The city will not obey
African urban policy must stop confusing prescription with planning.
African cities are often treated as if they are unruly children. They are told to densify, integrate, formalise, decarbonise, modernise, compact, include, connect and transform. Each instruction may sound reasonable on its own. Together they often become a thick layer of prescription placed over cities that are already under severe fiscal, institutional and infrastructure stress.
The result is not obedience. It is adaptation.
This is the point many urban strategies miss. A city does not behave like a machine. It does not respond automatically to a new spatial development framework, a revised zoning scheme, a donor strategy, a political slogan or an academic theory of the good city. A city responds to cost, risk, access, income, regulation, infrastructure capacity, transport, land markets and institutional credibility.
A city responds to cost, risk, access, income, regulation, infrastructure capacity, transport, land markets and institutional credibility
When those conditions contradict the plan, the city follows the conditions and not the plan.
This matters because Africa’s urban transition is now one of the central governance questions of the twenty-first century. The OECD, the Sahel and West Africa Club, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa argue in Africa’s Urbanisation Dynamics 2022 that Africa’s cities will absorb the largest share of the continent’s future population growth, with hundreds of millions of additional urban residents expected by 2050. Africa added 469 million urban residents in the last 20 years and is projected to add roughly another 700 million by 2050. About 80% of overall population growth will be absorbed in urban areas.
UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2022 makes the warning explicit. It states that many developing-country cities are urbanising rapidly without the structural transformation needed to turn urban growth into productivity gains. In plain terms, Africa is urbanising, but too many cities are not yet becoming sufficiently productive, connected or financially capable.
This is not only a planning problem. It is a state-capability problem.
Africa is urbanising, but too many cities are not yet becoming sufficiently productive, connected or financially capable: this is a state-capability problem
A city that grows faster than its infrastructure finance will not wait for the perfect capital programme. People will self-provide. A city whose land-use system makes lawful development too expensive will not stop developing. Development will move into informal, semi-formal or politically negotiated channels. A city that regulates more than it can administer will not become orderly. It will produce discretion, delay, avoidance and selective enforcement.
That is why informality must be read as evidence before it is treated as failure. Informal settlements, backyard rental, pavement trade, illegal subdivision and improvised transport systems are not random acts of urban disobedience. They are signals. They tell us where demand exists, where formal systems are unaffordable, where land markets are blocked, where infrastructure is absent, and where the state has lost practical authority.
UN-Habitat has repeatedly argued that rigid and complex urban legislation can push citizens into informal practices for land transactions, business operations and access to services. This point should be uncomfortable for planners. It means that informality is not always the opposite of planning. Sometimes it is the direct product of misdirected planning, unaffordable standards and weak administration.
The World Bank’s Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World reaches a similar conclusion from an economic angle. It describes many African cities as crowded, disconnected and costly, and argues that weak land markets, fragmented urban form and poorly coordinated infrastructure investment limit productivity. That diagnosis should change the way we speak about urban planning. The problem is not that African cities lack visions. Many have too many visions. The problem is that spatial visions are often detached from infrastructure capacity, capital budgets, operating costs, property rights, household affordability and private investment behaviour.
This produces what might be called “compliance theatre”. The approved plan says one thing. The city does another. The paperwork shows alignment. The ground shows divergence. Officials can point to strategies, frameworks and participation processes. Residents point to transport costs, water interruptions, unsafe streets, insecure tenure and unaffordable formal housing. Investors point to risk, delay, land assembly problems and infrastructure uncertainty. The city, meanwhile, keeps moving.
Jane Jacobs warned long ago that cities are problems of organised complexity, not simple engineering diagrams. James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State also remains relevant because it explains how states often simplify complex social realities to make them administratively legible, then mistake the simplified map for the real society.
For African cities, this warning is practical. A clean spatial concept can hide a broken infrastructure balance sheet, while compact-city and densification policies can ignore household income and bulk capacity. A land-use scheme can protect order on paper while excluding most actual demand; a resilience plan can speak confidently about the future even when the municipality cannot maintain its current assets.
The city will not obey these contradictions. It will work around them.
This does not mean planning should retreat. That conclusion would be lazy. African cities need stronger public authority, not weaker public authority. They need enforceable rights, credible infrastructure investment, functioning land administration, safe public spaces, capable utilities and honest long-term financial planning. They also need regulations that ordinary households and firms can realistically comply with.
The shift required is from prescriptive planning to adaptive governance.
Adaptive governance starts with observation rather than instruction. It asks where people are actually settling, where firms are actually investing, where transport demand is actually moving, where infrastructure is actually failing, and where rules are being bypassed. It then asks the harder question: why?
Adaptive governance starts with observation rather than instruction
If people are building informally, is the formal product affordable? If developers avoid priority areas, is infrastructure available? If households move to the periphery, are central locations financially accessible? If public transport fails, what informal systems have replaced it? If a municipality promotes growth, can it fund the operating costs of that growth? If a plan promises integration, does the capital budget follow?
Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric governance is useful here because it recognises that complex systems are rarely governed well from one command centre. Her Nobel lecture is available here. Cities require multiple centres of decision-making, but those centres must operate within clear rules and credible accountability. National government, local authorities, utilities, communities, landowners, developers, financiers and households all shape the urban system.
The future African city will not be built by instruction alone. It will be built where public institutions align regulation, infrastructure, finance and rights with the choices that households and firms are already making.
That is the uncomfortable lesson. The city is not disobedient because it is irrational. It is disobedient because it is rational in the face of contradictory instructions, unaffordable standards and weak delivery systems.
The city will not obey. It will reveal, daily and without sentiment, whether our plans understand reality.
Image: Burgert Gildenhuys/City responding to reality. Outside Nairobi, Kenya.
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