Introduction

1Sub-SaharanAfrica has been tipped as the fastest urbanizing region in the World.1 Although the mantra of ‘rapid urbanization’ across sub-Saharan Africa has been questioned in recent years,2 images of both the young and the old drifting to towns and cities across Africa is evident in all countries on the continent. Equally visible across many cities on the continent is the close proximity of rich and poor, evident in affluent neighbourhoods located alongside slums and shanty towns.3 In other words, the contrasting images of poverty in many African cities from Johannesburg in the south, Lagos in the west, Nairobi in the east, and Cairo in the north, and large slums and shanty towns coexist with the rising affluence of high-rise condominiums, shopping malls and gated communities are disturbing features of the African city landscape.

2Across many cities in Africa, the sight of slums and street hawking in cities are viewed by many city authorities and urban elites as incompatible with their modernist vision of the city. This situation pitches city authorities and elites with their modernist dreams of the city against the poor living in slums and eking a living in the informal economy. The competing claims of the vision of a viable African city is set in the context of weak governance structures, poor infrastructure and services, and failing urban land management regimes. These complexities of the urban landscape make the right to the city in Africa the most contested practice and concept anywhere in the world.

3Also, the growing urbanization and increasing incidence of poverty and informality, and affluent neighbourhoods in many African cities are set against the background of neoliberal and market-oriented policies in which everything from basic social services (sanitation, waste management, education and health), housing and land are dominated by market forces. As Parnell and Pieterse argue, the historically weak capacity of central and sub-national governments to engage with the complexity of sustainably addressing urban poverty issues has been compounded by the neoliberalism agenda which has swept across Africa since the mid-1980s.4 Consequently, the right to the city in Africa is a struggle between a neoliberal development agenda and the rights of ordinary individuals, households and the poor in general to live and survive in the African city.

4Given that the future of the Global South is largely predicted to be urban, there is a growing concern for inclusive urban development in this part of the world. This has received considerable attention from several UN agencies, notably UN-Habitat, and the international donor community led by the World Bank, to advocate an inclusive urban development policy. According to Kuymulu, the ‘right to the city’ has come to dominate the policy space on urban development drawing together fundamental opposing institutions and ideologies.5 In the face of structural urbanization challenges and the alienation of a large section of the urban poor in respect of the benefits of urbanization, a range of different institutions have come to appreciate the right to the city as an ideal political slogan with broad-based popular appeal. Nevertheless, contradictions and tensions exist between institutions and ideologies regarding how the right to the city should be pursued in practical terms in poor cities such as those in Africa.

5Parnell and Pieterse6 have argued that the right to the city in the African context needs to be conceived as a perspective beyond urban neoliberalism but one that advocates for a strong return of the state and sub-national government. They added that such a state-led perspective is required to provide inclusive development planning and to enforce land use management as well as economic and environmental regulations that advance the interests of the poor for purposes of urban poverty reduction based on job creation and economic growth. Indeed, such a developmental state is required given the historical weaknesses of the state in promoting inclusive urban development (a situation compounded by the drive for urban neoliberalism) and the scale and intensity of poverty in many African cities. It is these complexities that are the probable cause for the limited focus on the right to the city in the African context. The exception is South Africa where decades of apartheid and segregation policies by the state have led to serious commitment in the post-apartheid era and conscious attempts (including constitutional instruments) to deal with the past regarding the right to the city and inclusivity of urban development in general.7

6In this chapter we review the processes of changes in African cities inspired by modernist and urban neoliberalism-driven urban development agenda in African cities. We argue that the urban spaces created by this agenda are categorized by the public power as a residual space to be populated by the urban elites and politically-connected resulting in inequalities in the urban commons and the deprivation of the rights of many.

Urbanization in Africa and its Challenges

7The urban population in African countries has increased considerably even in the midst of decelerating global urban growth rates.8 From an estimated population of about 373.4 million as of 2007, the urban population in Africa is projected to reach about 759.4 million by 2030 and this will constitute about 53 % of the urban share of the total population.9 The pace and level of Africa’s urbanization is geographically uneven. As of 2010, North Africa and Southern Africa had the largest share of the urban population in Africa with estimated figures at 51 % and 46 % respectively.10 East Africa has the smallest share with just about 20.5 % but the most rapidly urbanizing region among the other regions.11

8The rapid pace of urbanization in Africa has had significant impact on its large urban settlements. For instance, colonial and post-colonial policies which favoured large investment in major African cities led to increased urban growth of these cities and also facilitated rural-urban migration.12 While data continue to point to increased population in major African cities, current trends suggest that future urban growth will be taking place in small and intermediate urban settlement.13 Further, these urban growth dynamics will be occurring within a context of a gradual decelerating urban population growth rate.14 The implication of this is far reaching. This is because city authorities will have to pay attention to small and intermediate urban settlements and increase their capacities to manage this transition. This said, it is important to also indicate that at present, urban transition in Africa continues to present huge challenge to city authorities as latent structural constraints continue to impede African cities from making any gains from this urban transition.15 Indeed, the exceptionalism of African urban experience is an indication of its high demographic and low economic growth.16

9Africa’s urban challenge is huge, and is constantly on the increase. One challenge that characterizes Africa’s urban experience is the high rate of urban poverty and inequality. It is estimated that a high proportion of people in sub-Saharan Africa live on less than US$ 1.25 a day.17 Further, a huge number of African youth are unemployed or underemployed due to lack of opportunities in the job market and also a lack of access to finance to help urban dwellers engage themselves in useful economic ventures. The urban poor and most urban dwellers who eke out a living in the informal labour market face constant struggles as they are dispossessed and denied access to productive resources in the urban economy.18 This exacerbates the poverty situation and increases the inequality in most urban settlements in Africa. A clear manifestation of poverty and inequality in African cities are the increased number of slums and informal settlements.19 Indeed, it is estimated that more than half of Africa’s urban population lives in slums.

10There is also the problem of limited institutional capacity to manage urban problems. Most institutions, especially those in charge of local government is poorly resourced both in terms of human and financial resources.20 Most local governments are unable to achieve their revenue target due to their inability to efficiently collect revenues on prospective economic activities in towns and cities. Again, the infrastructural and logistical support required to effectively manage urban settlements is also lacking. The latent institutional bottlenecks have rendered most city authorities impotent in discharging their duties, especially in the area of service and infrastructural provision.21

11Indeed, the issue of infrastructure is critical to Africa’s economic transformation. However, the extensiveness of Africa’s infrastructural gap continues to be a major drawback for economic progress. It is estimated that Africa needs an average growth rate of about 7 % to meet its infrastructural gap by the year to 2025.22 The problem of infrastructural gap is indicated by the poor road networks found in cities and also those that connect these cities with the rural areas. There is also a deficit in electricity and power supply in most African countries as a result of inadequate investment into the sector. It is reported that Africa’s firms lose 5 % of their sales as a result of frequent power outages ; this rises to 20 % for informal sector firms. In addition, it is estimated that only about 53.9 % of those living in urban areas in Africa have access to clean water,23 while access to good sanitary facilities is also a major challenge facing most urban dwellers.

12The issue of safety and security is another issue posing serious challenge to the management of cities in Africa. Two aspects of safety and security are of significant interest in this discussion. This includes safety from crime and violence, and safety from natural disasters. Undoubtedly crime and violence has seen an increase in a number of African countries.24 This is accounted for by a high rate of inequalities, inadequate financing of security agencies which render them impotent to extend security to larger section of the urban populace and poor planning of urban environment which provide conducive spatial context for crime to fester. The other issue also is that, years of violence in a number of African countries have contributed to the proliferation of arms as well as their easy access which also facilitate various forms of violent crimes.25 Quite apart from criminogenic concerns, increasing densities in urban settlement and the serous deficits in infrastructural provision is leading to the accumulation of various forms of environmental risks and vulnerabilities in African cities.26 Most of them are facing serious challenges with flooding, coastal erosion due to climate change, the spread of communicable diseases as a result of lack of sanitation facilities and ineffective governance structures to mention just a few.

13Despite the intractable challenges facing urban areas in Africa, the city still represents hope for many Africans who are ready to maneuver their way through an environment which seems to present little opportunities for them.27 However, the chance to survive in this environment, especially for the urban poor and those within the informal sector of the urban economy, is always constrained by policies and actions from city authorities which tend to exclude them from mainstream economic activities. It is within this context that the quest to address urban challenges in a more holistic manner and involving all actors and persons has become critical. It is based on this notion that recent discourse on urbanism is beginning to advocate for recognition of the right of all to be part of the shaping of African urban societies.

The right to the City in Africa : Different visions and different actors ?

14Over the years, policy-makers, academics and human rights advocates have been engaged with the concept of right to the city.28 Evidence of attention given to the concept is seen in the number of charters and other policy documents which aim to promote justice, inclusiveness and participation in all urban affairs. These include the World Charter for a Right to the City ; the European Charter for Safeguarding Human Rights in the City ; Rights to the City Alliance and ; the New Urban Agenda which is based on a “right to the city” component.29 While this suggests progress in terms of galvanizing support to advance an urban future where universal rights are deemed important and daily struggles and all sections of urban inhabitants are catered for, it is equally significant to bring to the fore the varied notions and for that matter the experiences that characterize the right to the city from the African perspective and experience. Before this perspective is shared, it is important that insight is shared on the early meanings of the right to the city as provided by Henri Lefebvre and other scholars such as David Harvey.

15The idea of a right to the city is reflected in most of Lefebvre’s work. Even though he is known by many as a Marxist, his views on urban life and concerns for the daily struggles of urban inhabitants, especially the urban poor made him more of a libertarian socialist.30 Lefebvre rejected the totalitarian control and orthodoxy of the state as well as the control of capital while favouring a project that aimed at championing the struggles of people from the domination of capital.31 Furthermore, Lefebvre’s view of an urban revolution was far from the normative conception of radical political change at the state level which favoured state ownership of the means of production but instead supported a conscious project that sought to enhance participation and appropriation or what is normally termed the right to the oeuvre.32 According to Huchzermeyer,33 this notion of right can be extended to mean right to habitat or inhabit, right to urban life and a right to complete usage of space.

16For Harvey in particular, the right to the city reflects a struggle against new forms of capitalist productions where the quest to accumulate wealth tends to dispossess people of their right to urban resources. In his conception of a right to the city, Harvey notes that :

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources : it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.34

17While the daily struggle of Africa’s urban poor may not differs much from what was advocated by Lefebvre and Harvey, the struggle for city existence in Africa is reflected in the numerous informal settlements and the daily struggles of informal settlement dwellers with city authorities as they seek to define their presence in the city.35 The large presence of informal settlements and informality in general in Africa reflects past and present exclusionary policies. For instance, from the colonial periods to the present many African cities have witnessed the enactment of laws that encourages socio-spatial differentiation as well as exclusion in economic, social and political life. For instance, in Ghana and other African countries, colonial housing policies resulted in a situation where some urban communities were recognized because they had housing structures recognized by laws and set standards. On the other hand, there were others regarded as informal because their housing structures were characterized as in contravention of existing regulations.36 This meant that during the colonial period nothing was done in terms of investment for the urban poor to improve both either the quality or the quantity of housing.37

18Again, in recent times, attempt to disposes the urban poor and the informal sector is reflected in city authorities’ reliance on and support for large-scale foreign investment and attempt to improve the city’s landscape and aesthetics.38 These attempts again reflect the current neoliberal agenda where the main concern has been to improve a city’s attractiveness within the global economy so that it can engender the needed economic growth to finance infrastructural development.39 For instance, Otiso and Owusu40 writing on urbanization in Kenya and Ghana, highlight the conscious efforts made in both countries to plan their national capitals, Nairobi and Accra, as the gateway to East Africa and West Africa respectively in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI). In the process of attracting global capital, the development of many African cities has taken a pattern that threatens the presence and survival of the poor in the cities, and exacerbated existing spatial and social fragmentations.41

19Across Africa, an endless list of new towns is now seeking to house the new urban elites. Those attracting global attention in West Africa include Eko Atlantic in Lagos, Nigeria (a proposed city with 400,000 population, built on land reclaimed from the ocean) and proposed Appolonia and Hope Cities in Ghana (mixed-use cities with residential, commercial, hitech and industrial zones). In East Africa, Kenya is hosting the proposed Konza Technology City (already hailed as Africa’s Silicon Valley) and Tatu City (a 2.8 billion USD project located just off the region’s new Thika Super-Highway) and ; in southern Africa, Lusaka, Zambia, is welcoming Roma Park (a residential and commercial development being built on 118 hectares of greenfield).42 These new towns are far bigger than the earlier experiments of gated communities, and represent a new phase in the African urban experience. Indeed, Lumumba43 noted that these towns should be comprehensively planned, independent, relatively self-contained communities, usually built from scratch, and large enough to provide housing, public facilities, socio-cultural opportunities and employment for their residents. In the view of Cirolia (2014)44 , these new township projects are utopias which embody the optimism of the rising and renaissance Africa, as well as the progress and potential of African economies in sourcing for global investment for ‘tech hubs’, ‘smart cities’, ‘Olympic villages’ and ‘satellite towns’.

20While the impact of these new towns with their elitist and modernist-orientations are not yet fully known, it is certainly the case that they are not built to accommodate the urban poor or even a large part of the middle-class. As Lumumba45 notes a vast urban experiment is underway, with not enough study or forethought as to how these places will affect the economies, environments and lives of people who will live both within and outside of them. She adds that there is little recognition of place, economy, context or even poverty in these new towns and asks who exactly these cities belong to and planned for. It should be stressed that similar to gated communities, these new towns exclude a large segment of Africa’s urban population and raises questions about inclusivity and the rights to the city.

Resisting the Modernist Urban Agenda

21The response of city authorities and recent policies aimed at restraining the right of urban dwellers has been much more confrontational and in some cases characterized by violent protests against the state institutional apparatus in African cities.46 Informal settlers and various interest groups which are occasionally excluded from mainstream economic opportunities within the African urban settings are re-organizing themselves within the urban space and on a number of occasions supported by civil societies.47 This form of collective action is beginning to gain some level of success since in most cases it has restricted city governments from acting against their collective interests. Furthermore some groups have enjoyed legal backing for their rights, which fits with Lefebvre’s argument cited in Purcell :

… legal rights are never God-given, nor are they natural rights that the framers of constitutions simply write down. Rather rights are always the outcome of political struggle. They are the manifestations, the end result of collective claims made by mobilized citizens. Because they result from struggle, they are always subject to further struggle, to renewed political agitation.48

22There are various examples of successful outcomes to struggles of the urban poor in African cities and which also depict the recreation of the urban space by different actors. For instance, residents of Old Fadama, one of the largest informal settlements in Accra, in an attempt to forestall an impending planned government eviction organized their own data-gathering exercise together with elements of civil society. This exercise which was done in three phases spanning three years revealed that the estimated population of the area as of the last census conducted in 2009 was about 79,684.49 By this collective action they were able to argue in court of the negative impact that the eviction would have on the informal settlers since they would be deprived of their livelihoods.50 The enumeration also highlighted the varied economic activities that settlers were engaged in and how this contributes to the urban economy.

23Additionally, the struggles of the Abahlali baseMjondolo shack-dwellers movement in Durban, South Africa, shows how urban social movement and collective action can lead to reforms and facilitate the right to participate in urban life and to enjoy opportunities available in the urban milieu. The Abahlali movement began in 2005, and its membership has grown to tens of thousands. Among the major demands of the group has been access to land, housing and social services and infrastructure for its members, who are mostly shack dwellers.51 Even though they have had some degree of success, but this has provoked continual arrests, harassment, death threats and occasional assassinations of its members.52

24Furthermore, attempts at curtailing informality, including street trading and slum development across many African cities, have failed. This is because in many cities despite the huge challenges confronting individuals, households, neighbourhoods and the city in general, urban life has not collapsed largely due to the informal sector. For many residents and neighbourhoods in the cities in Africa, it is the informal sector which provides them with shelter (housing) ; employment and income, and any claims on consumption of goods in the city. For instance, in Ghana, the informal sector employs 9 out of every 10 workers,53 and the same can be said of housing. However, we should stress that informality in Africa does not necessarily connote illegality but a sector usually not captured in state official records partly due to the state’s own deficiencies in regulations.

25Despite its huge contribution to the urban economy, the informal sector lacks adequate policy attention in many African cities. This has led to a situation whereby spatial planning has failed to consider informal economic activities in planning and the development of zoning schemes.54 This often leads to a situation whereby informal economy operators and local authorities clash over issues of space and location. City authorities have responded with forced eviction and the demolition of informal settlements and economic activities with serious consequences for the urban poor and the urban economy in general. Nevertheless, in Ghanaian cities and elsewhere on the continent where these forced evictions have taken place over the years, this has not deterred the continuous shift towards cities. This is because many poor urbanites still regard the city as offering brighter opportunities than their rural places of origin.55 Nevertheless, question of demolitions and forced evictions of informal structures lies at the core of the right to the city, and efforts to achieve sustainable urban development.

Conclusion and Policy Implications

26The widespread application of neoliberal urban development, privatization of basic services together with the increasing use of the market, such as the increasing commodification of land, is producing exclusionary urban spaces, residential segregation and exacerbating social divides and inequalities within cities.56 This is against the background of weak governance, poor infrastructure and service provision in many Africa cities. According to Parnell and Pieterse,57 the right to the city embodies four levels of rights, namely, the individual (e.g. the vote, health, education) ; household services such as housing, water, energy and waste ; neighbourhood or city scale entitlements such as safety, social amenities, public transport, etc and ; freedom from externally induced anthropogenic risk, such as war, economic volatility or climate change. We agree with Parnell and Pieterse58 that attaining all these rights require the active presence of central and local governments.

27Ironically, many African countries have signed onto international urban development frameworks such the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) that emphasize inclusivity and sustainable development agenda. In addition, many African countries have broad development policy frameworks that stressed on sustainable development, and reject any idea of exclusion. Yet, central governments have remained ambivalent on issues of forceful eviction and demolition strategies of city authorities. We argue that there is a need to keep a careful balance of the interests of middle-class upper-class segment of African cities, and the imperative of attracting global capital with the principles of equity and justice in cities. Pursuing this challenging balance for African cities society requires the active presence of central and city governments to provide inclusive development planning and regulation of economic and environmental interest to advance the interests of the urban poor for just and equitable cities.