Urban Challenges and Strategies in African Cities – A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Highlights: Top-down master planning has prompted most of the challenges in African cities. The majority of urban challenges are related to climate change effects. Spatial planning models should be reoriented towards inclusive approaches. African cities lack integrated spatial strategies to guide their development. Planning experts should prioritise local realities to frame urban resilience.

Background context of the study: African cities in a quest for modernity and economic development have been urgently playing catch up to deal with the increasing demand for adequate urban infrastructure, affordable decent housing, and improved urban systems and vitality among others since the independence movements of the 1950s. In that period, many African cities were modeled on the image of their colonisers’ capital cities where most of the independence leaders were educated. Urban policymakers and practitioners were mostly foreigners and lacked a real touch of local African urbanism(G. A. [98]. This partially explains their urban planning practices in Africa that mirrored the western planning customs which were already inadequate in practice in their origin countries. Consequently, these city-making practices created and accentuated many urban challenges that characterise African cities up to today. In recent times, African city planners have experimented with and adapted different spatial planning practices in search of accommodating rapid urban transformation and solving inherent urban challenges. Thus, many spatial planning models, technological trends, ecological metabolisms, environmental challenges, and socio-politico-economic realities influence African city dynamics to a great extent causing ambiguity, inconsistent policies, and inadequate urban planning practices. To efficiently guide a coherent, coordinated, and concise vision, to frame an integrated long-term spatial logic, and to give a precise direction of urban development, strategic spatial planning has been put forward as a potentially useful approach, and adaptations of it have been introduced in some African cities [128]. Strategic spatial planning originating from western cities[7], is defined as a creative effort to imagine structurally different futures and to bring this to bear on political decisions and their implementation. This type of planning which is “strategic” has been commended by researchers and practitioners [8], [9], [27], [91]for its potential to be highly flexible and adaptable to the social, economic, and environmental context. The flexibility and adaptability aspects of such planning make it more plausible to collectively address the many urban challenges facing African cities towards context-based strategies for urban sustainability, resilience, and smartness.