[design-l.v2] Africa in Fact, by Vanessa Watson -August 11, 2014 (fwd)


African cities have become the world's next property
investment frontier in the post-2008 economic climate.
International architects and property developers are
scrambling to sell fantastical visions of new satellite
cities, or in some cases entire city makeovers, to
short-sighted governments. The designs for some of Africa's
largest cities, dubbed "world-class cities", "smart cities"
and "eco cities", are accompanied by artistic renderings
suggesting visions of Dubai, Singapore or Shanghai. For
instance, the plans by US-based Oz Architecture for Rwanda's
capital, Kigali, ignore the city's large informal urban
population.

A proposed new satellite city near Nairobi, Kenya, designed
by New York-based SHoP Architects, promises a modernised and
sanitised living environment for the middle classes.

These smaller, mostly independent urban areas are far
removed from the squalor and congestion of existing cities.
Hope City, just east of Accra, Ghana's capital, designed by
Italian architect Paulo Brescia, is no different.

African beehives inspired its large, linked buildings that
contain all the facilities needed for residents and workers,
thus eliminating the need to venture outdoors. Other cities
are expanding by filling in land to create new urban
extensions. Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of
Congo, is one of Africa's largest and poorest cities.

Here in 2009 developers began filling the Congo River to
support up-market retail and residential buildings, a
process which destroyed the livelihoods of many small
farmers along the river's banks.

In Nigeria, the Lagos state government and South Energyx, a
private engineering and construction firm, are creating "Eko
Atlantic", a 10-square-kilometre artificial island off the
coast of Lagos, the country's economic capital, where some
250,000 people can live and work away from the city's
congestion and pollution.

When the project began in 2012, the Nigerian government
demolished the floating shacks of the Makoko neighbourhood
and left many residents of this fishing community homeless.
Do these new developments represent the "modernisation" of
African cities? Should we be concerned about them? Yes,
mostly because these urban plans ignore the realities of
African cities and in many cases would directly worsen
current conditions.

Full city "make-overs", such as the plan for Kigali, are
leading to the removal of slum dwellers from central urban
districts where income-generating opportunities and public
services are concentrated. Most of Africa's urban population
is desperately poor. Some 61% of sub-Saharan Africa's urban
population live in slums and 61% survive on the informal
economy, according to a 2010 report by UN-Habitat, the
United Nations agency for human settlements.

With a 3.9% average annual urban growth rate, a further 150m
people could reside in Africa's urban areas, especially in
secondary cities, by 2020, according to 2012 figures from
the UN's population division. Unless state resources and
energies are focused on meeting the basic needs of the urban
poor (sanitation, clean water, shelter, public transport)
and on city plans that are inclusive and supportive, Africa
will be facing an urban crisis of huge proportions.

Satellite city and urban infill projects will inevitably
divert state funding for new infrastructure away from basic
needs provision. A long history of satellite city planning
in other parts of the world shows the difficulty in creating
new self-sufficient urban areas: they rely on large and
ongoing government subsidies and worsen traffic congestion
by generating large movements back to the "mother" city for
work and higher-order public services.

The market in African cities for the high-end, luxury
apartment and office blocks portrayed in these fantasy plans
is very limited. Companies like Deloitte point to a
rapidly-growing urban middle class, currently defined as
those spending only $2-$20 a day, as cited in a 2011 African
Development Bank report.

A good example of this supply and demand mismatch is the new
satellite Kilamba City, a Chinese-built "ghost town" outside
Luanda, Angola. New apartments here cost between $120,000
and $200,000, unaffordable even for senior civil servants,
according to architect and planner Allan Cain in a study
published in 2014 in the journal Environment and
Urbanization.

Kilamba City, completed in 2012, stood empty for a year.
Eventually, the state was obliged to lower apartment costs
through major subsidies, which used up the bulk of the
national housing budget, according to Mr Cain's study.

The "smart" and "eco" labels, often attached to these
fantasy cities, are also suspect. While the principles
underlying them may be supportable, these terms are often
misused in the interests of urban boosterism.

Truly smart cities require much more than information
technology and infrastructure. Social capital, the networks
and shared values that encourage social co-operation and
which are needed for innovation, is equally important.

These urban plans often do not specify how they will be
achieved. Sustainability principles are important in any new
urban development, but the fantasy plans with their
glass-box towers, swathes of landscaped lawn and freeways
suggest the opposite.

These labels are also often used to justify urban projects
that avoid consultation and participation with city
residents. For example, the development of Konza Techno
City, a new satellite city 60km south-east of Nairobi in
Kenya, has stalled as local landowners dispute consultation
and compensation processes. Eko Atlantic has also moved
ahead without public participation, according to several
reports. The implementation of these fantasy plans depends
on local and national government support. African
governments should be demanding ideas that are appropriate
to the problems and issues which cities face, designs that
would improve the lives of a majority of a city's residents
and are not skewed to the imagined desires of a very small
urban elite.

The direct impact of most of the utopian plans will be to
further segregate cities into areas for the wealthy and
highly skilled and areas for the poor and unemployed.

They aim to allow the urban middle classes and foreign and
local investors to escape the "crime and grime" of African
cities. While this desire is understandable, it is dangerous
and short-sighted because it creates the illusion of
progress while leaving more pressing problems unaddressed.


/:b



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