Getting urbanization to work in Africa: the role of the urban land-infrastructure-finance nexus

Abstract

The serious social and environmental problems and risks associated with large-scale urbanization in Africa are widely recognized. However, the potential for urbanization to strengthen economic growth and development across the continent has only recently been grasped. The stakes are high for efforts to ensure that urbanization reinforces rather than retards prosperity, yet urban policies are frequently ambivalent and piecemeal. The development trajectory of cities hinges on the quality of their physical foundations, which underpin functional efficiency and will endure for many decades. Realizing the opportunities of urbanization therefore requires more concerted efforts to plan and manage the form of urban growth. This means reformed arrangements governing the allocation and taxation of land, major investment in urban infrastructure and stronger local institutions to coordinate land and property development. ARTICLE HISTORY RESUMENEn general, se reconocen los graves problemas sociales y medioambientales y los riesgos relacionados con la urbanización a gran escala en África. Sin embargo, solo hasta hace poco se ha comprendido el potencial de la urbanización para reforzar el crecimiento económico y el desarrollo en el continente. Es mucho lo que está en juego para garantizar que la urbanización fortalezca y no retrase la prosperidad; no obstante, las políticas urbanas son muchas veces ambivalentes e irregulares. La trayectoria hacia el desarrollo de las ciudades depende de la calidad de sus fundamentos físicos, que potencian la eficiencia funcional y perdurarán durante muchas décadas. Por consiguiente, para aprovechar las oportunidades urbanísticas son necesarios esfuerzos más concertados con el fin de planificar y gestionar la forma del crecimiento urbano. Esto se traduce en programas reformados para poder administrar la asignación y la fiscalidad del suelo, grandes inversiones en infraestructura urbana e instituciones locales más sólidas para coordinar el desarrollo del suelo y la propiedad. PALABRAS CLAVEUrbanización, África, Suelo, Infraestructura, Finanzas públicas АННОТАЦИЯ Серьезные социальные и экологические проблемы и риски, связанные с масштабной урбанизации в Африке, получили широкое признание. Тем не менее, потенциал урбанизации в укреплении экономического роста и развития на всем континенте был осознан не так давно. Важно добиться, чтобы урбанизация усиливала, а не тормозила рост благосостояния, но городская политика нередко носит довольно неоднозначный характер. Траектории развития городов зависят от качества их физической основы, которые будут определять их функциональную эффективности на протяжении многих десятилетий. Чтобы в полной мере реализовать возможности урбанизации, требуются более согласованные усилия по планированию и управлению ростом городов. Это подразумевает реформирование механизмов, регулирующих распределение и налогообложение земли, крупных инвестиций в городскую инфраструктуру, а также сильные местные институты для координации развития территорий и недвижимости.

Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

“…By using an interpretation of urban frontiers that demands attention to party politics and the messy, shifting and politicised legal‐institutional frameworks over newly urbanising spaces, we take forward Tom Goodfellow’s (, , , ) research on the interconnections between urban transformations and statemaking. His work has helped respond to calls for political economy insights into why public institutions in African cities lack capacity and fail to capture land and property values (Monkham and Moore ; Palmer and Berrisford ; Turok ). It emphasises the heightened importance of urban land and property as bases for accumulation in Africa, where urbanisation is occurring without concurrent industrialisation (Goodfellow ; Pitcher ; on Harare, see Chirisa et al ; Mbiba ; Muchadenyika ).…”

African dreams: locating urban infrastructure in the 2030 sustainable developmental agenda

“…Before instigating a major urban reform agenda, the political starting point of Africa as an urban continent had to be affirmed. While it may be that Glaeser's (2000) hyperbolic talk about cities as engines of growth has some merit, the reality is that not until poverty in Africa is acknowledged by national governments as urban and not just rural that the consensus needed to change the spatial development trajectory will be unleashed (Turok, 2016(Turok, , 2013Turok & McGranahan, 2013).…”

“…Specifically, African urban infrastructural research has moved away from the individual or community experience of poverty to highlight the pervasive and negative impacts of neoliberalism and tribalism (Beall, Parnell, & Albertyn, 2015;Goodfellow & Lindemann, 2013), the global interconnectivity of regimes of infrastructure service delivery (Turok & McGranahan, 2013), and the importance of technology innovation (Etzo & Collender, 2010;Silver, 2014). Crucially, the new post-structural urban research on planning, building and managing African cities ruptures the notion of informality by demonstrating the fiscal, physical and institutional linkages across infrastructural and service value chain (Jaglin, 2014;Silver, 2014;Turok, 2016) and opportunities for the decarbonization of new provision (Hodson, Marvin, Robinson, & Swilling, 2012;Silver, 2015;Swilling, Robinson, Marvin, & Hodson, 2013). It also creates space to think again of what the terms of African urban citizenship might be, and it is here, in defining the detail of an urban dream, that the interface of scholarship with the aspirations of the UN's 2030 agenda becomes pertinent.…”

“…One of the drivers of this, which manifests in infrastructure shortages, is the limited implementation of national decentralization programmes and the associated ambiguity in the urban responsibilities of central and local governments (Pieterse & Smit, 2014). The gap in accountability in settlement management is further complicated by hybrid and overlapping governance systems, reflected most acutely in land-use and tenure arrangements (Berrisford, 2014;Turok, 2016). Put differently, in the absence of cadastres that can render land-use transparent and predictable, a plurality of informal power dynamics has emerged in African cities that determine how land is used, serviced (or not), rented out, profited from, and made available for coherent and systematic planning and regulation.…”

“…The development models of these interventions, often in water and sanitation, also failed to anticipate the scale of urbanization or lack of management capacity and proved too costly for poor local governments to maintain. Faced with dramatically expanded urban service demand, new models of comprehensive affordable and sustainable urban infrastructure and service delivery are now imperative (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2016;Turok, 2016).…”