Dar es Salam, Dakar and Lagos
7.8 Strategic Options
With backcasting, a successful outcome is imagined for the future, the question being what needs to be done to achieve that outcome. The most critical factors that need to be considered can be summarized as a triple challenge: rethinking the city; having dialogues about the city; and working on – or better still – reinventing the city.
7.8.1 Rethinking the city
A city is an assembly, an interconnection of several economic, social, political, environmental, cultural and technological systems, an “assembly of assemblies.38 Rethinking the city also means asking questions about the meaning of the economy. The concept of the economy that gave birth to the city and presided over its development generates not only wealth, but also poverty, exclusion and many negative externalities. Both industrialized countries and countries of the global South are questioning this concept of the economy in which the city inserts itself.39
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What does informality mean when it is no longer marginal but defines the means of production and structures the urban space in a certain manner?•
Do the concepts of centre, periphery and peripheral city mean anything when in many urban metropoles the periphery is merging into the centre, or the centre is extending to and absorbing the periphery?7.8.2 Dialogues about the city
The city is a melting pot of many social, ethnic and racial groups, but is also a place where the many role-players and stakeholders operate, according to different and continuously evolving viewpoints.
While not necessarily an exhaustive list, the stakeholders include:
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Municipal authorities: their role is vital but their political, financial and human resources fall short of what they should be. As one of them said, they are expected to do gigantic projects with Lilliputian resources.•
Governments: they are responsible for long-term planning, which covers critical issues, such as energy, water resources, transport infrastructure, etc.•
The private sector: it plays an essential role in driving urban development and creating sustainable wealth. However, the correlation between urban growth and economic growth is not automatic.Urban development can, if mastered, become a lever that serves and feeds the economy, but, if uncontrolled, act as a brake on sustainable economic growth.
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The informal sector (or everyone in the popular economy) cannot be ignored because it contributes directly to the economy and plays a role in meeting the needs of the poorest of the poor.Platforms that enable dialogue among stakeholders are essential to rid the city of the violence that dates to colonial times and its authoritarian style of governance, and to democratize the relations between the many urban role-players or, better still, to rebuild the city starting with its inhabitants. The dialogues need to talk about the immediate problems and challenges as well as long-term problems and challenges, and the long-term vision that must inspire these policies. Unfortunately, there is a glaring lack of such dialogue. The long-term plans that exist have been prepared by technocrats with no real participation by all urban role-players. Just as war is too serious a business to be left to generals, so, too is urbanization far too complex to be left in the hands of urban planners alone, especially if they are foreigners.
7.8.3 Reinventing the African city
Cities and towns were not unknown in pre-colonial Africa, even though discussions about the African city focus on the colonial and post-colonial modern city. Yet many examples of African ingenuity exist, but often “very little attention is paid to the accuracy of infrastructures, the sustainability and practical design provided by great African cities such as Axum, whose majestic grandeur still dominates the valleys and rivers of Ethiopia” 40
Optimize resources
“Reinventing the African city means upgrading its physical, socio-economic and intellectual capital to achieve sustainable development.”41 There are five categories of resources: financial, human, environmental, information and institutional.
Financial resources: Municipal finances are notoriously weak because of inefficient local taxation systems, the size of the informal economy, which mostly falls outside the tax net, and the difficulties in collecting taxes in conflict-struck countries, such as Kinshasa during the 1970s and 1980s or Cairo since 2011. As a result, municipalities depend on transfers from central governments to fund their recurring, operational and capital expenses. This greatly affects their decision-making powers and their legitimacy in the eyes of urban communities.
Human resources: It is important to find ways of strengthening the capacity to formulate or implement urbanization policies and programmes, especially if the ambition is to encourage participatory planning, which involves dialogue about long-term visions of the city and urban areas.
A participative approach, which separates the skills necessary for foresight thinking from other skills, and institutional support necessary to enable foresight thinking, independent of power games, need to be put in place, while staying close to local decision-making. Decision-makers here include not only the local government and government administrative units but also local civil society organizations.
Environmental resources: Rapid and uncontrolled urbanization threaten the resources that made many cities attractive. For example, Cairo owes its existence to the Valley of the Nile, which cannot absorb more people without compromising the wellbeing of its inhabitants, the city’s economy and the environment. Social justice and economic competitiveness, which are the main priorities of Egypt 2052 (national development plan) are likely to be compromised if the environmental question, which is becoming a bigger challenge, does not receive attention.42
Information resources: We cannot know without measuring, but we can only measure what we know. All the case studies showed a lack of knowledge when it comes to measuring the city. The African city eludes the usual measurement instruments and statistical apparatus – for example, GDP, which measures wealth, is of little value in a context where informality dominates.
Institutional resources: Urban governance needs rethinking. The first governance difficulty is simply to delineate the city limits – if “we can govern from afar, we can only administer at close proximity”.43 The city boundaries for the case studies seemed to take the form of a variable geometry shape rather than result from rigorous calculations. Using criteria from several agencies for establishing
boundaries, the size of Johannesburg was found to vary between 1 645km2 and 7 700km2 and its population to fluctuate between 5 million and 9.5 million. The same varying proportions were found for Cairo, Dakar and even Dar es Salam. The second difficulty comes from what could be called the retrospective stubbornness of decision-makers who struggle to rethink their powers, even when they realize that excessive concentration and centralization leads to weak and inefficient urban management. The result is a gap between the intentions and ambitions on the one hand and reality on the other hand. For example, in Senegal, decision-makers created new local governments to respond more effectively to the needs of urban communities, but financial resources have not been transferred to the new local authorities – “delaying the transfer of financial resources to the new local government is a way of continuing to control them”. 44
Municipalities do not have enough of the managerial skills, and anticipation and foresight skills required for true decentralization. But this constraint can be overcome through sound capacity-building of local governments in financial resource management and even in foresight thinking.
Local governments can become “smart-future”. For this, what is needed are bottom-up processes that enable local municipalities to speak to each other and with the national and supranational levels.
7.8.4 Implement different strategies
To manage these different resources, various strategies will have to be implemented, under three categories: reactive, pre-active and proactive.45
Reactive strategies, which include everything that needs to be implemented immediately in order to transform colonial cities into African cities. Some priorities are:46
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Upgrade informal settlements – provide integrated infrastructure and services that target the poor, the youth, women and elderly people.•
Mobilize local and foreign urban finance to invest in creating better living conditions.•
Develop an effective public leadership that tackles racism, xenophobia and discrimination and violence based on gender and sexual orientation.•
Make greater efforts to further develop and implement positive city-level policies focused on compact and densified cities, and transit-oriented development.These are reactive strategies are necessary, and should be implemented as a matter of urgency, but are not sufficient to build the city of the future, as outlined in scenarios 2 and 3.
Pre-active strategies are necessary for the cities of the future and can only be built in the medium term, even if the foundations need to be laid now.
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Densification versus expansion (vertical or horizontal growth);•
Decentralization, and not simply relieving congestion and devolving power;•
Working with national government on long-term planning, water and energy security, and the implementation of all possible measures within the city’s control to ensure efficient use of water and energy reserves;•
Diversification of economic activities through creating new economic hubs geared to sustainable and value-added production and export.Proactive measures aimed at promoting a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities in the city, especially programmes targeting education and skills, and human capital. Resilience policies will be an integral part of this, consisting of:
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comprehensive measures aimed at improving air and water quality and an even greater effort to promote waste recycling;•
effective climate change adaptation strategies, and effective early-warning monitoring strategies;in short, the implementation of policies that will help build “sustainable, less polluted and climate resilient cities”.47
7.8.5 The role of local governments
Local governments have a crucial role to play in thinking, opening up for public debate and implementing these strategies.
Local governments must institutionalize the foresight approach at the local level: The future must be placed at the core of self-determination of African local government. This foresight approach should not be reduced to simply using a tool such as the scenario-building. As processes at local government level and in relation to national and supranational levels become more complex, territorial foresight can be a key factor in making governance more inclusive and centred on the aspirations of the people. To plan and build a municipality’s future requires: exploring plausible futures (desirable and undesirable), a collective and transparent reflection (to make societal choices that correspond to a shared vision), and a process of open reflection and implementation that makes it possible to identify and implement the actions necessary to achieve a shared vision and
to avoid undesirable pathways. This requires political and public will that rest on two principles:
developing endogenous foresight capacity (creating a critical mass of “smart-future” citizens and organizations) and implementing local foresight initiatives based on the concept of empowerment and accountability.
Local governments need to plan differently: Meeting today’s challenges requires a strategy that differs from conventional planning in two aspects: the products, i.e. urban development plans; and the process used to draft these plans. The plans would need to be based on rigorous analysis – sound knowledge of the dynamics of economic, political and cultural transformation in urban communities, not simply on perceptions or political aspirations. Secondly, short-term interests govern these plans because they are instruments for politicians whose long-term vision is not the same length as that of planners. Therefore, the drafting of a plan should involve all development role-players because a plan that is not the result of consultation, dialogue and negotiation will have no more value than a statement of intent or a political party manifesto. Among other issues that should be discussed is the very concept of urban development. The idea that development is a product delivered by the state to populations that are seen as beneficiaries is no longer relevant. No municipality can meet the needs of its citizens by itself, and urban populations (especially disadvantaged groups) are increasingly fighting to regain their status as active transformation agents and calling ever louder for more decentralization, not administrative devolution, which all too often is the case.
7.9 Conclusion
Africa is now an urbanized continent, with the fastest urban growth rate in the world, at 4.5%. This trend will continue. Within the next two decades, most Africans will live in urban centres and the size of the urban population will have doubled.
Will there be a correlation between urban development and economic development, as was the case elsewhere? This is one of the major uncertainties that cannot be ignored because the urban trajectory in the case study cities has not generated significant economic development in the economy’s formal sector. The scenarios showed that, if this correlation is not forthcoming, urbanization increases the risks of societal and economic destabilization. But if well managed, urbanization, together with the continent’s demographic transformation, could be critical for the continent’s economic and social development in the coming years. If well managed, rapid urbanization is a great opportunity to accelerate the region’s transformation and to increase its ability to respond to development challenges, including the eradication of poverty.
Given that a scenario of virtuous urbanization is possible and plausible, the winning formula is: to rethink the concept of the city, organize dialogues about the city and reinvent the city as organized, competitive jurisdiction containing hubs of innovation, information, knowledge exchange and economic production that are strongly linked to global value chains. To achieve this, planning and management are essential and, in this regard, the importance of the role of local government cannot be overemphasized.