Big City Africa

Held on Tuesday, November 10th, 2020

Recap by Claudia Chiappa

On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, the Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC) and the African Studies Center hosted Big City Africa, a discussion on the opportunities and challenges of urbanization in the African continent.

Moderated by Timothy Longman, Professor of Political Science at Boston University and Director ad interim of the African Studies Center at Boston University, the discussion featured Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Oxford and Director at the International Growth Centre; Astrid Haas, Policy Director at the International Growth Center; and Marcus Walton, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University.

Over the course of an hour, the panelists discussed the challenges urbanization is facing in Africa, the opportunity it presents, and some of the strategies that could help tackle financial challenges, among others.

The Opportunity and Challenge of Urbanization

“Urbanization is Africa’s biggest current opportunity for economic growth and development,” said Haas.

She explained how cities are growing because more and more people are moving from rural areas looking for jobs and prosperity. Cities also offer a good market for firms, which often choose to locate in cities for this reason.

“This feature of cities, being attractive to firms, allows them to come together, to specialize, to scale, to grow and this is what drives productivity and growth, and this is what makes cities such a powerful force for growth for the economy,” noted Haas.

Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent. According to Haas, two thirds of  African cities have yet to be built and this offers an incredible amount of opportunities. However, this comes with challenges, such as how short the “window of opportunity” is.

In the next 20 to 30 years cities will continue to grow, but often cities are unable to handle the influx of population, especially when it is not matched by an economic influx. Haas said that current estimates foresee an additional 2.5 billion people moving to cities by 2050 and 90% of those people are going to come from Africa and from Asia.

“While a lot of cities are dense with people they are not dense with firms because the investment climate is not favorable,” explained Haas.

This lack of firms leads to lack of jobs. However, a lack of jobs is one of the main reasons people leave rural areas and move to the city. This leads to people shifting to the informal sector, which creates problems because firms are unable to grow and operate at or near the poverty line. This limits the tax revenue that cities can collect for development.

Cities are also expensive for people living there, who therefore are forced to move further out of the city. However, because jobs remain concentrated in the center of cities, people often have to spend significant amounts on transportation alone.

“As it is expensive for people, people will require higher wages which then becomes even more unattractive for firms to locate into the cities,” noted Haas. “This is a vicious cycle many of our cities find themselves in right now.”

Dialogue as a Solution

In front of the challenges faced by cities, it’s important to think about what strategies and solutions could be implemented to tackle these issues. Collier talked about the importance for cities to be productive and livable at the same time. He explained how it is important to act now, before urbanization continues and future cities are built in an ineffective and unsustainable way.

“The key concept is that the city needs to become a community that builds a common purpose around a common understanding,” noted Collier. “From that common understanding it builds a common strategy.”

A big part of this, explained Collier, is the importance of common obligations. This means that everybody must play their part in their communities, following rules and paying taxes for example.

The best way to build a common purpose and a sense of belonging to a city is through dialogue. Collier talked about how we often see the decision-making process stemming from the top down, but this is ineffective. A dialogue must be held between people who have agency and who are equals, and decisions must be made by the people, not by those in positions of power.

Popular Mobilization

Dialogue is not always the main approach used by people. Marcus Walton discussed the rise of popular mobilization as we have witnessed it over the last two decades, and as we are witnessing now in Nigeria, where people are protesting the police unit SARS, police brutality, and abuse of power.

Walton said that cities are often catalysts of protests and mobilization because they are often producing inequalities within themselves. Social, economic, and political issues become intertwined, and people protest for issues such as access to resources, transportation, education, housing, and equality, among others.

“I do think that mediation and working through other channels outside of street protest is extremely important, but for many people living in unequal cities, access to political institutions is not very easy to come by,” noted Walton.

All of these different strategies are important and often they work best when used together. However, too often there are cases where dialogue was not followed by real action.

Financial Issues

One important issue stressed by the panelists was the importance to act sooner rather than later. It is substantially more expensive to move people out of cities because they lack infrastructure than it is to prepare cities to absorb growth. It is undeniable that cities need money in order to be able to keep up with trends, but money is often hard to come by especially when cities can’t raise enough tax revenue.

“Cities are very constrained about how they can raise money,” said Haas. “There are legislative constraints about what cities can do to raise money.”

Collier talked about how taxing land could be a solution to this issue and it all starts by establishing who owns land. He described this as a “great revenue potential” that is often overlooked.

Africa is urbanizing in the most data rich time we ever had and Haas believes this is a major opportunity for the continent. If we can use data well, we can better allocate resources and we can help urbanization.

“Urbanization is our largest opportunity but it’s not just any urbanization, it’s well managed urbanization,” noted Haas. “We have the opportunity to put in the right policies, the right infrastructures, the right investments to be able to unleash the power for the cities that are there and for the cities that are yet to be built.”