Prof. Matthew McCartney
From Teaching at UNZA to the Launch of the Africa Urban Lab (AUL): Eating Mints and Learning about Urbanization in Africa
In September 2023 I taught a ten-lecture course at the University of Zambia (UNZA), later that year and into early 2024 the idea of the Africa Urban Lab (AUL) in Zanzibar began to form. This blog is the first of an on-going series, from myself and colleagues, reflecting on the genesis, launch, and evolving form of the AUL
Back in the days when Lionel Messi was still a promising talent, I started teaching Development Economics at UK Universities – the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the University of Oxford (sadly acronym-less) – and have been compiling variations on the same course handout ever since. Lecture title, key concepts, key readings, extended reading list, essay questions; then multiply by eight or ten and *poof* we have a lecture course. As a jaunty artistic extra, I would find a nice and tangentially relevant picture online and paste it onto the front cover of the course handout.
Whether one or two hours the associated lectures had a venerable sense of tradition about them: key thinkers, theory, evidence, country specific examples, critical engagement. With a more somber sense of dress and greater profusion of facial hair, I could have seamlessly transported my skills back to Victorian England.
In September 2023, I gave ten one-hour lectures at the University of Zambia (UNZA) in the gently tickling sunshine of Lusaka. My title reflected the essence of traditional academia – ‘Rethinking African Cities’. I framed the importance of the lecture series in terms of the one billion extra people moving into African cities in the next three decades; the failure of existing cities to leverage the benefits of urbanization for human flourishing; and the sinking quagmire of crime, contagion, and congestion characteristic of cities like Lagos and Kinshasa (likely the first and second most populous cities in the world by 2100).
That is academics for you: take an important topic that even a casual observer would agree is exciting, note that someone thought about it, then propose having a good re-think about it. Exorcise the excitement with a long reading list. Ah! The hours of looming blissful contemplation staring into the middle distance whilst enjoying Lusaka sunshine.
The subtitle of the lecture course was a floating, flexible, and ever-changing list of words – inclusivity, governance, poverty, innovation, among others – carefully combined and re-packaged to appease whoever I was talking to at the time. The lecture series was planned in collaboration with the Center for Urban Planning and Research (CURP) in the Department of Geography. I want to thank the administrator Ms Dorothy Ndhlovu (CURP) and Dr Gilbert Siame (Geography) for facilitating these lectures. Also, thanks to the Acting Dean, Dr Musundu, and the Acting Head of Geography Dr Chisolo, who formally hosted the lectures and for their generosity in welcoming us and presiding over the closing ceremony.
We planned the course as a traditional university teaching module and discussed having follow-up discussions with UNZA about turning the course into a regular part of their MSc in Spatial Planning. It was a traditional role-call of all that was good and re-assuring about traditional academia, deans, heads, professors, and university teaching committees. I could sigh with contentment, put my fingertips together, and continue staring into the middle distance (re)thinking happily.
We had one disappointment, some breakdown in communication, emails that went astray, and a coach load of geography students heading out for extended fieldwork, as I eagerly walked in through the front gate. Sadly, we managed to get zero student attendance whilst in the midst of a big university campus. And that even with bountiful free mints for course attendees. I shook my head with shame at the modern generation. But we did have a Plan B. We would make courtesy invites to lots of government ministries, those we were working with, wanted to work with, thought we should be nice to in case we were ever arrested, sued, or had 27 years of spare time to apply for a license to get a permit to submit for an application in triplicate for something we then forgot about.
They attended. We had a great turnout. We welcomed officials, officers, and members of the Policy Monitoring and Research Centre (PMRC), Ministry of Local Governance and Regional Development (MLGRD), Lusaka City Council (LCC), Zambia Institute of Planners (ZIP), Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR), Zambia College of the Built Environment, Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR), and the Department of Resettlements.
This made me nervous. Any University course I had taught had an associated admissions process. You study economics at MSc so you need a BSc in economics, with some juicy grades in econometrics, microeconomics and macroeconomics to titillate the decision-making tastebuds of the admissions tutor. On the first day as a teacher, you know what they know and you know what you want them to know in time for the exam a few terms away. And the students, they know what they need to know in order to pass the exam, get parental smiles, and then a good job in a bank.
At UNZA I stood up, nervously trying to finish a mint, and with resplendent breath had to confront a room full of civil servants, think tank researchers, and professionals, not a homogenous class of carefully culled youthful applicants. These were also busy people. While students have to clamber out of student hall bedrooms and walk several dozen yards, these ‘students’ were busy professional people and attending after a full day at the office for a 4pm to 6:30pm class. Listening to other people talk, even delightfully minty people, is hard work, especially once the habits of university life have long passed. The course was free, it wasn’t assessed. There were no angry parents watching their bank accounts being emptied by avaricious UK teaching and living expenses, demanding good grades and dedicated attendance.
The format was scheduled to be two one-hour lectures and thirty minutes of questions a day. We dispensed with the format more quickly than a mint disappears between gnashing teeth. The students were evidently not really ‘students.’ They soon settled into a groove of being participants in an extended discussion, which ran through the entire teaching and wasn’t ring-fenced into the last half hour. The eclectic mix of participants had been well-chosen. We had a fascinating and diverse mix of lived experience in the practice of urban planning and urban policy making.
In the lecture, ‘The Governance of Cities: Government Capacity (Kampala and Kigali)’ we discussed the idea that ‘capacity’ is about more than just skills and knowledge. Capacity, we concluded, IS about having a skilled bureaucracy, but it is ALSO about having a visionary political leadership with the drive to promote rapid economic development. The related discussion was replete with practical examples of how the exercise of technical skills had been thwarted by political and administrative constraints.
In the lecture ‘Reforming Contemporary African Cities’ the contours of this debate really shone through. We were discussing the importance of land titling – giving land and property owners formal titles to incentivise them to undertake long-term investment and an ability to utilize that land as collateral to borrow from banks. Participating in the discussion were civil servants who had led the recent Zambian effort to increase land titling. Zambia charged $100 a plot and left 95% of land un-titled; Rwanda by comparison, charged $6 a plot and registered more than 10 million plots of land.
Where the students did feel constrained and really valued an outside lead was in discussing comparative examples. A town planner based in the Zambian towns of Kitwe or Ndola spends their professional life gazing through a magnifying glass. They come to know the quirks and personalities and planning regulations of Kitwe or Ndola as well as they know the contours of their favorite mug, the one that is never washed properly because it only ever used by one person drinking the same variety of coffee.
There were four takeaways from teaching at UNZA.
Comparative Case Studies: What the students really valued was a comparative approach, lots of case studies to discuss and compare. Some thought a focus on Africa was most appropriate, others liked the idea of learning about Hong Kong or Singapore, others wanted a liberation from university curricula that revolved around the Global North, but still others liked the idea of looking at cities like New York and London, that had escaped the chaos of slums and urban squalor and largely regenerated themselves. If those comparative case studies could come, not just from the class teacher, but from a room bursting full of expertise and practical experience from all over Africa, then all the better.
Modern Skills: Many of the students had graduated a decade or two back and been too busy or disconnected from academia to keep their skills updated; others bemoaned academics who recycled courses (surely not); everyone wanted to find an easy means (perhaps not a year away from the office) to engage with the latest research, and learn how new technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), GIS mapping, or Satellite night-light data can help urban planners.
Three legged tables: It was also a common refrain that university academia was excessively bunkered into separate disciplines, in particular the economists talked about markets, cost-benefit analysis, institutions, and externalities but didn’t talk about place, space, and cities. While those doughty urban planners knew lots about space, but lacked the economics to think so clearly about demand and supply. Why did areas of planned low-cost housing keep morphing into expensive apartments? Students wanted the flexibility to pick enticing chunks of urban studies that would constitute a fourth leg to the currently wonky table of professional skills on their resume.
Free mints: we were all agreed on this, no discussion needed.
So, at UNZA we realised we needed to do more than re-think cities, we needed to re-think how we were thinking about cities. There is great value in traditional university-based academia, writing essays, reading academic articles, decadent living in student halls of residence, and thinking critically. We need to do more to supplement the traditional. City professionals need an opportunity to leave their magnifying glass, to step back, to think, and to discuss comparative case studies, not just through the teacher as interlocutor but through a classroom community of Africa-wide practice. City professionals need opportunities to update their skills, an intensive two weeks not only via a leisurely master’s degree. City professionals work in an inter-disciplinary world and need the freedom to pick modules that complement areas where academia has left them hobbled by the narrow focus of particular disciplines.
I can’t say there was a blinding eureka moment at any point during the UNZA teaching, but there is a clear journey from the insights and lessons we learned in Lusaka to the launch of the Africa Urban Lab (AUL) in late 2024.
