Africa’s new cities: The contested future of urbanisation

Abstract

New private property investments in Africa’s cities are on the rise, and they often take the form of entirely new cities built up from scratch as comprehensively planned self-contained enclaves. As these new city-making trajectories are expanding and empirical research is emerging, there is a need to provide more conceptual clarity. We systematically examine the diversity of new cities in Africa; elicit their financial trajectories; and set an agenda for critically examining their actual and expected implications, by learning transnational lessons from debates on gated communities, peri-urban land governance and displacement, and older waves of new city building. Although most new cities are private-led projects, they are inserted into diverse and dynamic political economies with states ranging from developmentalist to neoliberal to absent. The consumptive and supply-driven character of many projects so far (resembling gated communities for middle and higher classes), their insertion into ‘rurban’ spaces with complex land governance arrangements, and their tendency to implement post-democratic private-sector-driven governance will make them at best unsuitable for solving Africa’s urban problems, and at worst they will increase expulsions and enclosures of the poor, public funding injustice and socio-spatial segregation and fragmentation.

摘要

非洲城市的新私有房产投资呈上升趋势，其形式往往是从零建造全新城市，成为全面规划的自足式飞地。随着这些新的造城趋势铺展，经验研究涌现，有必要在概念上进一步厘清。我们系统考察了非洲新城市的多样性；得出了它们的财务轨迹；并设定了批判式审视其实际意义和预期意义的日程表，包括借鉴国际学界关于封闭式小区、城市边缘区土地管治和拆迁以及过往造城潮流的争论所得到的经验教训。虽然大多数新城是民营企业主导的，但它们插入了多样化且动态的政治经济格局中，其中政府发挥的作用从开发者，到新自由主义式，到完全缺席，各不相同。目前为止许多项目（类似于面向中产阶级和上流阶层的封闭式小区）都呈现出消费和供给驱动特征；这些项目插入了有着复杂土地管治安排的“城郊”空间；并且它们趋向于实施后民主时代的私营部门驱动式治理。这些都使得它们在最好的情况下也并不适合用于解决非洲的城市问题，而在最糟糕的情况下则会加剧对穷人的排斥和包围、公共资金利用的不公正，以及社会空间的区隔和碎片化。