Delineating African cities (large urban regions) to compare them within global urban networks

Abstract

An important issue for Africa is evaluating cities' capacities to leverage global networks effectively to foster local development. However, this evaluation is complicated by the absence of a unified framework and criteria, making it difficult to compare African cities to both each other and with cities around the world. The first step, therefore, is to establish a basis for comparing African cities. In this paper, we address the challenges of defining urban boundaries for cities across Africa's 54 countries. We outline our methodology and present the results of adapting the concept of Large Urban Regions (LURs) (Rozenblat, 2020), which encompass regional urbanized areas surrounding the main African cities. In total, we delineated 304 African Large Urban Regions, covering 5,522 Local Administrative Units (LAU). This delineation of LURs enables African urban areas to be comparable with others worldwide and paves the way for evaluating their integration into global urban networks, especially through multinational firms, of which over 98% in our sample are located within these designated LURs.