ economies grew from supporting high-value agricultural exports and the range of enterprises that support their growth, processing, packaging and transport. There is surprisingly little documentation on food and agriculture in regard to the 100 cities, except in cases where the city served a region producing crops or other agricultural products for national and international markets (such as Port Harcourt for palm oil during colonial rule). Apart from some city case studies, we know little about the agriculture feeding the 243 million residents of the 100 cities. Umuahia, Kaduna, Aba, Osogbo, Onitsha and Bobo-Dioulasso are among the 100 cities with important agricultural markets and associated agricultural services.

Other drivers of change

Contemporary urban change has many other significant influences and drivers. Extreme weather events, disasters and water shortages – to which climate change has contributed – are likely to become more extreme and more frequent.

For many cities, change is brought about by conflict and/or people displaced by conflict. Covid-19 and risks of other pandemics and the many life-threatening diseases – whose impacts get forgotten in the fight against the current pandemic – are having a profound impact.

One positive outcome of the pandemic could be a much wider recognition of the importance of well governed and adequately resourced local government and local civil society, including grassroots organisations and federations.

Sources: The text in this blog draws heavily on the profiles of the 100 cities in Wikipedia.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

This is the first of four blogs, considering what we know (and don’t know) about Africa’s 100 largest cities. Also to come are blogs on the thousands of urban centres that are not in the 100 largest city list.

No surprises

A quick review of Africa’s 100 largest cities does not present many surprises. Most are in Africa’s wealthiest nations. Most are national or regional/state capitals. At least half have river or seaports. Many have had railway stations for decades and, more recently, airports and connections to highways. A large number have universities. All have profiles in Wikipedia including many that run to several pages.

Surprises

But if we take a more careful look, we may be surprised. There are cities whose populations have doubled or even tripled since 2000 (see Box 1) and whose governments’ budgets, bureaucracies and technical capacities are far too small to cope. We find cities where most of the population and workforce live in poor quality, overcrowded informal settlements lacking safe, regular water supplies and adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, healthcare, emergency services, electricity, schools, the rule of law and other vital services.

In other words, these are cities that are catastrophically failing to meet their responsibilities in public services provision – and it seems, from the limited data available, backlogs are growing. Data on health outcomes in informal settlements, such as infant, child and maternal mortality rates, are very rare. And all this in some of the wealthiest nations and cities.

We see how little attention is paid to reaching groups of city dwellers facing discrimination on the basis of gender, age or ethnicity/nationality, or groups with chronic health problems or special needs. Many cities have large numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons, who are not in camps and are now part of city labour markets/economies – they too often face discrimination. On top of this, current incapacities to address Covid-19 reflect decades of underinvestment in public services. 

Lack of data

A constant theme in this blog series is the lack of data on those city residents whose needs are unmet in the ways we have just seen. Official data sources are usually of no use to city governments, because they are from sample surveys that can only give aggregated statistics. They have no local statistics of use to local governments and civil society. There are usually limitations in other data sources, such as vital registration systems and censuses (these limitations will be the focus of a future blog).

This lack of relevant data means that the issues the data should inform are not addressed. How can a city government develop plans for improving water supplies without data on the quality of water provision to each household? Informal settlements usually fall outside any data gathering on service provision, even when they house 30-70% of a city’s population and workforce.

Aerial view of Ikoyi, Lagos. Photo credit: Reginald Bassey / Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mogadishu gets a detailed 16,000-word profile – but no mention of the very poor housing conditions and lack of basic services facing much of the population. Most live in 480 informal settlements spread across the city. A report in 2020 noted that housing consists predominantly of corrugated metal sheet shacks or temporary shelters made of sticks, plastic and fabric. These settlements often lack proper buildings and the most basic services (including access to electricity, water and sanitation).

Wikipedia is not averse to these issues – for instance, it has a detailed profile of Kibera, one of the largest informal settlements in Nairobi. So perhaps the point is not that contributors to Wikipedia ignore these issues, but that the data needed to cover them is not available.

What lack of data?

The lack of city and community data on how well needs are being addressed means that we do not know how well cities and city governments are meeting their responsibilities for public services. We do know, however, that innovative, well-resourced city governments working with their populations can do much to meet these needs and reduce the backlogs.

We have also learned that effective responses to Covid-19 need partnerships between local government and grassroots organisations. We have amazing examples of grassroots organisations striving to address the gap between services needed and local governments who partner them – many who are now uniting to fight Covid-19 and its economic, social and health impacts. But little funding is available for them. And there is generally little capacity in city governments and national and local and public health care services to work with them.

The next blog explores the drivers and other influences of contemporary urban change in Africa’s 100 largest cities. Future blogs will cover invisibilising cities and their populations – including the obsession with national statistics and international comparisons – and alternative data sources for cities and communities.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

Most large African cities today were already well-established when colonial rule began to expand dramatically in the late 19th century. Most preceded the slave trade era too. This blog outlines the history of cities in Africa from 500 AD up to the late 19th century.

From existing sources, we glean evidence of a rich and varied urban history, even as we acknowledge that this history is incomplete. Kingdoms, empires and caliphates had capitals (and often regional capitals) going back more than 1,000 years (and longer if we were to go back to the Roman Empire). Some cities were also local or international religious or trade centres. Many cities combined these roles. And some, such as Tunis/Carthage, were even used for tourism by Romans who had holiday villas in and around the city, after Rome finally defeated Carthage.

Africa’s rich urban history

There are some striking similarities between Europe and much of Africa over the centuries, as empires, kingdoms and city states rose and fell – with obvious consequences for their capital cities and the cities that served them. There were cities that grew to serve prosperous agriculture, and cities greatly influenced by religious conflicts and wars (for Africa, especially the Muslim conquest of Northern Africa in the 8th century).

But cities were also centres of administration, scholarship, schools, trade, magnificent religious buildings (mostly mosques in Africa, mostly great cathedrals in Europe) and large flows of pilgrims. There are also vast differences – and great diversity among African cities.

Large cities in the past

We have population estimates for many African cities, showing so many substantial cities with long histories (see Table 1 for examples). Some were among the world’s largest cities of their time. But there are many large cities that have lost importance or have been abandoned. Al-Iskandariyah (Alexandria) was the capital of Egypt from its founding by Alexander the Great to AD 642 and became a centre of commerce and great intellectual activity. But, by 1777, it had become an insignificant fishing town of 6,000 inhabitants before later returning to be a large and important city. Perhaps there are many more cities still waiting to be discovered and acknowledged.

Table 1: Examples of large cities over time

The city of Fès in Morocco, for example, was founded in AD 786 and at its peak in 1200, it had 250,000 inhabitants. It was the national capital for long periods and a centre of religion and scholarship. The University of Al Quaraouiyine was founded in Fès in AD 859.

Cairo, founded in AD 641, has been Africa’s largest city for almost all of the last 15 centuries. Around 1340, almost 500,000 people lived there. It was the principal seat of Islamic learning and central to the profitable East-West spice trade.

Cairo has within its boundaries more ancient cities, including al-Fustat (city of tents) that became the first capital of Islamic Egypt in 641, al-Askar (the city of sections, or cantonments) and al-Qatta’i (“the Quarters”). Al-Fustat remained Egypt’s administrative centre until 1168, when it was burnt to prevent its capture by a Crusader army, and Egypt’s capital moved permanently to Cairo.

Western Africa

One key influence on cities in Western Africa was the empires that came to control large areas. Cities were their centres of government, trade and military power.

The Ghana Empire (c. 300 to 1100) grew rich from increased trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt, allowing larger urban centres to develop. Bamako became a major market town, and a centre for Islamic scholars, with the establishment of two universities and numerous mosques in medieval times.

The Mali Empire spanned the 13th to 17th centuries and ruled over 400 cities, towns and villages of various religions. Niani was the capital for 300 years; it reached its zenith as Mali’s political, commercial and caravan centre (gold, salt, kola nuts, slaves) in the early 14th century.

The Songhai Empire dominated the western Sahel in the 15th and 16th centuries. The city of Gao became its capital. Other important cities in the empire were Timbuktu and Djenné.

Among the best known of the sub-Saharan African urban cultures is the Yoruba culture. This included many large cities in what is today southwest Nigeria. Major cities include Ile-Ife, Oyo, Abeokuta, Ijebu-Ode, Akure and Ibadan. Ibadan was founded in 1829 and had a population of around 100,000 by the mid-19th century.

The documented history of the Yoruba people begins with the Oyo Empire, which became dominant in the early 17th century. It was preceded by Ile-Ife; between 700 and 900 AD the city began to develop as a major artistic centre. The nearby Benin Empire was also a powerful force between 1300 and 1850. A number of other cities, though non-Yoruba, were influenced by the Yoruba, including Warri, Benin City, Olene and Auchi.

Eastern Africa

Traditions of urbanism are most in evidence in Sudan (and Khartoum and Sennar), Ethiopia (and Aksum and Gondor) and cities along what came to be called the Swahili coast (including Mombasa). There were also ancient cities such as Kerma (in Sudan, which flourished as the first great urban centre of tropical Africa and was estimated to have 10,000 inhabitants in 1700 BC), Meroe, Suakin, Shendi, Sennar (‎on the Blue Nile in Sudan, described by a European visitor, as “one of the most important trading centres in Africa… regularly visited by caravans from Nubia, Darfur, Cairo, Fezzan, Bornu and Ethiopia”). Further east, former Swahili towns on the Benadir Coast, such as Mogadishu, Barawa and Marka, Lamu and Zanzibar, had by the 18th century become trade centres. 

Final note

This blog provides an introduction to the scale and nature of cities in Africa – but only up to the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the late 19th century, as different European nations expanded their empires. It does not cover the large and profound changes brought by colonial rule from the 1880s onwards (acknowledging too that colonial rule stretches back much earlier than this for some cities).

It has not dealt in any detail with the trade in slaves that had existed for thousands of years, but whose scale and impact increased so much through the development of the Atlantic slave trade. It is difficult to be dispassionate about the slave trade’s impact on cities. Certain ports became important when the slave trade to the Americas expanded dramatically and came to use ports in Western Africa (what was called the Slave Coast), rather than the long-established trans-Saharan trade routes (which were better suited to trade with Northern Africa, Europe and Asia). Some cities in west Africa fortified to protect themselves from capture. Ports that exported slaves from Africa include Ouida, Lagos, Aného (Little Popo), Grand-Popo, Agoué, Jakin, Porto-Novo and Badagry.

Most ports that served the slave trade are still urban centres but with small populations (under 100,000). Lagos and Badagry (in Nigeria), Porto Novo and Cotonou (Benin’s two largest cities), and Luanda (Angola) and Dakar (Senegal) were among the exceptions. Badagry, just down the coast from Lagos, was for a while larger and more important than Lagos. On Africa’s east coast, Bagamoyo (Tanzania) was founded at the end of the 18th century and became one of the most important trading ports along the East African coast, including trade in slaves.

Sources: This blog draws on the UN Population Division’s 2018 World Urbanization Prospects; Chandler, Tertius (1987), Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census, Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, UK, 656 pages; Bairoch, Paul (1988), Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, Mansell, London, 574 pages; and Freund, Bill (2007), The African City: A History, Cambridge University Press, 214 pages; Burton, A. (2001) ‘Urbanisation in Eastern Africa: An historical overview, c.1750–2000’, AZANIA: Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 36-37(1): 1-28. But its main source is Wikipedia, which has profiles of almost all the cities mentioned; most are long and detailed, including details of their foundation and development.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

We know relatively little about most of Africa’s pre-colonial urban history and the role of its cities. This is something especially pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet we can get a sense of urban history from diverse sources, including tales from travellers and explorers, material evidence of large cities, and import and export records. There are also dozens of cities with buildings and districts built centuries ago that still exist – especially mosques and medinas.

There is more written on social, economic and political issues on the continent or in countries within it, but less on what this meant on the ground for cities and their populations – and in turn, what city development meant for these issues.

Evolving city systems

Africa has a rich and varied urban history going back centuries, or more than 2,000 years for some countries and cities. Indeed, many of today’s large African cities were already well-established before colonial rule. Table 1 below lists the largest cities in Africa in 1800, including the population at that time, the year the city was founded and the rank among all cities in Africa in 2020.

It is worth highlighting that all cities for which we have the year they were founded pre-date European colonial rule. Only eight of these 34 largest cities are among 2020’s 100 largest cities, and five of these are in Northern Africa.

Additionally, while none of the African Cities Research Consortium’s 13 focus cities feature in the list of the largest cities in 1800, all are within the largest 100 for 2020. Five (Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Khartoum, Addis Ababa and Nairobi) are in the top 11 largest African cities.

The fundamental reshaping of the urban system and the location of the largest cities in all nations reflects the economic and political changes brought about by colonial rule – whereby colonial powers tended to avoid the largest cities – and post-colonial developments. City systems came to reflect more closely the government hierarchy, as the importance of state and provincial capitals grew in many nations, along with access to agricultural and mineral resources for export.

Hence, the political and economic changes imparted by colonial rule and post-colonial development created a new urban geography. Almost all the great historic cities described in the next blog still exist as cities, but with much less economic or political importance.

Africa’s largest cities in 1800 and 2020

One striking feature outlined below is how old most of Africa’s cities are. Table 1 lists the largest cities in Africa in 1800, their population at the time and the date they were founded – referring to the foundation date of a settlement that was not a city, or when an already existing city was classified as a city. Table 1 also gives the rank of these cities in 2020, allowing us to see how the 34 largest cities in 1800 fare in 2020.

Table 1: The largest cities in Africa in 1800

Table 2 shows the 34 largest African cities in 2020 – to compare with the 34-city 1800 list (in Table 1). As noted earlier, the 2020 list has few of the same cities as the 1800 list, and has far more cities founded in the late 19th and early 20th century by European powers or commercial interests. Table 2 also shows how the largest cities in Africa in 2020 rank in the 1800 list.

Table 2: The largest cities in Africa in 2020

Out of the 34 African cities that were recorded or estimated to have 20,000+ inhabitants in 1800, eight were in Mediterranean countries, although not all on the Mediterranean – much of the international trade was by overland routes, not by sea. Most of these urban centres had very long histories as prominent cities.

Of the 34 largest cities in 2020:

• Five were in Northern Africa (compared with 11 in 1800)
• 11 were in Western Africa (compared with 20 in 1800, and including five in Nigeria, compared with 13 in 1800)
• Six were in Eastern Africa (compared with two in 1800)
• Five were in Southern Africa (all in South Africa, compared with none in 1800)
• Seven were in Middle Africa (compared with one in 1800)

Distribution of the largest cities across nations

Figure 1: The countries with the highest percentages of Africa’s largest cities 

Figure 1 shows the countries with the highest percentages of Africa’s largest cities over the last 220 years. Given the scale and nature of economic, political and urban changes in Africa since 1800, there is perhaps a surprising extent of continuity.

Notably, Nigeria had the most cities for all years, although faced changes as some new cities became more prominent and some older cities – previously capitals of kingdoms and empires, and cities in the north, including those involved in the trans-Sahara trade, – lost importance.

Morocco and Egypt were also among those with the most cities for each year, but this has declined over 220 years.

Surprisingly, Congo PDR had none of Africa’s 100 largest cities up to 1950, and then seven of them by 2020. All seven cities were colonial foundations, with many established around mining for diamonds, gold and uranium. Consequently, it is often remarked upon as a country with vast wealth but very high levels of poverty.

Continuity and change

Of the 34 largest cities in Africa in 1800, eight were still in the 100 largest cities in Africa list in 2020, but with a lower rank, except for Cairo and Kano. Nine of the 34 cities were not in the 2020 cities list, but have more than 300,000 inhabitants today. So while cities can go up or down in the rankings, it is rare for them to lose significance altogether.

For instance, Sokoto may have fallen from the second largest city in Africa in 1800 to outside the top 100 in 2020, but it is still a substantial city with more than half a million inhabitants. Similarly, Meknes – Morocco’s capital before it moved to Rabat – fell from third to outside the top 100, but remains significant.

This is also the case for Oyo, Ife and Katsina in Nigeria. Cities that were to become Nigeria’s four largest cities in 2020 – Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt and Abuja – had not even been founded in 1800. Meanwhile, many cities in Northern Africa, including Sokoto and Katsina along with those involved with the trans-Sahara trade, slipped down the rankings as using ships for trade became cheaper and quicker.

Only Cairo had no movement down the rankings, while five cities had drops of 0-50: Kumasi, El Djazaïr (Algiers), Rabat, Tunis and Abomay. Eight fell out of the top 100 cities in 2020, six of which were in Nigeria.

Urban population growth over time

In 1800, Cairo was the largest city in Africa, with 260,000 inhabitants. In 2020, Cairo remained the continent’s largest city but with more than 20 million inhabitants. The 34th largest city in 1800, Kairouan, had 20,000 inhabitants, while the 34th largest city in 2020, Brazzaville, had 2.4 million inhabitants.

Figure 2 shows not only how the average size of Africa’s largest cities changed dramatically from 1800 to 2020, but also how this average size – 2.77 million in 2020 – is relatively small in comparison to the global average of 9.5 million.

Figure 2: Average population of Africa’s largest cities (1800 to 2020)

In 2020, the collective population of Africa’s 100 largest cities was 244 million – comprising just over two-fifths of the continent’s total urban population of 588 million – with cities from 39 different African countries featured in the top 100 list.

Although cities with more than a million inhabitants existed before 1800, they were very rare and none were in Africa. But, by 2020, there were 68 of them, with Cairo becoming the first African “million city” in the 1920s. So, from being very uncommon worldwide, most African countries now have one or more “million cities”.

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Sources: Almost all city and urban population statistics from 1950 onwards come from the UN Population Division’s 2018 World Urbanization Prospects. Almost all city population statistics prior to 1950 come from Chandler, Tertius (1987), Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census, Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, UK, 656 pages. This blog also draws on Bairoch, Paul (1988), Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, Mansell, London, 574 pages and Freund, Bill (2007), The African City:  A History, Cambridge University Press, 214 pages.

Notes: One limitation in international comparisons of city populations is that definitions of cities vary in how their boundaries are defined. A city’s population can be defined by the historic city boundaries, or boundaries based on the built-up area, or based on a political/administrative boundary, including the boundary of a much larger metropolitan area and perhaps a metropolitan planning region that is even larger. Of course, there are very large differences in city populations and rates of change, depending on which boundaries are used.

The UN Population Division makes a heroic effort to make city population figures more comparable by seeking to get figures for urban agglomerations. Their boundaries are defined as the extent of the contiguous urban area or built-up area. This definition could be applied to 55% of the 1,860 cities in the UN’s most recent World Urbanization Prospects, with the rest being on the city proper (35%) or the metropolitan area (10%).

Ultimately, the UN Population Division is dependent on data provided by UN member states and whatever definitions they use, meaning it is also hampered by the lack of censuses in many nations. Of course, for discussions of historic city populations, there were no censuses to draw on.

For Table 2 and Figures 1 and 2, the figures for 1950 onwards are UN statistics and there were more than 100 African cities. This was not the case for 1800, 1850 and 1900, so all cities with populations estimated to be at least 20,000 inhabitants were included.

Figure 2 overstates the average population of cities in 1950, 2000 and 2020, as it is the average size of cities that had reached 300,000 inhabitants by 2018. Many cities are smaller than this and if included would bring down average populations.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

Catch up on our webinar introducing the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) and outlining how the Consortium and its international partners are planning to tackle complex, political and systemic problems in some of Africa’s fastest-growing urban areas.

ACRC has been awarded a contract of £32 million from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) over the next 6 years. Building on the political settlements analysis established by the Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre, ACRC will adopt a city as systems approach to addressing complex urban problems. Through engaged action research we aim to catalyse progress for disadvantaged communities in a number of focus cities and beyond.

Speakers

• Professor Diana Mitlin, The University of Manchester
• Professor Sam Hickey, The University of Manchester
• Dr Martin Atela, Partnership for African Social and Governance Research, Nairobi
• Chaired by Dr Admos Chimhowu

Find out more

• The African Cities Research Consortium
• The Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre
• Follow the African Cities Research Consortium on Twitter
• Sign up to the African Cities Research Consortium newsletter

This post originally appeared on the Global Development Institute Blog.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

Researchers from the Global Development Institute have been awarded a new research contract of £32 million to establish the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC), funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) as part of UK Aid.

Led by Professor Diana Mitlin, ACRC and its international partners will tackle complex problems in some of Africa’s fastest growing urban areas. Over 6 years, research will generate new evidence to catalyse integrated, sustainable, inclusive approaches to urban development.

African Cities will approach urban areas as complex systems, undertaking engaged political analysis, in order to address large scale development challenges. A ‘city as a system’ approach aims to move beyond the sectoral silos of research and interventions by treating each city as a complex system. It builds upon the political settlements analysis establish by our Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre, and will integrate political and technical analysis undertaken alongside key players on the ground.

The African Cities Research Consortium brings together engaged partners including the UK-based IIED, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and ODI, African-based groups such as ICLEI Africa, PASGR and SDI, as well as international organisations, such as the IRC and UNU-WIDER. Closer to home, it will utilise expertise from across The University of Manchester,  particularly within the Manchester Urban Institute and the Global Inequalities research beacon.

CEO Diana Mitlin said, “The long term prospects for much of Africa will hinge on creating more sustainable, equitable and inclusive cities. The African Cities Research Consortium will enable us to tease out the complexities and highlight potential solutions to improve urban centres across the continent.”

ACRC has the ambitious aim of generating new evidence to catalyse integrated, sustainable, inclusive approaches to urban development challenges. An initial focus on 13* African cities will allow us to undertake focused, inter-connected research that delivers real insights for local authorities, civil society and donors. 

Tade Akin Aina, Executive director of the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR), based in Kenya will be the Uptake Director for the Consortium. He said, “Covid-19 is highlighting structural inequalities within cities across Africa. By taking a holistic approach and bringing together communities with local authorities and donors, I’m confident the African Cities Research Consortium will play a vital role in improving urban areas.”

Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manchester commented, “The University of Manchester is proud of its contribution towards tackling global challenges and the new African Cities Research Consortium epitomises this approach. With rigorous research, combined with the engaged networks and insights of partners from very different spheres, we’re confident that great progress will be made.”

* The initial 13 African cities are: Accra (Ghana), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Bukavu (DRC), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Harare (Zimbabwe), Kampala (Uganda), Khartoum (Sudan), Lagos (Nigeria), Lilongwe (Malawi), Maiduguri (Nigeria), Mogadishu (Somalia), and Nairobi (Kenya).

Photo by Virgyl Sowah on Unsplash

This post originally appeared on the Global Development Institute Blog.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.