Urbanisation, poverty and sexual behaviour: the tale of five African cities

The question of how urbanisation and poverty are linked in sub-Saharan Africa is an increasingly pressing one. The urban character of the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa exacerbates concern about the urbanisation - poverty relationship. Recent empirical work has linked urban poverty, and particularly slum residence, to risky sexual behaviour in Kenya's capital city, Nairobi. This paper explores the generalisability of these assertions about the relationship between urban poverty and sexual behaviour using Demographic and Health Survey data from five African cities: Accra (Ghana), Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania), Harare (Zimbabwe), Kampala (Uganda) and Nairobi (Kenya). The study affirms that, although risky behaviour varies across the five cities, slum residents demonstrate riskier sexual behaviour compared with non-slum residents. There is earlier sexual debut, lower condom usage and more multiple sexual partners among women residing in slum households regardless of setting, suggesting a relatively uniform effect of urban poverty on sexual risk behaviour.     

Africa’s Urban Food Deserts

Since the mid-1990s, the concept of the ‘urban food desert’ has been extensively applied to deprived neighbourhoods in European and North American cities. Food deserts are usually characterised as economically-disadvantaged areas where there is relatively poor access to healthy and affordable food because of the absence of modern retail outlets (such as supermarkets). This idea has not been applied in any systematic way to cities of the Global South and African cities in particular. Yet African cities contain many poor neighbourhoods whose residents are far more food insecure and malnourished than their counterparts in the North. This paper reviews some of the challenges and difficulties of conceiving of highly food insecure areas of African cities as conventional food deserts. At the same time, it argues that the concept, appropriately reformulated to fit African realities of rapid urbanisation and multiple food procurement systems, is a useful analytical tool for African urban researchers and policy-makers. Although supermarkets are becoming an important element of the food environment in African cities, a simple focus on modern retail does not adequately capture complexity of the African food desert. In the African context, the food deserts concept requires a much more sophisticated understanding of over-lapping market and non-market food sources, of the nature and dynamism of the informal food economy, of the inter-household differences that lead to different experiences of food insecurity and of the Africa-specific conditions that lead to compromised diets, undernutrition and social exclusion. The papers in this special issue explore these different aspects of African food deserts defined as poor, often informal, urban neighbourhoods characterised by high food insecurity and low dietary diversity, with multiple market and non-market food sources but variable household access to food.     

Reality check: Planning education in the African urban century

Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa owes much to the colonial legacies that inform the shape and composition of African urban spaces and places. This applies to legislation, institutional systems and planning education. In 2008, the Association of African Planning Schools AAPSs embarked on a 3-year initiative on the revitalisation of planning education in Africa, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The aim of the project was to propose ways through which the training of urban planners can be more responsive to the special circumstances of African urbanisation. This paper reflects on this initiative.     

Reshaping Cities, Rebuilding Nations: The Role of National Urban Policies

The challenges of rapid urbanisation in large parts of Africa are beyond the capacity of local government to manage. The paper explores the arguments for a national urban policy to complement local strategies, reflecting the unique power of the central state and the special circumstances of cities. With appropriate support, urbanisation could become a more positive force for economic and human development. Recent experience in South Africa illustrates some of the difficulties and possibilities for agreeing a systematic approach to planning and managing urban growth and transformation. Key stakeholders in the policy process have focused on urban poverty as an immediate priority and broadened the traditional economic argument for nations targeting cities to spell out a long-term environmental and economic development agenda. This paper draws on work for the South African Cities Network on preparing the ground for a National Urban Development Framework that was led by the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.

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Are South Africa’s cities too small?

Are South African cities to small? Given the history of South Africa’s spatial development, one might expect that South African cities might be under-sized, and not over-sized as in many other developing countries. It is found that the rank-size distribution explains the sizes of South Africa’s cities but that Zipf’s Law does not hold for the country’s cities. The so-called q-coefficient was found to be equal to −0.75 for the 123 places with population in excess of 100 000. It was also found that urbanisation in South Africa over the past decade seems to have taken the form of the parallel (slow, 1.04%) growth of five large cities. Finally, calculating the “H-measure” for 19 metropolitan areas in South Africa yields an inverse H-measure of 11.3. This suggests a reasonable degree of dispersal, which would only be consistent with optimal city size if transport costs were low and manufacturing not in need of scale economies; two conditions unlikely to apply to South Africa. Finally, the primacy ratio for South Africa’s largest urban agglomeration was found to be 38%. This suggests that the size of the Johannesburg-East Rand urban agglomeration (the primate city) may be relatively too large, whereas more efficient growth may come from larger harbour cities.     

Transport and mobility in sub-Saharan African cities: An overview of practices,lessons and options for improvements

Urban mobility is increasingly becoming one of the planning and development issues for cities in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region. Sub-Saharan cities are growing fast, outstripping the current transport infrastructure. Despite the population and spatial growth, many cities are defined by inadequate planning, rapid urbanisation and deteriorating transport infrastructure and services. In most sub-Saharan African countries, modes of urban mobility are highly dependent on income. Transport options are limited. In fact, walking and cycling are often the main means available for the majority of city commuters. Little effort is made to develop a range of transport options or to improve bike or walking paths. Combined with traffic jams, poor governance and the increasing cost of living, public transport mobility in sub-Saharan cities is having a tremendous impact on their liveability and citizens development aspirations. This paper argues that inclusive and broad ranging transport planning must be prioritised in SSA cities to improve the capacity of citizens to participate in work opportunities as well as to fulfil their daily domestic needs. Using observations and comparing progress in other countries and regions, we note that the majority urban poor, women in particular, are often bearing the brunt of inadequate planning and transport provision. We note that urban planning and transport infrastructure should therefore be (re) designed with particular focus on the wellbeing of the poor. The paper thus ends with a range of suggestions on what planning, design and policy options might be available to better integrate various commuting modes into urban planning infrastructure. In doing so, the paper notes that safety and security are critical elements of improving urban and spatial transport planning in the sub-Saharan Africa region.     

Multiple Land Regimes: Rethinking Land Governance in Maputo’s Peri-urban Spaces

Africa’s increasing levels of urbanisation have significant implications for urban land. Growing populations imply that there is increasing pressure on cities to provide economic opportunities, housing, infrastructure and social services to existing and incoming urban dwellers. These activities take place on urban land, and much of the new growth occurs outside of the state regulatory and legal frameworks. Using survey data collected in Maputo’s peri-urban areas of Luis Cabral and Hulene B, this paper explores how ordinary urban dwellers access, hold, transact and manage land. These findings suggest that a land market that is technically outside of the legal system exists. Notwithstanding its illegality, these land practices are organised, comprising sophisticated local land management and regulatory systems. The low incidence of land conflicts in both neighbourhoods shows that these governance practices are relatively functional. Local practices are characterised by a complex web of social roleplayers, including family members, neighbours, local leadership structures and state officials all of whom lend credibility and legitimacy to the existence of a local land market. These findings challenge conventional understanding of formal and informal markets. It is argued that these socially embedded land markets indicate how urban territory is segmented and managed, and their existence also transforms the way we conceptualise formality and informality in African cities. This situation shows how informal urban economies are co-produced by state and non-state regulatory systems. These hybrid economies have implications for how we understand governance, markets and the role of the state in our cities.     

World Cities Are Just “Basing Points for Capital”: Interacting with the World City from the Global South

There has been a substantial and continuous critique of the world city concept for several years now. One of the main thrusts this critique is taking is that the world city literature is insensitive to urbanisation processes in the global south and builds its theoretical advances on the empirical examples and perspectives of the global north. This paper traces the origins of world city research before examining the more recent critique of this extensive literature on world cities. The main argument is that the concept of the world city as developed by many prominent writers on the topic is not a recent resurgence of modernisation theory in urban studies, as implicitly submitted by its critics. Instead, it is not only conceptually relevant in the context of third world urbanisation, but provides ample room for critical evaluations of urban development in Africa and the global south more generally.     

Selecting independent measures to quantify Melbourne's urban–rural gradient

As cities and towns increase in population and size around the world, there is a growing interest in the impact of urbanisation on humans and the environment. The use of urban–rural gradients has proven to be a useful tool for studying changes in ecological patterns and processes across urbanising landscapes. Currently, there are a wide range of measures being used to represent changes in human demographic patterns, physical structures and landscape composition and structure along urban–rural gradients. The aim of this paper was to identify a suite of measures that can be used to define an urban–rural gradient in Melbourne, Australia. Using principal components analysis, we assessed 17 commonly used measures of urbanisation that included demographic variables, physical variables and landscape metrics. Four measures captured most of the variability in the patterns of urbanisation: (1) Index_combined; (2) the ratio of people per unit urban land cover; (3) landscape shape index; (4) dominant land-cover. We used these four measures to quantify Melbourne's urban–rural gradient and then explored their use in representing urbanisation as an environmental space rather than a geographic space. This study provides an example of how to objectively select a subset of measures to quantify urbanisation, and illustrates a novel way of combining the measures to obtain a richer understanding of ecological responses to urbanisation.     

A systematic review of gated communities and the challenge of urban transformation in African cities

Globalization and the spread of neo-liberal models of urban restructuring have resulted in the rise in gated communities worldwide, including in Africa. The on-going scholarly debate revolves around the drivers of gated communities, their impacts and implications on the planning and management of cities. To contribute to and advance scholarly debate on gated communities and the challenge of urban transformation, we used standard systematic procedures to synthesize findings from 31 peer reviewed journal articles from 1990 to 2020, that examine the phenomenon of gated communities in African cities. Despite the differences in study settings, key findings emerge from gated community studies in Africa. Majority of the reviewed studies attribute the emergence of gated communities to the rise in crime and the search for good quality living environment. Globalization also plays an important role in facilitating new market-oriented gated communities. The globalization of lifestyles of the urban elite has also found expression in African cities. Reviewed studies are critical of gated communities for promoting spatial fragmentation, privatization of public space and local governance and for propagating socio-economic inequality and urban segregation. These issues have implications for the planning and management of cities; in terms of balancing between the need for secure neighbourhoods and promoting inclusive urban societies. The systematic review makes a case for re-thinking urban models that inform the production of new urban spaces; with a view to balance between private capital interests and the need for spatial justice.

     

Assessment of the Importance of Greenery in Urban Planning in Modern Britain

In recent years, the world has embraced rapid and large-scale urbanization making more citizens share the progress of society, such as abundant commodities, convenient and fast transportation, excellent medicine and education. For the urbanization, more land inside or around the limited cities have been exploited at the expense of greenery to build buildings as well as infrastructure to satisfy the according demands caused by urbanization. But human beings can never live without greenery, and more citizens mean more needs on greenery. In view of this, the importance of greenery has been increasingly recognized by urban planners and policy makers. This essay aimed to explore the role that greenery plays in urban planning in modern Britain and provided the theoretical basis for better utilization of greenery in the future urban planning.     

A Decade of Progress in African Urban Tourism Scholarship

This article introduces a theme issue of Urban Forum on the topic of urban tourism in Africa. A context is provided for the issue by an overview of key themes which have been represented in a decade of African urban tourism research. Although most extant research is on urban South Africa, there is an emerging literature on other African cities. The major themes of research have surrounded tourism and urban economic restructuring with the establishment of new products for leisure tourism; slum tourism and pro-poor tourism; the role of the accommodation sector; African cities as non-leisure destinations; and, informal sector tourism. It is argued that within the evolving international scholarship on urban tourism, aspects of African urban tourism research exhibit distinctive features and offer challenges to Northern conceptions of urban tourism and urban tourists.     

Access to Land for the Urban Poor—Policy Proposals for South African Cities

The issue of land is a critical one in post-Apartheid South Africa. Growing informality and poverty in urban areas, driven to a large extent by urbanisation, necessitates greater concerted action around land use management in urban areas to ensure more equitable, environmentally and socially sustainable use of finite land resources. The operation of the urban land market has been identified as a significant obstacle preventing the urban poor from accessing affordable land. A new approach, advocated by the UK Department for International Development and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation entitled “Making Markets Work for the Poor—M4P” emerged in the 1990s. The M4P approach recognises that even successful market development will not distribute land to the poor and intervention in the land market is therefore required to promote more equitable land distribution patterns. The M4P perspective however has been accused of an obsession with economic solutions to the problem of landlessness and informality to the exclusion of other socio-political and legal remedies. The Brazilian case provides an example of a more progressive approach as it combines social policy and legal reform to regulate the use of urban land to ensure that land fulfils its “social function”. The presence of large tracts of vacant and unused land in cities is an important issue in the context of growing informality and competition for land and therefore requires urgent policy attention. The paper discusses the Brazilian case and the instruments used in that country to deal with vacant/unused land in cities. It argues that the progressive taxation of vacant land in cities could be a potentially valuable policy instrument in South African cities. Land-based fiscal instruments can be utilised by local government to manage the use of land and to access additional revenue which can be redistributed to the poor for the provision of infrastructure and services. Although these tools are not a panacea for challenges of informality and poverty in the developing world, they do have the potential to augment municipal income and to facilitate urban renewal, infill development and a more compact city. The paper argues though that these tools should be applied on a city-wide scale; part and parcel of an overall urban land reform strategy and plan for the city.     

The Film Industry and South African Urban Change

Internationally there has been considerable discussion on the role that creative industries play as a strategy by which post-Fordist cities can revive stagnant urban economies. Among those sectors of the economy that form part of the creative industries, the filming sector counts as one. On the whole, these debates have been conducted with reference to the post-industrial cities of the north. Little attention has been placed on the role of the filming sector in the developing south generally, its spatial distribution, and its relationship to other economic and social geographies in those urban places. The paper provides a spatial analysis of the filming industry in urban South Africa and relates it to general economic and social geographies in two South African cities that have identified the filming industry as a key development strategy. In addition, an agenda for future research, in particular pertaining to urban South Africa is outlined. It is concluded that there is a broader urban planning and geography project at hand. Questions need to be asked about how the filming industry interacts with other government programmes and the ongoing transformation of physical and symbolic spaces in urban South Africa.     

非洲城市化探析

20世纪50-60年代以来,非洲城市化迅猛发展。本文从非洲城市化现状出发,分析非洲城市化在其发展过程中呈现出的特点。指出随着生产力的发展,中小城市迅猛发展,大城市相对重要性减弱,跨国城市走廊形成趋势加强将成为未来非洲城市化发展的必然趋势,同时"城市病"将继续困扰非洲国家。     

新加坡立体绿化管控模式及启示

立体绿化是实现城市集约化用地,提升城市生态环境和景观风貌的有效途径,而由政府主导的管控手段则是推动其建设、保证其质量和提升其社会认可度的关键力量。在综合分析新加坡立体绿化管控模式下的政策体系和运作机制的基础上,概括其立体绿化管控特点并提出对中国立体绿化管控优化的4点启示,包括完善法制,建管有序;科学评估,精准定位;分级规划,因地制宜;多方协作,共建共享。     

Localising urbanisation trajectories: comparing the emergence of second-tier urban regions in Europe (1890–2011)

This paper compares the emergence of urban regions around European second-tier cities based on population data between 1890 and 2011. It asks whether a characteristic trajectory of formation exists for those urban regions distinguishing them from the centrifugal growth typical of the early expansion stages of larger cities. The results are consistent with existing research and contribute to a spatial-historical characterisation of second-tier urban region formation. Their dominant long-term urbanisation mode lies somewhere between centrifugal and polycentric models of development, suggesting a more nuanced interpretation of urbanisation timelines and stressing the legacy of past urban growth in current urbanisation dynamics.     

Forces shaping urban morphology in Southern Africa Today: unequal interplay among people,practice and policy

ABSTRACT

This article explores public participation and its impact on urban structures in Southern Africa. Often, public participation stands in opposition to existing legislation and prevailing urban policies. Using textual analysis and case studies of Harare, Zimbabwe, Johannesburg, South Africa and Luanda, Angola, this study concludes that the urban fabric and structure of Southern African cities are in a state of instability. The rise of public participation–“right to the city”–has given way to “cities of rebels” in which citizens react or rebel against urban policies and legislation. These forces threaten sustainable urban morphology and service delivery, complicating the roles of urban planners and managers.     

Avifaunal Richness and Abundance Along an Urban Rural Gradient with Emphasis on Vegetative and Anthropogenic Attributes in Tiruchirappalli,India

Urban expansion and human migration from rural to urban locations have complex relationships with environmental change. Habitat fragmentation, loss of biodiversity and vegetation changes are some of the most common impacts of urbanisation. In many Indian cities, the urban core is characterised by historical human settlements with narrow lanes and packed commercial establishments, while urbanisation that occurred after 1970s preferred spacing between the dwellings with more greenery or urban forestry. As urbanisation progresses, the urban fringes have more scope for incorporating environmental concerns and conservation. In this study, we measured species richness and abundance of birds within varied urban habitats and landscapes along the urban–rural gradient in Tiruchirappalli, India. We also tried to determine the linkage between bird diversity and landscape attributes including anthropogenic factors. Our observations showed that within urban areas, certain landscapes favoured species richness while many habitats are unfriendly for species but encouraged homogenisation. As we move from urban core towards rural gradient, the species richness increased; however, it is not uniform in all peripheral directions. Interestingly, the urban fringes at certain pockets had richness equivalent to rural locations. Species richness positively correlated with vegetation cover while built cover, noise, vehicular movement and pedestrians had negative impacts. As the urban fringes are in various stages of development, they have more scope for integrating ecological and biodiversity considerations and in this aspect wetlands, riverine farmlands and urban forests may play a crucial role in retaining native birds and also supporting migratory bird species.     

Green plot ratio: an ecological measure for architecture and urban planning

Current research on sustainability of cities has favoured the implementation and conservation of greenery in the urban context. The benefits of plants are not just environmental but recreational, aesthetic and emotional. The full benefits of plants and the role they play in the ecology of cities remain to be mapped out but the general significance of plants appears to be uncontested. This paper proposes a new architectural and planning metric for greenery in cities and buildings. This new metric, the green plot ratio (GPR), is based on a common biological parameter called the leaf area index (LAI), which is defined as the single-side leaf area per unit ground area. The green plot ratio is simply the average LAI of the greenery on site and is presented as a ratio that is similar to the building plot ratio (BPR) currently in use in many cities to control maximum allowable built-up floor area in a building development. GPR allows more precise regulation of greenery on site without excluding a corresponding portion of the site from building development. It provides flexibility to the designer while simultaneously protecting the green quota in the design. This concept has been applied in a number of design competitions in which the author has collaborated with colleagues and various architectural practices. It has also been adopted as a planning requirement by the client authority for one of the competitions for which the author has entered. While seen as a fundamental and important metric, GPR is not in itself an indicator for all the ecological relationships between plants and cities. A larger set of related metrics need to be developed.