Irene Salenson: "Only 40% of Africans live in cities"

Audio 4:50

By: Alexis Guilleux Follow

Since 1960, Africa has experienced strong urban growth. 4% per year on average between 1960 and 2010. Megacities like Lagos and Kinshasa will have more than 20 million inhabitants in 2030 ...

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Will African cities explode? Irène Salenson , urban planner and researcher at AFD , asks the question.

Alexis Guilleux: " Are African cities going to explode ? Is the title of the article you are publishing. When we see the figures for urban growth in Africa in recent decades, has this explosion not already taken place?

Irène Salenson: It is true that there has been strong urban growth in Africa for a long time. But we chose this title - with a question mark - because the term explosion is a bit strong. So we wanted to say that you don't necessarily have to be afraid and that it doesn't have to be serious. Because in fact, for the moment, the majority of the population still lives in the countryside in Africa. About 40% of the population lives in the city alone. If we look for example at cities with more than one million inhabitants, there are 41 cities with more than one million inhabitants in Africa in 2015, while there are 115 in Europe. For the moment, Africa is not as urbanized as the other regions of the world and it is a process of catching up.

You are also dismantling an accepted idea : that of the rural exodus. Is there no African rural exodus ?

There is little African rural exodus. We cannot say that there is none at all. But this is not what mainly feeds urban growth. Today, the growth of cities in Africa, it is due only for a third to the rural exodus and for two thirds, it is due to the births of children of city dwellers. This is particularly true for the Sahel countries. And what makes it not the rural exodus that fuels urban growth is that in fact, there are many old villages that are becoming cities. So it's really local growth.

One of the challenges of this urbanization in Africa for the coming years, for the next decades, is the management of the poorest neighborhoods, the slums. How to integrate them into the big African cities of tomorrow ?

There has often been an illusion that, thanks to development, these neighborhoods could disappear. It's unlikely. We should rather not stigmatize these neighborhoods. There are often economic activities and services that develop. So, we should not consider that the solution would be to demolish them. There are still a number of African governments who think that these neighborhoods are populated, precisely, by migrants who come from the rural exodus and who would like these people to return to the countryside. These are stereotypes and therefore, it would be better to integrate them. This means first of all not stigmatizing them and then, facilitating links with the formal city, mainly by developing public networks and equipment, therefore connecting them to roads, connecting them to public transport, connecting them to networks of sanitation, water, electricity, normalize them.

But to all these questions of transport infrastructure, sanitation, is it possible in the poorest countries ?

Yes, that is obviously a big subject. Of course, in the poorest countries, governments cannot afford, once again, the speed of this growth and to provide public services and corresponding infrastructure. What international cooperation agencies recommend is to work on improving the resources of public authorities. It involves improving taxation, it also involves using other types of financing, including borrowing. This sometimes involves international aid, it involves the mobilization of the private sector.

Faced with this great and strong urbanization, several countries have tried to build new cities. Do you already have some examples ?

The first country to build new cities on the African continent was Egypt. Then, the country which also built a certain number of them is Morocco. And more recently, we are also seeing new cities appear in several sub-Saharan African countries: Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Angola, etc. The big challenge is to build cities that offer both housing and employment. These are cities which would be autonomous and which would avoid the congestion of very large cities. But if there aren't enough jobs, it doesn't work. And we know of a certain number of cases where finally the new cities are not occupied as much as the plans had foreseen. Otherwise another problem is to have a social mix in these new cities. We have cases where the new cities in fact are gentrifying, in fact they are reserved for the wealthy classes when they had a social mix objective. And there are other cases where if there are not enough jobs or if they are not attractive enough, the wealthy and middle classes disappear. And finally, these new cities are becoming poorer. They also become poor ghettos.

Do we have an idea, an estimate of the number of homes that will be needed in the coming years in Africa ?

The needs are estimated at 4 million additional homes each year. It is obvious that this figure cannot be reached by the public authorities. Even in Europe we cannot produce as much social housing without the help of the private sector. It is not possible.

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