by Massimo Zaurrini and Gianfranco Belgrano

• The future of Africa will be built in its cities. The growth of its population is being accompanied by a simultaneous growth in its rate of urbanisation: this poses urgent challenges that must be tackled immediately. It is in the cities that Africa’s future - and in many ways that of the rest of the planet too - will be decided... as the 2030 Agenda reminds us, with its SDG 11 goals. The image of rural Africa, with its tissue of villages, huts and dirt roads, will increasingly be replaced by Africa as the epicentre of global urbanisation.

In 2017 Africa passed a significant milestone, when the continent's total urban population passed Europe’s city dwellers. According to the United Nations, in 2017 Africa had 569 million people living in cities, compared to 553 million in Europe and 533 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the next few years, this already rapid growth trend will undergo further acceleration: it is estimated that in Africa the urbanisation rate will reach 50% in 2030, and reach 60% in 2050. By the same year, Africa’s population will be the largest and youngest of any continent in the world. And the number of young people in Africa will be ten times greater than the number of young people in the European Union.

For Africa this process of galloping urbanisation brings both great opportunities and great challenges. According to a study carried out by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the urbanisation of Africa can become an exceptional driver to power the kind of overall "structural transformation" that will also allow the development of solid and stable rural living conditions.

In order for this to happen, and the phenomenon of African urban growth to become a catalyst for positive energy, it is essential to analyse and deal decisively with both the infrastructural and socio-political aspects, pursued in a context featuring overall sustainability. If we compare the data on total population growth with that on urban populations in many African cities, the urgency of rethinking the role and meaning of current urbanisation models becomes all too obvious.

Ensuring social and environmental sustainability in Africa’s developing cities is one of the key goals to be achieved if urbanisation is to become the positive force for change and improvement that everyone hopes for. The exceptional rapidity of urbanisation rates urgently demands an equally rapid response in terms of economic, social and environmental development.

To respond to the challenges facing Africa, as a prerequisite for collective social welfare "the continent's policies must focus on creating productive jobs and public facilities and services for the growing urban population", indicates the African Development Bank's report.

Among the clearest priorities is greater investment in urban infrastructure, which has completely failed to keep up with the expansion of cities. A third of the infrastructural needs of developing countries concerns urban areas. Across the entire continent, the cost of necessary urban investment is estimated at 30 billion dollars a year, of which 20 billion in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the top of the priority list is the urgent need to develop low-cost housing markets. This is because the construction sector in recent years has practically saturated the middle and upper middle class housing market, while neglecting the less affluent sector. The keystone to reversing this trend lies in the development of financial instruments, loans and mortgages, to enable the lower classes to boost the demand for decent low-price housing, and consequently to reduce the spread of unplanned settlements. This has been demonstrated by experiments in several African nations (e.g. Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana) facilitating housing for public administration employees. According to the latest report by Un-Habitat, in 2014 56% of the urban population of Sub-Saharan Africa lived in slums. Positive examples of dealing with this phenomenon can be seen in Morocco, Tunisia or Mauritius, where 89% of the population own their own homes.
Another fundamental priority is the creation of public transport systems capable of providing urban and peri-urban mobility, guaranteeing social inclusion and dynamism. The development of road infrastructures and transport connections between cities and their vast surrounding peri-urban areas, known as "urban corridors", would also encourage smoother transitions in the overlap between urban and rural life peculiar to Africa, as classic urban centres spread chaotically outwards. In recent years many African countries have begun to pay increasing attention to the issue of urban and peri-urban public transport: e.g. Ethiopia (with the Addis Ababa surface metro) or Ghana (which has set itself the goal of building 1,200 km of railways to connect urban and rural areas). The speed of Africa’s urbanisation is generated above all by the growth of medium-sized cities and towns (50,000 to 500,000 inhabitants). The closely interconnected continuum of rural areas, villages, towns and cities brings with it the promise of development and growth for both 'poles' of the rural-urban axis. Today 82% of the continent's population lives in this mixed city-country area. The so-called 'intermediate cities' account for 55% of all African urban areas. Improved town planning for the development of intermediate cities and urban corridors is a key tool for tackling the challenges created by the urbanisation process. The interest of many African governments in the development of railway lines and underground lines connecting peripheral areas to urban centres, is driven by the need to ease the pressure of new arrivals on city margins, limiting the proliferation of informal and improvised agglomerations. These transport arteries also make rural areas increasingly attractive from an economic point of view: they enjoy the benefits of a concentrated economy typical of cities, but at the same time they maintain the benefits of lower suburban-model costs.

Another high priority is constructing infrastructures for the energy, water and sanitation sectors. These particular priorities are even more urgent in the light of the menace posed by climate change in Africa, and the direct impact this has on the health and living conditions of whole populations. Then there are the rising health consequences of exposure to the so-called "double air pollution burden”... an expression which describes the deadly health impact of the combination of Atmospheric Air Pollution (AAP) with Home Air Pollution (HAP). From an environmental point of view, sustainable urban development must focus on eco-friendly policy interventions, especially concerning architecture, and the installation of sustainable systems for water management and energy consumption, which today are still mostly based on burning coal and wood in domestic contexts. In this area, there are experiments underway in various areas of the continent (e.g. Senegal and Kenya) on the domestic use of gas (natural and liquid) or the rising use of renewable energy and off-the-grid systems to meet the energy needs both of urban and rural areas. Investments in "greening" measures, and strategic management of waste disposal (preferably through incinerator plants that produce energy) represent two other key priorities in the management of urban issues. A steady improvement in water and sanitation services is taking place in many urban areas of the continent. Examples of significant growth (+ 40%) have come from some of the countries that began with very poor figures (Guinea, Mali, Niger), but more generally, constant and significant improvements have also been recorded in Angola, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Mauritania and Tanzania. Angola, in particular, represents an interesting case, both for its infrastructure investments in water and sanitation services and for the decentralisation of these services, frequently operated by autonomous or provincial commercial structures with assistance from the central government.

It is also important to emphasise the role that information and communication technologies (ICT) can play in identifying solutions to many African problems: in this field also, ICT can enable many cities to "leapfrog" their problems, as they already have done in other sectors. The innovative potential of this particular 'Smart City' approach is already visible in many of the continent’s cities, with practical applications that range from infrastructural planning to mobility to the provision of prepaid energy in slums. However, technological innovations are also leading to new initiatives in the services provided to the population, e.g. providing more public information, more participation and more sharing in decisions taken by the authorities, thus turning African cities into citizenship laboratories. Just think of 'conTEXT', the data collection and information service experiment in a slum in Kigali, implemented via an sms exchange platform connecting the city administration with the inhabitants of the pilot project district.

Africa’s new cities can become real engines of development, laboratories for governance and citizenship, stimulating training, innovation and culture in a context of social and economic growth... but only if these things are accompanied by the creation of productive job offers, the provision of public goods and services, and improved planning of links with rural and productive areas.

by Umberto De Giovannangeli

The challenge of inclusion requires us to re-think our cities and the relationship between the centre and the suburbs. City planning can either promote or dismantle social cohesion. The “new city” is a political thought, interpreted in the highest and most noble sense of the term “polis”. The “New city” gets to grips with the quantitative dimension of urbanisation, especially in the countries in the southern parts of the world.

The destination of the human pathway is neither a garden or the countryside, however fertile and attractive it may be, but rather the city. It is the city described in the book of Revelation, with twelve gates, twelve thousand stadia long and thick; so a city in which all the peoples of the earth are called upon to come and live. Its gates will never be closed during the day and there it will never be night (Rev. 21-25). We do not necessarily need to have an ideal city in front of our eyes, but at least an ideal of a city...”

Carlo Maria Martini

• Interpreting the city and the complexity of its territories, resources, identities and characteristics means equipping ourselves with a reading filter which - like a narrative pretext - tells its stories to be told, identifies reference scenarios and defines keywords in order to evoke the structures, resources, identity and perspective of its transformation.

In particular, the spatial layout of the city, its geographical distribution, floods itself with historical, cultural, social, economic and town planning meanings. And depending on the reading filters used, these present perspectives of promotion and development that do not necessarily respond to the traditional models of urban functioning that can be defined in a hierarchical sense: the centre - as the place that represents the urban, economic, social and cultural identity - and the suburbs - seen as a place hosting everything that cannot be located in the centre.

On the other hand, if it is true that contemporary life is a mixture of elements, more social than ethnic or cultural, today, the urban suburbs are often places where, on the other hand, a new meaning of city is taking shape, and in which global contradictions and conflicts present themselves on a local level and promptly collapse. The new citizens, first and second generations immigrants, often represent a mirror in which the historical city looks at its reflection and fails to recognise itself: the use of the public spaces, - the squares, the gardens, the pavements - again become the prime locations for social relationships and collective interactions, albeit untidy, noisy and conflictual ones. In this way, they reassign public function to spaces that the contemporary city has gradually privatised, regulated and supervised over the years.

Reasoning by adopting new paradigms and trying to redesign the division between the centre and the suburbs, means acknowledging and assigning cultural and social value to the urban hybrids that intertwine and meet in the suburbs. The multi-centre city is not only one capable of distributing new functions on an urban scale to all its territories: multi-screen cinemas and leisure centres in the suburbs, an opera house and museums in the centre. The “new city” is seen as the challenge of our era, goading us to combine, on a planetary level, security and inclusion, notes Sir Crispin Tickell in his introduction to the book “Cities for a small planet” by Richard Rogers: “Cities behave like organisms. They swallow resources and emit waste. The larger the city, the more it depends on the surrounding areas and the more vulnerable it becomes to the changes happening around it...” Indeed.

The challenge of inclusion requires us to re-think our cities and the relationship between the centre and the suburbs. City planning can either promote or dismantle social cohesion. The “new city” is a political thought, interpreted in the highest and most noble sense of the word “polis”. The “New city” gets to grips with the quantitative dimension of urbanisation, especially in the countries in the southern parts of the world, Asia, Africa, where the depopulation of the rural areas has caused overcrowding in the megalopolis cities, putting greater pressure on the environment. And this also means a larger number of refugees. In 1978 there were 6 million refugees, in the strictest sense of the word, that is, people fleeing from political, ethnic or religious persecution; in 1995 they had increased in number to over 22 million, excluding those who had become refugees for environmental reasons, some migrating from country to country, and others fleeing elsewhere within their own borders, with an overall additional increase of 22 million.

In 2016, the number of refugees exceeded a record-breaking 64 million. “The effect of this flow of human beings will be felt, especially in the cities and the surrounding areas”, notes Tickell. The “new” city is the - sometimes successful - attempt to combine the ideal with the real. Tickell ends his introduction as follows: “The book by Richard Rogers is a message of hope. It shows how the fair, well-balanced and above all compact city must be pluralist and integrated, varied and cohesive. The result should be, in the words of Richard Rogers, a high density city with many centres, an eco-friendly city, one that favours human contacts, a city of different, mixed activities, one that is fair, open and, last but not least, a city that is capable of showing beauty, in which art, architecture and landscape can stimulate and satisfy the spirit. Richard Rogers shows us how this can be done”.

In the divide between centre and suburbs, notes Ilda Curti, one of the top Italian urban regenerators, the historical centres now risk taking on the artificial semblances of “amusement parks”, in which the functions for which they were created are excluded or rendered sterile. Instead they offer reinterpreted, sometimes trivialised identities, crushing themselves around a historical identity that is crystallised, unchangeable and reiterated over time.

In this perspective, the urban suburbs and the neighbourhoods not located in the centres risk, on the contrary becoming service areas, piled high with functions for which there is not enough space in the ‘developed’ city. Places in which the untidy scraps of the contemporary city find a physical, well-planned urban location in which they are easy and handy to use. But often they are not capable of generating local projects, visions of indigenous development that are able to assign value - albeit of the intangible, immaterial type - to a collectivity that is spatially hemmed in”. Often, Curti notes, “the urban suburbs are, more than other areas, places where contemporary life is produced and consumed: the social mix of the residents, the multiculturalism and cohabitation, the difficulty of sharing public spaces and private relationships turn them into laboratories in which a new kind of citizenship is tested out, where the rules of how we live side by side and relate to one another are continuously cast up for debate.

It is in the suburbs, in the neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the historical cities that contemporary society multiples itself, in many different shapes and sizes, often taking on forms that clash with the concept of a crystalline, glossy modernity. They are often the laboratories of social innovation, because it is in the recesses of their untidiness and conflicts that languages, cultural forms and methods of expression contaminate one another. The very future of the planet passes through an intense rethinking of the “City”. Others will tell of pilot experiences (like that of the redevelopment of the Brazilian favelas, experiences in which Italian Cooperation has played an active, pro-active role.

Here, it is important to highlight the fascination of this challenge, City versus urban Forest. And I cannot find words that are more evocative and deep than those used by cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in his “Towards Jerusalem” (Feltrinelli): “The destination of the human pathway is neither the garden or the countryside, however fertile and attractive it may be, but rather the city...It is the city described in the book of Revelation, with twelve gates, twelve thousand stadia long and thick; so a city in which all the peoples of the earth are called upon to come and live. Its gates will never be closed during the day and there it will never be night (Rev. 21-25)”. Cardinal Martini was looking towards the future, with the same extraordinary intellectual precision that accompanied him throughout his life, reminding all of us that “We do not necessarily need to have an ideal city in front of our eyes, but at least an ideal of a city”. habits and identity...”. Defining the characteristics of a “New city” is the biggest intellectual challenge of our times. Because it obliges us to design beyond the emergency, to intertwine different kinds of knowledge. “The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants; we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it” reflects Roland Barthes in his “Semiology and Urbanism”. And at times, urbanism explains much more abut the reasons behind a conflict than geopolitics or diplomacy are able to do. This is true for one of the cities that I have visited most frequently for work in the Middle East: Jerusalem. Holy city, City that is fought over, in whose name atrocities have been committed and “miracles” performed. To understand the real Jerusalem, writes Paola Caridi in her wonderful book “Jerusalem without God. Portrait of a Cruel City” (Feltrinelli), “we don’t need the usual, infinite tourist guides, intent on providing hordes of details when defining each individual stone with the slightest link to religion. Maps, floor plans and town planning schemes are what we need...”. Because Jerusalem is a “separate body”. “Lines, borders, walls, one here and one there. Here, where I am and on the other side, where the ‘others’ are - notes Caridi, who has lived in Jerusalem and knows the city like few others - Deciding on a town planning scheme in Jerusalem therefore means throwing oneself headlong into the process of peace. The two-state solution indicated by the Oslo Peace Process, and that is Israel and Palestine side by side, with Jerusalem as the capital, along the 1967 divide, is impossible to implement. This is due to the town planning strategy and because - as a result the city now has a population with a different, in fact a very different balance from that of 1967. Others will tell the stories of unique experiences, of the virtuous redevelopment of degenerated places transformed into pieces of “New city” (for instance the experience of the favelas or that of Medellin). Here, it is important to highlight the fascination of a commitment in which Italian Cooperation plays an active, pro-active part, and on which the very future of our planet depends.