Cities everywhere increasingly contend with growing socio-economic inequality and environmental stressors. Meanwhile, the institutional shrinking of the state has diminished its ability to fulfil its traditional role as provider of public goods and everyday security (Brescia & Marshall, 2016; Ciplet et al., 2015). These broad trends, today shared across urban geographies of the Global South and North, however, obscure the granular, divergent histories, circumstances, and experiences of city residents.

There is a lengthy history of state-led urban experimentation from Garden City movements of the early twentieth century (Myers, 2003) to more recent forays into sustainable urbanism (Listerborn, 2017). One significant change from the past, however, is the diminished role of the state in the creation and implementation of urban design schemes. The widespread onset of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) has radically changed civic engagements vis-à-vis the state, especially in localities across the Global North. However, across the cities of the Global South, the need for individuals and communities to make do in the context of limited state engagement has been an enduring part of everyday urban life. Residents of African municipalities, for example, exhibit a lengthy and varied history of coping with conditions of pervasive precarity and uncertainty in the context of an unevenly present state (Rakodi, 1997; Chabal & Daloz, 1999; Trefon, 2004; Chalfin, 2014; Myers, 2016). Together, these practices, strategies, and tactics deployed by African urban dwellers represent a form of expertise that is a resource often-untapped by policymakers and academics when formulating urban development policies, both within the African continent and around the globe. This special issue of Urban Forum thus departs from the understanding that contemporary processes and practices evident in contemporary African urban development can offer significant conceptual and empirical insights into urban settings outside the continent.

Based on case studies from across the continent, the collection presents research oriented around questions of “do-it-yourself” urbanism (see Marr & Mususa forthcoming), sustainable development, and climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts undertaken by socio-economically vulnerable citizens. Collectively, the special issue argues on behalf of a few normative claims. First, we advocate for the need to engage in cross-regional urban comparison and outline the thematic contours such an undertaking might entail. Second, we seek to centre African urbanism in ongoing, in increasingly urgent, conversations about urban theory and development in a (urban) world succumbing to mounting pressures from climate change, environmental precarity, and pervasive inequities. We thus explore the implications of an African-centric approach to urban sustainable development and climate change mitigation in cities around the world.

Recent conceptualizations of African urbanisms, exemplified by the work of AbdouMaliq Simone (2004a, 2004b, 2010, 2018) and Filip De Boeck and Marie-Francoise Plissart (2014), consider African cities and citizens on their own terms, rather than measuring how well they conform to a set of universal urban aesthetic or behavioural standards. Subsequent to this shift, one emergent conceptual truism is that the unpredictable, predatory, and unequal distribution of infrastructure often found in African cities—and elsewhere—prompts residents to experiment or improvise their daily encounters with both urban settings and each other. This recognition has prompted exploration into how political economic dynamics, social cultural factors, and the environment shape everyday practice, livelihood activities, and the creation of a variety of socio-technical innovations (Monstadt, 2009). It has further highlighted the interdependent nature of individual and community relationships to the natural environment, opening a portal through which it is possible to address linked concerns of climate change, sustainability, and social justice (Cuthbert, 2008, Hester, 2006; Pieterse, 2013).

The preceding dynamics accentuate a heightened urgency as climate change-related consequences manifest most starkly in urban environments riven by spatial, economic, and political instabilities. Concurrent to these challenges, across the globe, from the slums of Mumbai (Rao, 2006) to the favelas of Sao Paolo (Caldeira, 1996), urban political and economic informalization(s) predominate (Kudva & Beneria, 2005; Heintz & Pollin, 2003). Such conditions are, of course, not unique to developing countries. In the post-industrial Rust Belt cities of the American Midwest, for instance, localities such as Flint, Michigan (Dandaneau, 1996), and Gary, Indiana (Barnes, 2012; O’Hara, 2011), have undergone decades of depopulation, deindustrialization, and poor governance driven by austerity measures and long-standing municipal policies entrenching environmental racial inequity. These processes came to a head in Detroit (Herron, 2007; Marr, 2016; Sugrue, 2014): the 2013 default on a debt of over 19 billion dollars stands as the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

In response, improvisations by residents are viewed as required tactics of survival mandated by unpredictable economic circumstances, an ill-equipped and oftentimes predatory state, and inadequate municipal infrastructure. Out of necessity, residents in cities from Detroit to Lusaka implement solutions related to sourcing of water or urban farming (Colasanti et al., 2012; Hampwaye et al., 2007; Kayaga & Kadimba-Mwanamwambwa, 2006; Rall, 2018). These activities have been variously labelled as “greening” (Macmillan, 2012), “wilding” (Marr, 2016), “villagization” (Mususa, 2012), or “divining” (De Boeck, 2015). Each of these terms connotes a form of DIY urbanism common in precarious urban environments. Across these settings, it is possible to identify the diverse ways—some successful, some not—in which citizens respond to and attempt to manage persistent state absence or neglect.

Following Stephen Marr’s (2016) comparative work on Detroit and Lagos, and Jean and John Comaroff’s (2012) call for theorising “from the south”, we embrace the recognition that some of the most innovative theories and methodologies and practices have emerged in sites where limited resources often necessitate creative thinking (Simone, 2004a, 2004b; Hammond et al., 2007; Pieterse 2010; Mususa, 2010). Writing about the invisibility and complexity of what happens, particularly in African cities, scholars have argued for taking multiple approaches to understanding what goes on in them (De Boeck & Plissart, 2014). Elucidating these processes requires an exploration of the on-the-ground practices of what people do, for example, to meet their housing and infrastructural needs amidst environmental insecurity and poverty. It is from these insights that this collection with cases from Accra, Blantyre, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Luanda, Lilongwe, and Maputo draws its approach.

Furthermore, understanding what urban sustainability means in the context of inequality, uneven state presence, and ecological crisis requires drawing on analytical framings that intersect political economy and political ecology. A political economy approach to uneven development (Harvey, 2011) would have us look at both the spatialisation of capitalist development and accumulation, but also its disruptive effects manifest in repetitive cycles of growth, industrial decline, and financial crisis. However, the impact of human activity in the world’s ecosystem, and the sheer scale and speed at which extractive interventions happen, has led to the description of our age as that of the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2006). It is therefore necessary to direct attention at the socio-political and ecological dimensions of urban life (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003). Such a perspective points to issues of urban ecological injustice (Gleeson & Low, 2002) such as inequalities in the distribution of resources, services, and infrastructure within the city, while highlighting the myriad and profound impacts the current global capitalist system has on marginalised urban residents and the pollution of their environments (see Liboiron, 2021; Livingston, 2019; Yusoff, 2018).

Africa’s Urban and Climate Challenge

The United Nations’ 2014 World Urbanisation Prospects report estimated that approximately two-thirds of the world’s population will call cities “home” by 2050. The main source of contemporary urbanization today occurs in locations outside Europe and North America. Africa now experiences the world’s most rapid urban growth, with far-reaching implications for efforts to combat climate change in particular, and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals more broadly. The World Bank (2015) has found that 55% of Africa’s urban residents live in informal settlements characterised by absent or scarce public services like sanitation or secure housing. Contemporary urban development in sub-Saharan Africa will thus largely occur in places with limited administrative, technical, and financial resources needed to grapple with governance, planning, and infrastructure challenges to come. These capability gaps will become especially acute in an era of accelerated climate change as the consequences of climate change will not only exacerbate existing problems, but also create new ones (McMichael et al., 2006).

And indeed, African cities are likely to endure the worst consequences of climate change. A Climate Change Vulnerability Index report (2018) concludes that some of the largest African cities fall within the highest risk zones. These locales include Cairo, Kinshasa, and Lagos. Given their vulnerability and relative wealth and size, megacities attract international attention and investment via large-scale infrastructure projects such as Lagos’s Eko Atlantic City. Of course, these types of interventions are not without problems. They entrench dynamics of urban exclusion (De Boeck, 2011; Murray, 2015), introducing new lines of bifurcation linked to existing class divisions and socio-economic inequalities. Such divisions now often determine who benefits from climate adaptation efforts and who does not: the emergence of fault lines delineating climate “haves” versus “have nots”Footnote 1 (Marr, 2016) is an ever-widening dilemma confronting planners and policymakers as they try to adapt to climate impacts in cities across Africa and around the globe. Even while acknowledging the difficulties with these efforts, the ability of large megacities to begin to grapple with climate change places them in the urban minority in Africa.

The picture is far bleaker elsewhere on the continent. Smaller cities, particularly those not located in Africa’s largest economies and most populous countries, struggle to elicit the interest of the international aid and investment circuit. At the same time, they lack the technical, institutional, or financial resources to confront the worst consequences of climate change (Myers, 2016). The focus on megacities in contemporary discussions risks neglecting analysis of urbanisation trends and their environmental impact in more peripheral African countries, such as Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia. The UN State of African Cities report (2014) estimates that between the years 2010 and 2025, capital cities such as Lusaka, Lilongwe, and Maputo can expect average annual population growth rates of, respectively, 6.89%, 6.19%, and 4.07%.

What this means in practice is that, for example, Malawi’s capital city, Lilongwe, which in 2011 stood at about 772,000 residents, is expected to almost double to 1,538,000 by 2025 (UN 2014). Donald Brown (2011) makes a case that this fast rate of urbanisation will have significant implications for climate change and socio-economic development in Malawi, particularly on food security in an economy that relies predominantly on agriculture. Similar rates of urbanisation are changing cities such as Lusaka, and Maputo, with comparable, but also varying, implications for climate change adaptation strategies. In Lusaka, the failure of the municipality to meet the infrastructural demands of a rapidly growing population has led to concerns of water scarcity and quality, the impact on the wider ecosystem, and on the health of the urban poor (Hubbard et al., 2020). Maputo, in Mozambique, garnered international attention when major floods hit the coastal city, highlighting its vulnerability to climate change disasters, much like other urban coastal areas in Africa. Recent work (Nielsen, 2010; Rodrigues, 2019) on Maputo foregrounds the persistent risks associated increased urban flooding and the ways in which peri-urban residents cope, often on their own, in the context of the state’s failure to follow through with support for those affected by the floods. Such research calls attention to the need to understand the political and practical innovations adopted to address future risks. The articles included in this special issue of Urban Forum attempt to further those aims, offering insight into how the urban poor respond to ongoing urban climate crises, the variable roles of an absent, ineffectual, or inattentive state, and the unequal power relations undergirding sustainability discourse and practice.

Political and Practical Climate Action: between State and Community

Jennifer Hart’s essay on Accra, Ghana, demonstrates how histories of segregation, class cleavages, and colonialism have shaped urban spatial, welfare, and infrastructural landscapes. Embedded inequalities and infrastructural deficiencies in the present day, such as in the paucity of sewerage and waste management services, maintain continuities with the past. These persistent, pernicious legacies reflect experiences found in other African cities, where, for instance, flooding disasters not only imperil urban resident’s lives, assets, and livelihoods, but also expose them to environmental health hazards when often densely located pit latrines and water wells flood over. Analyses of Dar es Salaam (Panman et al.) and Blantrye and Lilongwe (Chilinde & Mamiwa; Makuwira) in this collection present individual and localised community efforts to protect assets and livelihoods in the context of flooding and environmental disasters. Despite the resiliency and agency such undertakings represent, they are not without their shortcomings.

Where urban informal support networks exist, and do provide some support to counter climate disasters, as the group savings schemes described in this collection by Panman and colleagues on Dar es Salaam, these also tend to be ad hoc and uneven. They find the most vulnerable urban residents such as those living with chronic illness, orphaned children, and the elderly not always able to participate in mutual aid groups, or when they do, competing needs and crisis limit response. This highlights, as Makuwira writes on urban marginality in this collection, the impact of state absence in welfare and service provision for the most vulnerable urban populations.

In circumstances where the state is present in addressing climate change stresses, there is often a disconnect between its actions in creating institutions and frameworks to address these challenges and the processes through which they become localised and responsive to the needs of the affected citizens. This reflects, as Rodrigues’s contribution on Maputo and Luanda shows, that it is not enough for the state to appear to be doing something to address the climate crisis—it needs to be present on the ground.

Dabaieh and colleagues on the other hand, in their essay on climate mitigation and adaptation in Cairo, review Egypt’s overall efforts at combatting climate change effects. They show significant state engagement on climate matters, directed towards catalysing an energy transition, with a particular concern on issues of agriculture, food, and water. However, they point out that despite cities having a significant role to play in addressing the climate crisis, the Egyptian government has focussed less on how urbanisation trends and the built environment may play a role. They argue that this is problematic given that there is an active research environment in the country exploring issues of climate change and cities.

Dabaieh’s insights from Egypt pinpoint the blind spots of an overly state-centric approach to climate change action that does not adequately account for the climate knowledge and responses generated in other community spheres. These observations resonate beyond Egypt’s borders. For instance, Dabaieh has elsewhereFootnote 2 discussed the difficulties present in Sweden connected to her efforts to make climate change adaptation efforts more inclusive of marginalised groups. As an illustration, she described a pilot project in Lund, Sweden, that sought to develop a community-built “minus carbon” eco-friendly refugee house. The aim of the project was to address both the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, which had catalysed urgent housing demand across Sweden, and ongoing municipal policy goals designed to incubate sustainable housing and infrastructure solutions. Even as it attempted to intervene in what were then urgent challenges, the project ultimately stymied in part to the heavily politicised discussions around migration (see Emilsson, 2018). Despite significant state support for the initiative, along with a municipality open to experimentation, bureaucratic processes around voluntary labour, and a growing hostile public attitude to refugees hindered the possibilities for wider implementation. The Egyptian and Swedish examples indicate that policy and political inclinations may, even where the state is present, create gaps that do not adequately include all actors and efforts in addressing the challenges of climate change.

It is, however, important to note, as Makuwira demonstrates in his essay for the collection, that a state largely absent from intervening in the climate crisis can also be particularly devastating for marginalised urban residents. When confronted with the need for long-term planning amidst a backdrop of increasing environmental uncertainty, provisional and improvised efforts of do-it-yourself urbanism undertaken by individuals and communities can be of limited value in the face of a climate disaster. This inadequacy points to a fault line in climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy, practice, and implementation. On the one hand, as is the case in many African cities, the limitations of urban residents’ efforts occur in part due to limited state support. While on the other hand, such as in the municipalities of the Global North, where the state has a more active presence, bureaucratic constraints engendered by policy gaps and internal societal inequalities result in uneven efforts to counter the climate crisis. 

The growing movement towards urban agriculture, for example, shows how this chasm might be bridged. City residents from Lusaka (Simatele et al., 2012) to Detroit (Thibert, 2012), and Malmö (van der Jagt et al., 2017) are engaging in urban gardening. Urban residents are taking up urban agriculture in unused slots, countering food insecurity and food deserts respectively. Unlike the appropriation of land for informal housing development on often flood-prone land in cities such as Lusaka, which are sometimes razed in political cycles (Resnick, 2011), urban gardens on the other hand are looked on benignly by state officials. In Detroit, following the financial crash, urban gardening, and the rewilding of abandoned industrial and housing areas has reinvigorated previously neglected parts of the city, and offered an indication of how post-industrial sites might be sustainably regenerated (White, 2018). In Malmö, urban gardens provide newcomers potentially a space to connect to the cities green and climate-friendly ambitions (Hochedez, 2020; van der Jagt et al., 2017).

However, as the articles in this collection show, for the most part, urban residents in African cities must create their own precarious infrastructures to cope with living in disaster zones with minimal support from the state. This not just shapes the societal response to climate risks but also has an indelible mark on urban ecosystems. In a paper presented in October 2019 in Lilongwe, Malawi, as part of the workshop from which this Special Issue originates, Brenda Mwalukanga,Footnote 3 a Lusaka-based urban planner presented on the Lusaka Water Security Initiative. She outlined how state and multilateral-led increases in financial investment that are intended to expand access and rehabilitate water and sewerage infrastructure run up against the fact that after decades of self-provisioning services by poor and wealthier residents alike, the aquifers are today highly contaminated. Contamination has led to contemporary concerns regarding the viability of clean water supplies for the city, which is a situation made more dire by climate change instigated weather pattern instability and the protracted periods of drought the city now endures. Recent experiences of other cities, such as Cape Town, which have seen water shortages because of severe droughts (Savelli et al., 2021), underlie the compendium of compounded risk brought on by accelerated urbanisation and climate vulnerability set atop fragile networks of decayed and/or deficient infrastructure systems.

Paradoxically, despite their vulnerabilities, African cities such as Lilongwe, Maputo, and Luanda have undergone a rapid increase in starkly uneven urban development (Tiwale et al., 2018; Melo, 2016). An additional challenge, as Chilinde and Mamiwa describe in their article, is the weak regulatory boundaries for land allocation that are common to African cities. Vague rule-based frameworks make it difficult for most residents to acquire land for housing or trade. At the same time however, procedural ambiguity can be leveraged by wealthier residents to do as they please. The absence of clearly defined or enforced regulations functions as either a help or a hindrance depending on the class of the resident involved. What this has meant in terms of urban development, however, is that residents who are shut out of more formalised land allocation processes are left with little choice but to develop sites that are particularly vulnerable to climate-related or other environmental disasters. With the growing demand for land, whose allocation favours the urban well-to-do and politically connected, the urban poor necessarily shifts to more peripheral and ecologically unstable urban settings. Such an outcome, Makuwira highlights in his article the need for an urban justice framework in addressing climate change risks in the city. This approach centres the experiences of those most at risk and makes the case that it is here where the state should act and draw up its institutional and governance frameworks for urban climate action.

Some Final Reflections

Urban development in most of Africa’s cities is marked by the lack of comprehensive state welfare mechanisms, a paucity in public services, and uncertain infrastructure capacity. As a result, people rely on their own skill and resources to make a living, create a safety net, and organise the provision of services and infrastructure. These do-it-yourself initiatives require not only practical know how, but also political savvy. For example, to organise services amidst the competing demands and interests of more powerful and wealthier urban residents often results in poorer residents’ investments in housing and trade destroyed to pave way for high-end developments. In some cases, such actions have produced political mobilisation around squatter rights, housing security, and more wide-ranging debates related to inclusion and urban citizenship. Even in better-resourced cities, such as those found in Nordic countries specifically, and countries in the global North more generally, a compendium of reduced employee rights, austerity policies, and privatisations in public services has catalysed unevenness in urban development, creating precarious living situations for some sectors of the urban population. Residents and municipalities are thus innovating new forms of civil engagements, governance, and planning to best respond to this more uncertain socio-economic environment. At the same time, events that occur beyond specific locations also affect urban development, as cities and their peripheries are host to persons fleeing war, economic crisis, and environmental disasters. These movements have a tangible impact not just on existing infrastructures, but also on political discourses of belonging, community, and citizenship. New kinds of policy responses and political engagements from civil society actors are required.

City developers, planners, and managers must necessarily grapple with these issues and do-it-yourself initiatives, which often leads to incremental processes of negotiation and participation in the planning and administration of such situations (Metsola, 2018). However, the practice of city planning and sustainable development is not neutral and remains entangled in networks of influence and economic motivations (Campbell, 1996). Under current regimes of global capitalism and urban development, sustainability as both an idea and a complex of infrastructures is often not evenly distributed, equally accessible, or uniformly understood. The fact that planner- or developer-led interventions are contested highlights the fact that sustainable urbanism is not just a technocratic option, but one that is inherently political and politicising. Thus, urban practitioners’ engagement has significant political implications, which are not always recognised or accounted for, and which affect diverse urban populations and actors in several ways.

This points to, as Heyman (2004) noted, the need for social scientists to explore the “lives” of bureaucratic systems. To this end, as the authors in this collection have done, it requires mapping the organisational structures of the various bureaucracies—both formal and informal. We must therefore address their decision-making processes, the role of the various actors who shape everyday governance in the city, and the micro and macro processes that drive infrastructural developments, especially as they pertain to sustainability and climate action.

The collection, lastly, illuminates the gap between the state and community action in addressing climate risks. Building on a call to action originally proposed by the planner Gilbert Siame (2018), the essays in the Special Issue make the case that in highly unequal settings, bridging the gap between local efforts and municipal and state bodies requires all actors to engage in processes of co-production.