Africa’s Stunted Urban Renaissance
In the last fifteen to twenty years, the urban landscape of Africa’s major cities has changed tremendously, riding on the back of her newfound economic prosperity and political stability. African nations are today embarking on massive urban development projects across the continent. City landscapes, which were hitherto littered with only colonial and post-colonial architecture, are now giving way to ritzy contemporary skylines across the continent’s capitals and major cities. With her newfound affluence, Africa is at present funding ‘purpose-built’ mega-cities that take after similar developments around the world; and African governments and developers are now flying-in ‘Starchitects’ from all corners of the globe to redesign the entire master plans of their major cities and also create brand new ones. These brand new cities are mostly springing up from the ashes of yesterday’s slums and shanties, scattered all over the continent. Today, no African nation is left out of the skyscraper race; from Kigali to Luanda, Takoradi to Kinshasa, the story is the same. The continent has become one massive construction site where spanking-new upscale neighbourhoods and cities are daily been designed and built from scratch, while old ones are being rejuvenated.
One such brand new mega-city in Africa is Nigeria’s Eko Atlantic City. It sprouts from a reclaimed ten-square-kilometre strip of land on the Lagos Atlantic coast in southwest Nigeria. The city, which by all means is a twenty-first century city, is being provided with modern transportation, an efficient waste management system and every amenity befitting a modern city that will be home to at least four hundred thousand people. The Eko Atlantic city is touted to become Nigeria’s new financial hub, comparable to Manhattan. And in southern Africa, on the outskirts of Angola’s capital city, Luanda, there sits a 3.5-billion dollar brand-new city, the Nova Cidade de Kilamba, which is expected to be called home by at least five hundred thousand residents. The new city has seven hundred and fifty blocks of eight-storey buildings, dozens of schools and about a hundred retail stores. In east Africa, Kenya also has broken ground to commence construction of her new 14.3-billion dollar IT business hub, the Konza Technology City, nicknamed ‘Africa’s Silicon Savannah’. This new mega-city is about sixty-five kilometres south of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. The city is expected to be called home by about two hundred thousand people who will be living and working there.
Africa’s prevailing economic growth, even in the face of negatively changing fortunes in other regions of the world, isn’t a happenstance. It is one that is fuelled by higher commodity prices and backed by multi-sectoral reforms and the prevailing relative political stability across the continent. It is this growth that has naturally given birth to the massive development of infrastructure and the large-scale urban development projects across her major cities. Africa, with her newfound wealth, has adopted an urban development model similar to modern-day China and the United Arab Emirates. She is today designing brand-new master plans for her cities and aggressively building new ones from scratch, with the accompanying modern urban infrastructures like roads, electricity and sewage treatment systems. The skylines of her major cities are beginning to look at least a little like her opposite numbers in the West, and of course in the East. And just like magic, whichever slum Africa waves her wand at instantly becomes a new, upscale district, complete with befitting amenities. In the new Africa, shanties could be turned into swish neighbourhoods, complete with five-star hotels and shopping malls, in as little as two years.
Regrettably, as Africa basks in the euphoria of her new urban utopias, she has failed to notice the slow but imminent crisis brewing underneath: unbeknownst to her, she has adopted a relatively unsustainable urban development model, one which comes with two very fundamental flaws, one socioeconomic and one sociocultural. It is a development model that is complemented neither by the social advancement of the larger African population nor by the natural evolution and growth of her indigenous architecture style. It is, indeed, an urban development model that has left behind a very substantial proportion of Africa’s larger populace.
The socio-economic implication of this growth model is that Africa’s current urban growth pattern follows only one track and is headed only in a single direction. This is because she has focused exclusively on those at the very top of her social pyramid, at the expense of those at its lowest rung. While Africa is excelling at the whole-scale ‘importation’ of brand-new contemporary cities, she is failing terribly at elevating the living standards and comfort of her low-income-earning communities, as well as the original inhabitants of all the slums and shanties that are being transformed into world-class cities. The continent has been unable to balance the level of growth and development in her urban centres with a corresponding level of growth in her small towns, sub-urban areas and the low-income-earning communities. And as these urban make-overs are occurring around the continent, no one has yet asked about the fate of the millions of original inhabitants of the shanties and slums from which these new cities are sprouting. The thinking in some quarters is that this group of people will one day be naturally absorbed into these new urban settlements; this line of reasoning is not only lacking in logic but is also insensitive, because these people are in a class far removed from that of the new inhabitants of the land on which their old homes once stood, hence they will never be able to afford these settlements. The direct consequence of this is that this set of people will always find ways of setting up new slums within the same city, even if only for a brief moment before they are sent packing again.
continent, especially when weighed against her ballooning human population, which is growing at a very alarming pace. The UN Population Division in its ‘World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision’ lists Africa as one of the regions with the highest fertility levels in the world, and therefore projects that Africa’s population will grow from the current 1.1 billion to at least 2.4 billion by 2050 (UN DESA, 2013). Consequently, bearing in mind these figures, it is impossible to ignore the underlying challenges that the ballooning population growth poses to the continent.
Indeed, very few countries in the world today possess the capacity to sustain the urban growth model Africa has adopted; in fact, by adopting this model of urban development, Africa is leaving behind a huge percentage of her overall population (conservatively at least sixty-five per cent), hence this urban growth is superficial rather than natural. The danger of this one-sided growth is that the continent could end up with swathes of ghost cities in the coming years. This has already been speculated in a report by Louise Redvers, in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian of the twenty-third of November, 2012, to have happened in Nova Cidad de Kilamba. The report claimed that almost twelve months after the completion of the city, only two hundred of the initial two thousand eight hundred flats that went on sale had been sold (Redvers, 2012).
As much as it is still too early to share the pessimism of that Mail & Guardian report, it is quite troubling that a similar pattern had already played out in China, a country which had used a similar urban growth model. China now has more than its fair share of ‘ghost’ cities: a situation where some of her new, purpose-built cities have remained uninhabited long after their completion. This is because the rural migrant Chinese workers, at whom some of these developments were targeted, simply cannot afford to pay for these buildings. But, unlike Africa, China can afford to have empty cities because the new cities of Zhengzhou, Chenggong, Yujiapu, and the like were also built on the premise of keeping the rapidly growing blue-collar Chinese workforce busy. This, on its own merit, seems like a potent economic strategy to provide a source of livelihood for a good percentage of the local Chinese workforce. Even in the event that these cities remain empty for too long, it is also well within the means and capabilities of the Chinese government to underwrite the estimated two trillion dollars that have been sunk into building these new cities. China could ultimately decide to convert them to social housing projects to cater for her large local migrant population. Although Africa, just like China, will have no shortage of people to fill up her new cities, the problem is that only a tiny fraction of Africa’s larger population could ever afford any of these properties. And no country in Africa today has the resources to turn these projects into social housing projects even if it wanted to.
any reason her current capitalist experiment fails, it is the same people on whose backs Africa’s wealth has been built that will suffer the most. She must adopt a growth model that enthrones infrastructural development all round, rather than one that creates a glaring disparity between the infrastructures and amenities in large cities, the city outskirts and small towns. Without a doubt, Africa also needs some of the skyscrapers, large malls and posh districts that are being developed, but she must learn to strike a balance. She should deploy twice as many resources to develop the areas inhabited by her larger population as she is currently dedicating to the few at the very top, because there is no wisdom in bulldozing slums without providing alternatives, because these slum dwellers will simply create new slums elsewhere and it will become an enduring pattern over time.
The second problem with Africa’s current urban development model is sociocultural: these new urban projects are not only bereft of any form of cultural responsiveness, but they have also failed to draw any form of inspiration from their immediate environment, thereby failing to accommodate the anthropological peculiarities of the wider African population. By exclusively adopting an international architectural style, Africa has altogether discarded her indigenous architectures and utterly dashed any hopes for a revival of the same. Africans are known to be very culturally sensitive people who hang on to every thread of their customs and traditions; hence urbanisation must not be seen to have dispossessed them of that which they hold dear. Rather, it should be able to integrate itself into the culture of the people whose cause it seeks to advance. As a continent, Africa has never laid claim to a homogenous indigenous style of architecture, but rather her architectural styles are as varied as the numerous influences that inspired them. For instance, the architectures in north Africa were influenced by the Roman, Islamic and Arabian styles, and are typically characterised by stone or earthen walls and flat roofs. This style of traditional African architecture is most popular in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, but its influence also stretches across the Sahara Desert to Timbuktu, in Mali, and to parts of northern Nigeria. The style of architecture found in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa was mainly influenced by early European colonialists and Christian missionaries, whose buildings were characterised by long, classroom-style houses with verandas, typically covered with hip roofs of corrugated metal sheets. For the rest of the continent, situated in the hinterland and cut off from coastal borders and direct foreign influences, buildings were just basic primitive African architecture consisting of round earthen huts, roofed with bamboo trusses and clad with dry thatch. Despite their ostensible similarities, each of these traditional regional architectural styles still has its own individual peculiarities, which differentiates it from the others; this is seen either in the constituent materials or the geometry, depending on the locality in which it is found.
beyond the glitz of her glass and concrete architecture, there is a bona fide need for her local people to still feel culturally connected to their immediate architecture. Hence, it is important that they are not entirely dispossessed of their cultural identity as a result of urban development; rather, there should still be some measure of connection between the past and the present. Despite its current crude and primitive nature, traditional African archi-tecture has the capacity to serve as a springboard and source of inspiration for a new variant of urbanisation in Africa. While it must be conceded that traditional African architecture as it is today possesses physical, structural and material limitations that could make it impossible to satisfy every project brief, its exclusion altogether means it will probably never have the opportunity to further evolve beyond its current state. The reality is that Africa has no choice but to invest in the research and development of traditional African architecture, not just for cultural reasons but most importantly for its affordability. In fact, the affordability and ease of construction of traditional African architecture has the potential to become the best alternative to rapidly balance the enormous low-income housing deficit. This is because low-income housing is a very important facet of any urban development, as well as a non-negotiable social right; therefore, it is important that African states deploy substantial resources to provide mass social housing for their people, using indigenous architecture. This is a much more effective alternative than leaving low-income housing entirely in the hands of Shylock developers, who are currently populating the landscape with sub-standard housing which is lacking in both cultural and structural integrity and retails at outrageously exorbitant rates.
It is also important to note that, traditional African architecture possesses an appreciable level of sustainability, and even under very stringent green rating systems and with very little effort, it possesses the inherent capacity to earn credits for regional materials, rapidly renewable materials and low energy use. Long before the mantra of sustainable architecture ever saw the light, Africa was already building with sustainable materials; not because she had caught the ‘green bug’ then, but out of necessity, using only materials gathered from her immediate surroundings. Yet, as the sustainability crusade gradually picks up steam across the continent, it is ironic that the continent is discarding one of the world’s most sustainable design precedents that has ever been set.
Even in the midst of the existing discriminatory urban development pattern across the continent, there is still a handful of worthy precedents that are being set daily. Although they are few and far between, they give hope for the rebirth of a neo- African architecture which combines influences from traditional African architecture with contemporary design to create a new style that is still related to the former. These projects, through their design, have not only evolved from the existing indigenous architecture of their localities, but they also employ local manpower, materials and technologies to create their own brand of contemporary African architecture; they have also, without doubt, clearly demonstrated how social housing should evolve. These projects not only integrate those on the lowest rung of society into the scheme of things, but they also leave intact the cultural identity of the local people they seek to serve.
The Outliers
EL Studio Netherlands, in partnership with BKVV Architects of the Netherlands, was commissioned by the Dutch Chipata Foundation to design a hospice in the city of Chipata, in the Eastern Province of Zambia. The project, which according to its architects is being built entirely with labour provided by the local community, using locally available materials, is a rotunda building inspired by the traditional Zambian earthen huts and has the capacity to host between twenty-four and forty-eight patients, with a total carbon footprint smaller than that of the average European home. It aims to provide a hospitable environment for terminally ill patients to stay in and receive treatment. The rooms will all be connected by the circulation space: a circular corridor which makes a ring around the central hut that serves as the nurse’s station and dispensary. The multiple openings around the exterior wall are designed to naturally cool and ventilate the entire structure, thereby almost eliminating the need for mechanical ventilation. This type of development can serve as a template for institutional buildings in local African communities, not just because it is well within the ambit of Africa’s resources, but also because it provides good living and working conditions for those at the lowest end of the spectrum of the social pyramid; it seamlessly integrates them into the social fabric of society, so they will then be naturally inspired to become a part of it.
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The New Rugo: A Traditional Burundian and Rwandan House
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We believe that planning has to respond to current needs, but also to be relevant for a wealthier and more developed Africa. That’s why affordable housing for the poorest has to be able to evolve as comfort standards evolve. By merging the two typologies, the two structures, we designed a new one, the New Rugo. The New Rugo is evolutive, allowing changes as Burundian and Rwandan societies evolved. The New Rugo is a typology, easily replicable, environmentally aware. With low cost technologies and cultural appropriateness, we developed a system empowering fragile communities in Burundi and in Rwanda.”- George Periclès Creative Design Studio
The new Rugo is a housing project in Rwanda and Burundi, inspired wholly by the traditional Rwandan and Burundian rural architecture, which establishes a visible connection between this housing and the pristine cultural values of the local Burundian and Rwandan people. It is the modern reinvention of the old without losing any of its original cultural responsiveness and connections. It highlights the importance of incorporating local cultures into the design of settlements and a low-cost housing solution that explores the status quo by adapting it to a new
contemporary setting.
The word Rugo comes from the name of the traditional Rwandan and Burundian houses, typically built with thatched roofs and adobe walls. The building, which was designed by George Periclès Creative Design Studio, is a multi-tenant structure of linked hexagonal buildings with courtyards serving as communal spaces, where tenants share amenities like water and play areas. This is, reminiscent and, very typical of traditional rural African settings, where socialising is an integral part of the native culture. The new Rugo is a contemporary housing solution that creates development without tampering with the traditional anthropology of the dwellers. In rural Africa, proximity to kith and kin is a very important consideration when designing settlements; hence these settlements are built closely together so they provide neighbours with ample opportunity to socialise. This is because although communal living is almost non-existent in Africa’s big cities and towns, it is still practiced in small towns and villages because it is believed to help strengthen family and communal bonds. In this kind of settlements, neighbours share utensils or partake in communal cooking and engage in joint communal activities like cooking and washing and share tales of the everyday happenings around them. Of course, this isn’t the case in the big cities and urban centres, but for the rural folks it is one bit of cherished culture that has remained until this day.
References
IMF. (2013). World Economic Outlook. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, Publication Services.
Redvers, L. (2012, November 23). Angola’s trophy city a ‘ghost town’. Retrieved April 27, 2013, from Mail & Guardian: http:// mg.co.za/article/2012-11-23-00-angolan-trophy-city-a-ghost-town
