Africa’s rising cities How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future

Learn about Africa’s urban future and how its cities are set to become the center of global development and economy.

Articulated Insight – “News, Race and Culture in the Information Age”

by New York IPTV | 

This article is reported by Max Bearak Nairobi bureau chief. 

Dylan Moriarty and Júlia Ledur for the Washington Post  Nov. 19, 2021  Click here for original article

Growing at unprecedented rates, and shaped by forces both familiar and new, dozens of African cities will join the ranks of humanity’s biggest megalopolises between now and 2100. Several recent studies project that by the end of this century, Africa will be the only continent experiencing population growth. Thirteen of the world’s 20 biggest urban areas will be in Africa — up from just two today — as will more than a third of the world’s population.

Researchers created three population models to account for different paths of development African countries might take this century, and in all of them, African cities outpaced the rest of the world’s cities in growth. They found that changes in government policies, education levels, access to contraception, movements for women’s equality, and the severity of climate change had significant effects on the birthrates driving population growth, but not enough to keep most major African cities from growing faster than cities on other continents.

In each of the following five African cities, we examine common themes — migration, inequality, foreign investment, conflict and planning — that underlie this transformation across the continent.

• • Lagos, Nigeria: Set to become the world’s most populous city, Lagos faces all the challenges rapid growth poses, which can be boiled down to one: planning. Can solutions outpace the weight tens of millions of new inhabitants will place on a city that is low-slung and dense, situated on polluted lagoons and rivers, and short on public services?

• • Khartoum, Sudan: Unstable states like Sudan crumble first in their hinterlands, and in those moments of crisis, cities are beacons of safety, places for people to regroup, build new identities and forge political movements — even revolutions — that aim to bring peace back to places they had to abandon. Jump to city.

• • Kinshasa, Congo: In a city whose geography still reflects segregationist colonial-era planning, where a handful of oligarchs lead gilded lives while the poor navigate systems broken by corruption and neglect, we get a glimpse of what it takes to break inequality’s shackles. Jump to city.

• • Mombasa, Kenya: The designs of foreign powers have molded African cities for centuries, especially along the continent’s coasts. From narrow-alleyed old towns to gleaming new container-shipping terminals, port cities like this one are layered with evidence of how budding empires, in the Arab world, Europe and now China, sought to remake them. Jump to city.

• • Abidjan, Ivory Coast: Despite fearmongering that Africa’s growing population will flood into wealthier parts of the world, cosmopolitan cities like this one draw most of Africa’s migrants and serve as models of tolerance, welcoming immigration policies and a reinvigorated Pan-African identity. Jump to city.

Lagos A megacity like no other

On a new expressway in the city on track to become the world’s most populous, Abolaji Surajuddin lurches his packed minibus forward in traffic. Then he switches off the ignition for the 10th time in 10 minutes. It will take him three hours to travel 15 miles. He’s driving one of nearly 100,000 decrepit “danfo” buses in Lagos — the main means of public transport — all of them decades-old hand-me-downs from wealthier countries. Surajuddin’s ancient Volkswagen Transporter, its bare wooden benches packed with 20 weary commuters, shudders as he turns it off.

“This is every day,” one says when a reporter turns around and looks at her with a sympathetic face. “This. Is. Every. Day,” she repeats.

The traffic is a manifestation of what Lagosians fear most for their city: There is no plan. Lagos will balloon to 30 million, then 50 million, maybe even 100 million people, and meanwhile the government will keep unveiling new visions for the city that never come to fruition. Many doubt even its simplest promises, such as the impending inauguration of a single subway line that was supposed to open a decade ago.

That’s why the small talk in this city isn’t about the weather. It’s about traffic. The horror stories aren’t of bad jams; they’re of the times the “go-slow” became a “no-go” and everyone just left their cars in the road, figuring they would fetch them once the day’s obstructions — a flooded patch of road, a broken-down truck — were cleared.

Surajuddin’s daily route down one of Lagos’s most severely clogged arteries reveals the city’s dangerously high blood pressure. On the trip between Ajah — a newly developing suburb on the eastern edge of Lagos — and downtown, he said, he usually witnesses half a dozen fights between drivers unbottling their tempers after hours stuck in place.

“Maybe the government has tried to improve traffic, but we can’t see it,” Surajuddin says. “Because what good is a road if all you do is fight every day for an inch of space on it?”He kicks the Transporter back into gear and focuses on the tasks at hand: maneuver wisely, don’t dent someone, and conserve fuel.

“Yes, I am tired. My brain is tired, my hands are tired, my soul is tired. I am tired of this city,” the 39-year-old says. “But I am feeding my family.”

When demographers predict a city’s size far into the future, they seek to create growth models that account for variables such as shifting levels of education, family planning, climate change, and migration. In other words, values for political choices can be plugged into population-growth algorithms to change the outcome.

No matter how the values are tweaked, though, Lagos emerges as the world’s most populous city at some point between now and 2100, in study after study. Changing the inputs affects only how soon and by how much. Lagos is already enormous, but no one is sure how many people live there. City officials say there are at least 20 million residents; the United Nations puts the number at a more modest 15 million — still nearly double New York City’s population. Every new Lagosian has their own reason for coming here: fleeing poverty, fleeing conflict, fleeing family burdens, perhaps. The birthrate in Nigeria — one of the world’s highest — means the city also grows rapidly on its own.

“There’s no exact science” for determining the city’s population, said Taibat Lawanson, a professor of urban planning at the University of Lagos. She explained that most Nigerians go to ancestral villages for census counts, even though they live in Lagos most of the time. A huge proportion of the city’s residents are itinerant laborers who sleep in different locations from week to week, making census questions about household size irrelevant.

“If anything, Lagos’s population is probably higher than anyone gives it credit for,” she said.

A study published last year in the Lancet forecasts that Nigeria will become more populous than China by the end of the century, as birthrates rapidly shrink in some parts of the world — East Asia, eastern and southern Europe, the Caribbean — and level off in others, such as the United States, which is projected to have a similar population in 2100 as now.

Most of Africa’s population will continue to grow rapidly this century. Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania are all forecast to join Nigeria among the 10 most populous countries by 2100. North Africa and southern Africa, while continuing to grow, will do so at much lower rates than the rest of the continent.

Unlike China and Vietnam, which have imposed limits on the number of children families could have during periods of rapid growth, no African governments have attempted large-scale population control, although many do promote family planning.

In three projections by the University of Toronto’s Global Cities Institute, Africa accounted for at least 10 of the world’s 20 most populous cities in 2100. Even in the institute’s middle-of-the-road development scenario, cities that many Americans may seldom read about, such as Niamey, Niger, and Lusaka, Zambia, eclipse New York City in growth.

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