URBAN MANAGEMENT ACROSS CONTINENTS

Furthermore, these challenges are selfreinforcing: When businesses operate in the informal sector and cannot grow because of regulatory and infrastructural barriers, their turnover will remain low, directly affecting cities’ tax bases. Even where cities have managed to institute reforms to grow their tax base, such as in Kampala, this is still not remotely sufficient to provide the level of public infrastructure that is needed. The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns have exacerbated these issues.

Turning towards the opportunities, the talk outlines several steps that need to be taken to unlock the potential and pointing towards several best practices in African cities.

First, security of land tenure is an essential precondition for economic growth. Rwanda is a good example in this regard: The country has been proactive to register its whole land in a community participatory practice. The whole country is now titled under a freehold land system. The outcome was that the number of mortgages increased because people are willing to invest in their land. All this happened within a five-year period. It is important to note however, that although this was successful in Rwanda, it may not work everywhere, as African cities and land tenure systems are very diverse.

Secondly, it is important to make adequate use of available data. The example of Cape Town is instructive in this regard, as during its water crisis, the city made water consumption data on a household level publicly available, to make people aware of their consumption patterns and potentially trigger behavior change.

Thirdly, there is need to recognize the potential of planning and investments into infrastructure in advance of people settling. This is important because there is evidence from Latin America that the cost of retrofitting can be three times higher than doing it in advance of settlement. In addition, the social, political, administrative costs to of moving people from their land for infrastructure upgrades cannot be underestimated. Hargeisa in Somaliland is a good example in this context: The city is planning around the outskirts of the city, where people are moving to. Importantly, however, it is doing this before people arrive, by demarcating the land to ensure people keep areas free for future investments in public infrastructure. Similar attempts have been successful in Colombia and Ethiopia. In Tanzania, an earlier implementation of a sites and service scheme resulted in the land today being five times more valuable than upgraded land. Furthermore, planning for climate resilient transition in advance will be cheaper, as an example from Kenya shows.

Fourth, housing should be a part of the urban strategy, and not only a national strategy. The cost of building urban housing is extremely high in urban Africa. Addis was able to build over 300.000 public housing units, but even this number cannot keep up with population growth.