Governance Challenges in African Urban Fantasies
Satellite settlements are recently booming around major African cities, often as comprehensively planned and self-contained new towns. These large-scale projects are influenced by the visions of global, smart, and sustainable cities, and are funded largel
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Governance Challenges in African Urban Fantasies Ismaila Rimi Abubakar
Abstract Satellite settlements are recently booming around major African cities, often as comprehensively planned and self-contained new towns. These large-scale projects are influenced by the visions of global, smart, and sustainable cities, and are funded largely through international real estate investments aimed at the middleand upper-income markets. A research issue left largely unanswered is the lack of clarity about the place of such “African urban fantasies” within the governance structures of the countries where they are situated, including decision-making, public participation, accountability, transparency, environmental sustainability, and equity. This chapter reviews the governance structure for such megaprojects, and how it undermines the social inclusiveness goal of contemporary global development agendas. The chapter concludes with key lessons that we can take from these new towns towards a more appropriate and inclusive governance structure. Keywords Africa, developing countries · New satellite towns · Modernist planning · Smart sustainable cities · Sustainable urbanisation · Urban governance
10.1 Introduction Over the past three decades, developing countries have been witnessing a spate of building new towns around booming cities, most noticeably in Africa and Asia, which are the future of the world’s urbanisation (Abubakar and Dano 2018; Resnick 2014). Between 2015 and 2050, urban areas in Africa and Asia are anticipated to add about 2.5 billion people or 90% of the estimated growth in the worldwide urban population (World Bank 2019). African’s rapid urbanisation rate of an average of 4% annually will result in urban populations growing by about threefold to reach
I. R. Abubakar (*) College of Architecture and Planning, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (formerly, University of Dammam), Dammam, Saudi Arabia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Home (ed.), Land Issues for Urban Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa, Local and Urban Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52504-0_10
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1.3 billion people or 60% of the total population by 2050 (World Bank 2019). The resulting surge in demographic pressure is increasingly placing a serious strain on already overwhelmed housing, infrastructure, and basic service delivery mechanisms, with significant implications for poverty, inequality reduction as well as environmental sustainability (Abubakar 2018a; Grant 2015; Muhammad and Abubakar 2019). More than two-thirds of the continent’s urban residents live in poor housing and slums that lack safe and adequate basic services, according to the African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD 2005). For example, Nigeria’s housing deficit was over 17 million units in 2012 (Abubakar and Aina 2019). Similarly, 51% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) used unimproved sanitation facilities or practiced open defecation, and 43% used unimprove
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