The Urban Expansion & the Periphery Framing Paper is one of four papers outlining the research agenda for the Africa Urban Lab. The Urban Expansion & the Periphery cluster is focused on advancing the study of urban expansion planning across cities in Africa, asking questions about the importance of preemptive urban planning and rethinking the role of planning in rapidly growing cities. Given the scale and speed of urbanization, it is crucial to better understand the policies and strategies that can guide sustainable, productive urban expansion. The research conducted under the Urban Expansion & the Periphery cluster directly feeds into and informs the AUL’s work implementing Urban Expansion Planning (UXP) across multiple municipal government partners and helping measure and evaluate outcomes to further inform policy decisions.