Building Sustainable Urban Infrastructure in Africa

For over 50 years international development agencies have struggled to achieve any significant improvement in the Africa's urban condition. This failure is a direct result of flawed intervention strategies; by controlling Africa's intellectual space, and dominating the urban development debate, external agencies have defined the urban development trajectory in Africa that has led to the current situation.

Africa is a rapidly urbanising continent, yet the way it is developing is quite distinct from other regions. 70% of its population live in the secondary towns and cities with populations less that 500,000 people. And these urban areas are quite different from those of 19th century Europe, where the existing infrastructure and urban planning models evolved. Based upon extensive experience working in secondary cities, much of it in Africa, and the lessons learnt from a major development programme that covered 18 secondary towns in Ethiopia, this book demonstrates that, far from being problematic, the secondary towns provide an immense opportunity to create truly sustainable urban habitats.

The key to success lies in rethinking the role of urban infrastructure and situating this in a 21st century context, within a framework of social equity and environmental sustainability, with the city rather than the individual as the user of resources, so that the primary role of infrastructure becomes one of mediating the resource flows, With this approach, African countries retain their current low carbon economies, whilst at the same time integrating into the new Green Economy. Service delivery is equitable and the quality of life improved. Roles and relationships evolve naturally while the approach results in a more effective model for urban good governance.

Chapter Headings

This book operates on two levels. On a local level it is a book about urban governance and the role of urban infrastructure in creating sustainable towns and cities in Africa, with the focus on the secondary towns. On a higher level though it is an exploration of the extent to which western governments and international development agencies control the African development agenda, through a colonisation of Africa's intellectual space. This chapter lays out the argument for this position.

In looking at urban development, the chapter argues that the western approach to Africa is essentially responsive and reactive to events, rather than being pro-active. And a major part of this response has been driven by a failure to understand the role that infrastructure plays in urban development. The result has been continual fragmentation of urban service delivery into specialist sectors and a constant reduction in the level of service delivery, to a point where only the most basic services are considered for the majority of the population, and even this goal is unachievable. The current system is seriously flawed and in need of review and a change in approach.

The history of urban development has generally been carried out by western (mainly British and American) researchers who have situated their exploration within a specific World View, or Weltanschauung. Chapter 2 explores this historical development from a different perspective, and argues that it is the imposition of a specific Anglo-Saxon Weltanschauung that lies at the heart of Africa's current urban problems. Here the chapter build on four western 'Forces of Influence', identified in chapter 1, that have driven urban development in Africa since independence. These are:

• The Colonial Legacy of Urban Infrastructure.
• The Private Sector Model for Water Supply.
• A Basic Needs Approach to Urban Infrastructure (particularly sanitation).
• An Urban Planning Paradigm underpinning the Development Process.

This chapter describes the evolution of urban infrastructure, initially in Britain, and the way that this was carried through to Anglophone Africa via the colonial administration. In doing this it takes a completely new approach to the exploration of that history and highlights the key drivers and underlying concepts that would lead directly to the failure of the British Infrastructure model in Africa. This is supported by a more concise exploration of infrastructure in the United States, with the way in which this approach differed to that of Britain being highlighted. This comparative study shows how infrastructure is a much more complex and multi-faceted concept than is currently recognized, or appreciated. As a result infrastructure cannot be interpreted as a generic construct, made up a group of services; as currently perceived. Rather it is an interaction between technology and organizational structures, with both of these being intimately bound up with, and defined by, the wider social value system within which the infrastructure is situated.

Chapter 4 provides an analysis of the historical trajectory described in chapter 3. In this way it is able to show exactly how the international agencies, under British-American cultural hegemony, came to adopt the positions they did and how the evolution of the four western 'Forces of Influence' can be traced back to this historical evolution. This chapter shows the extent to which international thinking is still grounded in outmoded development concepts and constructs that have their origins in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the extent to which these western forces are guided by the way in which western countries (primarily in Britain and America) manage their own 'mature' cities, taking these experiences and then applying them to developing cities based upon the assumption of 'generic' (i.e. British and American) World views (Weltanschauung) regarding social, economic and political development and the way in which these should evolve in developing countries.

The way that the forces of influence developed shaped not only the development debate, but also the debate on decentralisation, and this chapter focuses on this latter topic. It covers the history of decentralisation and shows how western governments abandoned this area as a focus of development when they could not make it fit their own interpretation. This chapter then highlights the limitations of external involvement at a local level and the need to develop in-country capacity as the only way to manage the secondary cities. The chapter also shows the extent to which the failure of previous decentralisation models can be linked directly to the imposition of inappropriate institutional frameworks under the British colonial administration, and how these flaws have never really been addressed. This lays an important foundation for the work that follows, and makes the Ethiopian case study that follows critical to the exploration of solutions and new ways of thinking about local government in Africa.

When viewed from the perspective of urban development in Africa, Ethiopia provides a unique case study. This chapter provides a historical analysis that describes the reasons for this, and why the country is particularly important in the wider context of this book. It freedom from colonial control means that the ideas and concepts it uses in development owe much to its own internal thinking, which alone makes it unique. It has a long and continuous recorded history so that urban development can be tracked. And finally it developed a strong urban planning base without having an engineering culture, thereby creating an approach to urban development similar to that postulated by external development agencies in the rest of Africa. This chapter traces the history of the country from its early stages through the point where it established a Federal system of government, into a major development programme of capacity building for its secondary towns.

The development programme described in the previous chapter had a major urban infrastructure component that explored the nature, and the role, of the secondary cities in Africa in depth; the first study to look at urban infrastructure in Africa in this way for over 30 years. The outcome was a major rethinking of the role that infrastructure plays in urban development. The Ethiopian Government recognised infrastructure as the economic driver of urban development; a capacity building programme was instituted to support the planning, financing and delivery of infrastructure from local budgets; and the Government developed and introduced the first policy in Africa that situated urban infrastructure within a holistic and comprehensive development framework. This laid the foundation for a new way of thinking about the role of urban infrastructure in an African context.

The Ethiopian study highlighted the need to rethink both the technology and the management of infrastructure, raising the question of how to do this in the face of so much historical precedent. The result was the exploration of this question as a problématique, in the French analytical style. This took the question back to first principles, and exploring the socio-cultural role of infrastructure, in Africa, in the 21st century. The first outcome was a definition of social, environmental and economic imperatives that underpin the process. The social imperative highlighted the centrality of social equity in development; the environmental imperative the key role of resource management; and the economic imperative the critical issue of affordability. This last one differed though from the current western approach. For whilst the latter defines affordability at the level of the individual (the foundation of the Basic Needs approach), the exploration of the problématique showed the focus of affordability to lie at the level of the local government authority. This is something quite different and is the key to a new approach to infrastructure delivery.

The key to environmental sustainability in the cities lies in optimising the flow of resources through the city. In looking at the way this has been explored in the past, the chapter showed how the main weakness of existing approach derives from their point of departure. Unfortunately these approaches, whether based in the metabolic city or the eco-city model, look at resource flows from the perspective of a mature city. And whilst this may be quite reasonable given that this is their own specific environment, it also has a serious limitation, in that it encourages the use of a mechanistic approach. Looking at these models from a developing cities perspective requires a systemic approach, because we are looking at shaping, rather than adapting the urban environment. To manage this the book developed a new construct that shows the city as interacting with six distinct resource systems, an approach which has led to a new categorisation of resource flows in an urban context. The outcome of this new approach is to identify and define three principles that underpin sustainable urban resources management.

This approach (developed in chapter 9) situates urban infrastructure in a completely new light. The mechanistic, adaptive (Western) model takes infrastructure for granted because the infrastructure base already exists. The systemic model shows how it is not possible to develop a metabolic city without first understanding the critical role played by the infrastructure in shaping the urban environment. In this context the primary role of infrastructure changes from a 20th century model where the focus is on delivering services, to a 21st century one where the primary role is that of mediating resource flows into and around the urban area. Once this is recognised then the infrastructure can be developed in such a way as to ensure both social equity and affordability. Having developed this construct the chapter defines urban infrastructure services in a completely new way, providing the framework for sustainable development in the secondary cities in a way that is simply not possible with current Western thinking.

The chapter begins with a review of Good Governance. Drawing on the findings of the earlier decentralisation study this chapter highlights the importance of creating effective institutional structures prior to defining the nature of Good Urban Governance. It further shows how these structures are influenced by the role of local government as defined and developed in the previous three chapters. Here the book is arguing that there has to be a clear definition of roles and relationships and that this is a pre-requisite for Good Urban Governance to function. Having established this point the chapter shows how Good Governance at a local level differs significantly from Good Governance at a National or Federal level. The final part of this chapter then develops a new model of Good Urban Governance for sustainable and socially equitable urban development.

The book has sought to demonstrate the extent to which external thinking dominates urban development in Africa, going beyond being simply an input to becoming a dominant force; to the extent that it has completely dominated Africa's intellectual space. At a local level this has resulted in a development model that is grounded in the 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain and the United States. And at both levels external development agencies are trapped in their own Weltanschauungen (World View) to the extent that they are part of Africa's urban problem rather than contributing to Africa's urban solution. The reality is that African cities are being developed in the 21st century, under both local and global circumstances that are completely different from those of previous urbanisation cycles, and this require a new way of thinking about urban development. The extensive study of Ethiopia shows the extent to which such an approach can be grounded in African experience, whilst the development of a new conceptual model provides the basis for a new approach to urban management based upon the principles of social equity and environmental sustainability. Using these findings opens the way to create truly sustainable urban environments in Africa, allowing it to lead the way in creating a new low-carbon urban society that has lessons for the rest of the world.