You cannot have such a rate of growth without at the same time putting in place urban planning instruments. When you see economies, like the African ones, growing at 6 to 7 per cent, there’s no excuse. It’s very expensive, it brings social conflicts. If an unplanned city is built, then its reconstruction, the introduction of planning afterward, is much more difficult. There’s no other alternative for proper city growth than to be planned. And if it’s too dependent on central government, then it should be delegated to the local authorities.įor every “if” there must be a solution. If it’s complex because it involves different ministries, it needs to be simplified. The only solution is to speed up the planning process, because you cannot stop in-migration. The problem is that if the government is uncoordinated, or it doesn’t have the instruments, the speed of planning is much slower than the speed of city growth. This is something that has to be done by the government, because there is no other entity. The first step is the limitation of public space in relation to private space. In some countries in Africa, where urban planning is being attempted, it often seems slow and bureaucratic, and by the time it reaches implementation, things have already changed, growth has outstripped the plans. But it is necessary to introduce as soon as possible urban planning on a massive scale in Africa. The first waves of migration to the city are unplanned. At the beginning, it’s usually very difficult. The response to that is to improve urban planning, to plan for city growth. But what is different in Africa is the speed of the process. We have seen similar movements in other continents before. We are seeing an unprecedented pace of urbanization in Africa. ![]() How has the exceptionally rapid growth of Africa’s cities affected general approaches to urban development? Africa Renewal’s managing editor, Ernest Harsch, spoke with him at UN-Habitat’s headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. Joan Clos, a former mayor of Barcelona, Spain, and since 2010 the executive director of UN-Habitat, believes that tackling those challenges will above all require more systematic urban planning. For the United Nations Human Settlements Programme - known as UN-Habitat - that growth represents a dual challenge: helping Africans to better harness the productive potential of their cities, but also to cope with the increased demands for municipal services and decent housing, so that more and more people are not obliged to crowd into impoverished slum areas. That number is projected to triple to more than 1.2 billion, or 60 per cent of all Africans, by 2050. By 2009 some 395 million Africans - nearly 40 per cent of the continent’s population - lived in urban areas. ![]() ![]() Africa’s cities are growing very rapidly.
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