Making Africa Urban: The transcalar politics of large-scale urban development

Making Africa Urban is a collaboration between Prof Jennifer Robinson (UCL Geography), Prof Phil Harrison (University of the Witwatersrand), Prof George Owusu (University of Ghana, Legon) and Dr Evance Mwathunga (Chancellor College, University of Malawi). Three cities are studied: Accra (Ghana), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Lilongwe (Malawi). The transnational framework allows a new perspective on urban governance challenges, focused on large-scale projects, and will seek to treat African experiences as the basis for wider insights into global urban politics.

Transnational processes

Transnational processes are profoundly shaping Africa’s urban future - private sector, sovereign and developmental circuits of investment, policy and aid are “making Africa urban”. But the motivations and dynamics, as well as the impacts of the developments are poorly understood, and the literature on each are segmented - between academic and policy-driven analyses, and between topics (policy mobility, development co-operation, financialization, geopolitics). This project will range across these fields to assess the urban outcomes which shape and are shaped by these circuits.

Research will focus on how large-scale urban developments are planned, designed, financed and governed, as such developments are focal points for transnational actors and investment. They are also sites through which financial, political and governance innovations often emerge, given that they entail numerous actors and jurisdiction, as well as long time-scales. Large-scale developments can be important new urban spaces in their own rights, but they might also involve renewal and intensification of existing areas (with removal of current land uses), or city-wide interventions aimed at the extensive remaking of urban infrastructures and institutions. All have implications for the form of the wider urban territory, and for the potential for creating more liveable and equal urban contexts, or for undermining urban value.

The project takes as its starting point African urban contexts as these are very poorly represented in wider urban studies and especially within theoretical and conceptual understandings of urban politics. This project will develop and extend comparative methods to propose original theoretical and empirical insights on significant elements of global urbanisation, large-scale developments and city-wide interventions, starting in the African context but contributing new and wider understandings of global urban political processes and urban policy.

Background and justification

At the same time as the humanitarian impulse reflected in the SDG ambitions to “leave no city behind” (Acuto and Parnell, 2016), is shaping development interventions across urban Africa, powerful private and sovereign circuits of urban investment are also increasingly involved in making Africa’s urban future (UN-Habitat, 2018). Across the globe, interest in opportunities to realise value through investment in urban development has expanded considerably and the growing financialization of the global economy has brought new actors into the urban arena, for example, transnational investment trusts (REITs) and institutional investors such as pension funds. While such processes are incipient in the African context, and local capital and processes are still prominent, including African pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, there is a substantial mobilisation of global private sector interest in Africa’s urban future and a wide array of private sector urban design and construction firms involved in all developments. Closely intersecting with this is the extraordinary growth in interest in African cities from sovereign actors. China’s role is iconic, although not unique - Japan, South Korea and India will also figure in the research. Alongside these, continuing humanitarian and developmental interventions, funded by Western governments, charitable foundations and multi-lateral organizations are a formidable presence in resource-poor cities.

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