Prof. Matthew McCartney
The AUL is not a traditional university. The first cohort of our Professional Diploma in Urban Development is focused on “how” to change planning and governance to ensure better economic and social outcomes in African cities. This blog argues that the “why” questions generated by research are an important companion to the “how” questions taught in the classroom.
First Day of Class
The first cohort of students to the Africa Urban Lab (AUL) has arrived in Fumba Town, it is 910am on the 19th November and they are all seated in newly purchased and pleasantly mobile wheeled chairs in a smart lecture hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras campus in Zanzibar. Kurtis Lockhart, the Founder and Director of the AUL, is giving a welcome speech replete with winsome smiles, useful facts, and an overview of the program. Forgive those of us who have lived with the AUL since its beginning, and invested hours in fundraising, partnerships, and promotional activities, much of this inspiring message was very familiar to us and we set a bad example, our attention drifting away in the back row. For newly initiated curious among the rest of you; the mission of the AUL is two-fold: “First, we conduct frontier research on the challenges and solutions to rapid urbanization across Africa. Second, we aim to translate this research into policy action by training the African city builders, planners, and urban leaders of tomorrow to harness rapid urbanization for human prosperity.”
Kurtis also explains that the AUL is a ‘teaching hospital.’ Whereas “in medicine, students go through four years of medical school to learn the latest frontier knowledge, and then are paired with an experienced doctor in a ‘teaching hospital’ to understand how to apply the knowledge they’ve learned in the classroom in the real-world. Just as human bodies are complex phenomena, cities too are complex systems.” The AUL is designed to challenge students to apply classroom lessons on issues of urban planning, governance, and finance.
So began our first day. It was odd being back in classes, but pleasantly indulgent not having to give the lecture or ask and answer questions. I sat amidst the AUL students, learning a lot from the first two classes of the 2024-25 Professional Diploma in Urban Development.
For the Strategic Urban Planning module, Nuria Forqués Puigcerver kicked off the day with her lecture titled, “Overview of Global Urban Growth.” Nuria walked the students through the outline for their final projects - a ten-class effort to construct their own city master plan. She placed heavy emphasis on acknowledging the reality of African cities that are expanding outwards rapidly, asking, how we can best integrate the periphery into the existing city?
In the afternoon, Dr. Patrick Lamson-Hall began the Topics in Urban Governance series with his lecture, “History, Theory and Context of Urban Governance in Africa.” Patrick discussed the practicalities of working in the context of a lop-sided African decentralization program, asking, how can city governments manage when they have been passed down responsibilities for public services but the central government has retained the bulk of tax revenues for themselves?
It was obvious to me from the outset: the teaching I was listening to differed from that of a typical university academic course. There were references to underlying theoretical ideas, but the classes didn’t dwell on them and instead jumped resolutely into the practical implications of theory. The essence of teaching at the AUL was the question, “how?”
Having seen drafts of the next set of teaching courses (for April 2025) I know what tasty practical delicacies await the hungry, learning students. We will be posing similar questions. For the urban finance course, we will ask, how can city governments mobilize local taxation and negotiate public-private partnerships (PPPs) to better provide urban infrastructure? For urban economics, we will ask, how do demand and supply, rather than city master plans, determine urban land prices and hence long-run land prices?
As the veteran of more than twenty years at traditional academically-oriented universities (SOAS University of London and the University of Oxford), it was refreshing to listen to and learn from a new teaching approach. As the inaugural Head of Research at the AUL, it was also beholden upon me to reflect on how ‘frontier research’ and the practically-oriented teaching would inform each other.
In a traditional university the link is obvious. Academic research marches happily into the lecture hall. Academic articles are culled from peer-review academic journals to fill the reading lists. Lectures run through the collected theory, methodology, and critical engagement, revolving around academic debates. At the AUL, we are focusing on helping students think about how best they can implement a land registration program. A traditional university would more likely discuss the theoretical predictions of land titling and discuss the empirical results of studies that asked whether land titling programs increased long-term investment or gave small farmers a piece of titled property they could use as collateral to access bank loans.
“Why” or “How?” We Need Both.
By the end of the first day of teaching I had concluded that research was equally important in a practical teaching course. Before we teach “how,” we need research to understand, “why!” It is the “why” questions that research at the AUL will be asking and hopefully answering.
For example, in the morning session on the first day, Nuria discussed data that shows how African cities tend to be sprawling outwards at low levels rather than building upwards, a phenomenon that one study has labelled a pancake rather than a pyramid pattern of city expansion. Maps of city expansion produced by the students showed African cities increasing their land area by ten-fold over the last few decades. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Asia built almost 4,000 skyscrapers compared to around 50 in Africa. The tallest skyscraper in Africa remains the Carlton Center in Johannesburg, at 223 meters, which was built in 1973. Under what circumstances should planners accept this reality and focus on how to implement urban expansion planning at the urban periphery in an effective and low-cost manner? Or, to what extent is this pattern an aberration driven by constraints on building upwards in the existing city? Should we also be exploring how to liberate skyscraper construction in Africa?
During the Topics in Urban Governance module, Patrick highlighted the need to remove bad laws, defined as those which were overwhelmingly difficult for most urban residents to abide by. This subject was also the topic of a recent research paper by Heba Elhanafy and Matthew McCartney of the AUL. The paper asked questions that explored the origin and function of bad laws in various African cities, with the stated motivation of informing how best to frame how related reform suggestions. One bad planning law, for example, which is prevalent across many African cities, is the enforcement of large minimum plot sizes. These lots are often impossible for the poorest families to afford, pushing them into illegal urban slums.
The “how” for correcting this situation seems evident: remove bad laws and replace them with fewer, and better laws. If African city managers are unaware of how bad laws impact urbanization, we have a rationale for a training-based “how” class for the AUL. If city managers are unable to quantify the impact of bad laws, we may have found a need for a “how” class to teach the use of modern technology, perhaps GIS mapping or the use of Google Earth. It is also possible that bad planning laws exist because politicians like them, as Patrick pointed out. Politicians may benefit from informality because they can then offer their political protection to precarious slum dwellers in return for their votes. In this case, the “how” teaching needs to tread carefully into delicate political constraints on any technical reform.
In the Strategic Urban Planning module, Nuria made a convincing case that a crucial rationale for urban planning today is the imminent and massive expansion of urban areas in Africa. Between 2018 and 2050, according to UN estimates, the African urban population will increase from 548 million to 1.34 billion people – from below to more than double that of Europe. In response to the presentation of a graph (like the one below) from Nuria, some in the audience discussed the viability of pro-rural policies to stem the speed of urbanization. However, Nuria explained that global and African contemporary and historical evidence points to African urbanization being an inevitable process. Barring the interruption of urbanization by a severe economic crisis, such as the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE or the Soviet Union in the 1990s, it will continue ever upwards across Africa.
As urban planners, we should not think of urbanization as a policy choice but rather focus our attention on how to deal with the consequences. According to UN forecasts, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania will be the third most populous city in the world by 2100 CE (after Lagos, Nigeria and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo). As a coastal city, Dar es Salaam will be vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels. Urban expansion planning must be tailored to adequately deal with both spatial expansion and climate vulnerability. This nexus is the focus of a recent research paper by Eva Klaus of the AUL on Building Resilient Cities.
Figure One; Urbanization Over 12,000 Years
The forecasts of rising urbanization across the Global South are, in general, a good reason for optimism. Historically, GDP per capita and urbanization have increased together. Countries that experienced an acceleration of economic growth, such as China after 1980, also experienced accelerated urbanization. Cities have historically been drivers of industrialization and economic growth. There are well-established theoretical and empirical reasons to link urbanization to explain these economic benefits. What Professor Ed Glaeser in a 2011 book referred to as ‘The Triumph of the City’ and what economists more generally call, the economic benefits of density. This clear positive correlation can be seen the graph below from Patrick.
Figure 2: Urbanization and GDP per Capita
However, since the 1970s the link between urbanization and industrialization has broken down in Africa. This can also be seen in the above graph. In the large vertical cluster of African countries on the left-hand side of the graph, urbanization is no longer associated with rising levels of per capita income. Many governments in Africa recognize the need to re-establish the link between urbanization and industrialization. Promoting local industrialization, especially utilizing agro-inputs, is a government policy priority in Tanzania, Zanzibar, Ethiopia, Zambia, and elsewhere.
Is this a problem of urban planning, urban governance, or urban economic policy making? Existing research can be drawn on to support all three conclusions. Perhaps interventions in all three areas are needed, or perhaps you, the reader, are convinced by the argument of one strand of research and interventions should be prioritized in planning, governance, or economic policy. Either way, the research on “why” is a crucial determinant of the best way “how.” To emphasize this point, consider three examples.
When Better Urban Planning is Crucial
One influential strand of research concludes that urban growth will lead to economic growth only when it is accompanied by a well-functioning labor market. A well-functioning labor market allows for workers to commute to firms quickly at low cost, for firms to purchase inputs or sell to customers at low cost, for firms to have a large pool of available workers, for creative workers to easily connect with each other, and for knowledge to spillover between firms and individuals (Bertaud, 2014). The productivity of a growing city will increase only if travel between residential areas and firms and among firms’ locations remains fast and cheap.
An example of a poorly functioning labor market is that of Nairobi, Kenya. Surveys from 2012 show that 83% of all trips in Nairobi included walking as the major or secondary mode of travel. Travelling by foot meant that only 11% of jobs were accessible within a one-hour commute; even by minibus, the share was only 20%. In practice, Nairobi functions as a series of urban villages, which limits the potential for agglomeration externalities and in turn, the ultimate economic benefits of urbanization, industrialization, and productivity gains. The urban planner needs to teach “how” to better plan transport and housing to ensure the labor market functions efficiently.
Urban Planning is More Important Than We Realize
The importance of asking “why” to inform “how” in African cities is not just about how best to organize the priorities of the AUL. It is of central human importance. Çatalhöyük, humanity’s first city, was built around 7,500 BCE in modern Turkey. Human urbanization, defined as an increasing share of the global population living in cities, will come to an end around 2,100 CE. Children born today will witness the end of this near 10,000-year human progress.
While the more romantically-inclined among us may suggest that love is forever, the hardened realists at the AUL know that only decisions made by urban planners are forever. Figure Three below shows Roman Barcelona (modern Spain) as it existed around the first century CE and the aerial snap-shop to the right shows how the street pattern, public space provision and buildings are near exactly replicated in modern Barcelona, about two thousand years later. There is rigorous wider evidence of this effect. One study, for example, using satellite night-light data found that in 2010, cities in Germany and across Europe showed more economic activity where they had been connected to Roman Roads two thousand years earlier.
Figure 3: The Roman City of Barcino (c100CE) and the contemporary city of Barcelona
When Better Urban Governance is Crucial
In 1890, the US reached one-third urbanization when its GDP per capita was nearly $6,000 and one-half urbanized in the 1920s when its GDP per capita was closer to $10,000. In the fifty years after 1960, urbanization increased from 7 to 24% in Kenya, while per capita incomes increased by less than $250 (Glaeser, 2013:6). By 2010, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was touching 40% urbanization with an average GDP per capita of less than $1,000. Urbanizing at low levels of income means that African governments lack the tax revenue to invest in the public infrastructure that is essential to leverage the economic and social benefits of rapid urbanization. The outcome of low income and low investment in urbanization “includes extensive informal employment, sprawling shack settlements, overloaded services, environmental degradation, social unrest, violent crime and chronic traffic congestion.” Urban governance needs to be managed to do more (better infrastructure, public services, and housing) with less (tax revenue). What for example can other cities in Africa learn from Rwanda where land plot boundaries were demarcated using satellite and aerial photographs, and eleven million such plots were formally registered over five years at an average cost of $6 per plot? Why does Dar Es Salaam impose minimum plot sizes for urban dwellers that are ten times higher than those in Philadelphia in the US, so forcing 90% of the city in the untaxed informal sector?
When Urban Economics is Crucial
The phenomenon of rapid urbanization without industrialization has occurred alongside another transformative global phenomena - the rise of China. Are the two phenomena related? China has been blamed for exporting cheap manufactured goods to Africa and to third markets that have crowded out both African manufacturing and African exports. The optimists have pointed out that empirical estimates of the China effect on African manufacturing show it to have been real, especially in sectors like textile exports from Lesotho, but of minor importance at the aggregate country-level.
There are also countervailing factors which may help restore the link between urbanization and industrialization in African. China is investing heavily in African urban infrastructure, especially pro-urban-industrialization sectors such as power generation and transmission and transportation. By the 2000s, manufacturing wages were rising in China and labor-intensive light manufacturing firms were losing their comparative advantage. The re-allocation of China’s manufacturing to more sophisticated, higher value-added products and tasks was then promising to open new opportunities for labor abundant, lower-income countries to produce the labor intensive, light-manufacturing goods that China leaves behind and so tighten the link between urbanization and industrialization. One study noted that the mass relocation of China’s light manufacturing to Africa and elsewhere was now “pending,” often through Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Economic policies need to be managed to attract more Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), to incentivize local content in manufacturing, and to re-energize the generally moribund SEZ framework across Africa.
Concluding Thoughts
On the first day of teaching for the Professional Diploma in urban development, we taught “how” to address the challenges of urbanization, but this was underpinned by “why”-based research. In the evening, we stepped away from the classroom for a welcome dinner. We could see the sunset from where we ate and talked at Kwetu Kwenu Chill in Fumba Town. Just past the sunset were the lights of Dar Es Salaam, whose population of 5 million is forecast to reach 60 million by the end of this century.
Our student cohort comprised a mixture of city planners, infrastructure builders, land surveyors, architects, and GIS users. Once these students return to their jobs, the decisions they make, whether next week, next month, or next year, will have a permanent impact on how this last phase of human urbanization plays out. Will African cities remain characterized by contagion, crime, and congestion? Can African cities re-energize the historical link between urbanization and economic growth and industrialization, and so ensure urbanization is in turn associated with improvements in life expectancy, literacy, and human well-being?
It is a big responsibility. It was a beautiful sunset as well.
