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People and cities

Five steps for success:

•Cities must be seen as drivers of Africa’s diversified growth and jobs. Urban-centred growth represents a dramatic change from the export of natural resources, which has been central to most African economies.

•Urgent action is the only way to address the pending urban-population explosion.

•Focus on city-level funding and authority as a means to redefine the resources to enable local governments to meet the challenge of quickly expanding populations.

•Promote density of housing and cost-efficient transport solutions to realise the urban dividend.

•Focus on the provision of local security as the door through which much else follows.

Challenges and opportunities: So far, the rapid increase in Africa’s population has not been matched with a growth in jobs. Urbanisation in Africa does not yet appear to be delivering the improvements in economic growth and quality of life achieved elsewhere, notably in Asia. Instead, African cities are growing in a largely unplanned manner, stretching existing infrastructure and services to beyond breaking point and failing to improve productivity and create jobs. Whether a population surge turns out to be a good or a bad thing depends, largely, on how government responds, enables job creation and improves the absorption of people into the private sector.

Key statistics: According to the 2016 Ibrahim Index of African Governance, 33 African countries have experienced a decline in safety and rule of law since 2006, nearly half of them quite substantially. Almost half of the countries on the continent recorded their worst ever score in this category in the period 2013 to 2015. The index has ‘demonstrated a strong link between Safety & Rule of Law and governance performance’.1

Hillbrow is the most densely populated part of the City of Johannesburg. It’s a potpourri of nationalities, customs, cuisine and language, a blur between informal and formal, legal and illegal. A dip into its labyrinth reveals a fable of the modern African city.

Our guide is Brighton.2 He left the army in Zimbabwe in 2005 ‘for greener pastures,’ he says, and has been working as a security guard at a school since 2009. ‘No single group dominates the suburbs,’ he says as we drive east, although, of course, there are pockets of ethnic flavours. ‘More Somalis and Bangladeshis live in Mayfair,’ he notes, as we drive down the high street. ‘There are more students here,’ he says, pointing at a young couple lounging on a balcony in Berea. ‘But everyone is mixed up – Nigerians, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans. We all become South Africans to survive.’

The suburb of Hillbrow is a rectangular shape running north–south, covering a little over a square kilometre and officially housing 100 000 people, perhaps twice that number, compared to Johannesburg’s average of just under 2 500 per square kilometre.

One of the 50 largest cities worldwide, and the wealthiest in South Africa, Johannesburg was founded on the riches beneath its soil. It is home to 7 million people, the bulk of the population of the province of Gauteng, the heartland of South Africa’s economy.

Today, Hillbrow is synonymous with a collapse in governance in the 1990s and the flight of wealthy white South Africans to the north of Johannesburg or farther afield. There is in-your-face evidence of illegality – Brighton eagerly points out a queue of men waiting to buy drugs from a plain-clothes policeman who has hopped out of the back of a passing van in O’Reilly Road. When asked what sort of drugs, ‘Marijuana, crack, [the heroin-based] unga … whatever you want’ comes the reply. It seems drink is the greater devil, however, with constant ‘watch out for him’ references to the stone-faced drunk standing dead centre in the road or tottering off the pavement.

But it’s not so much the illegality as the coexistence of informality and more formal trade that is striking. Food kiosks and vegetable sellers operate on the sidewalk in front of the ubiquitous pawn shops, shebeens, barbers’ shops, surgeries, strip joints, electronics outlets and butcheries, no-name businesses alongside high-street brands. Hillbrow’s businesses are, if anything, increasingly off the grid. A visit to the electronics traders in Esselen, Twist and Kotze streets, mostly run by Ibos and Bangladeshis, hints at a trend of increasing informalisation. No television licences are asked or quoted for, as is legally obligatory, or VAT, for that matter. For them, the cost of joining the formal sector, including paying tax, is greater than the advantages. It’s all in the margin.

Further east, on Yeoville’s Raleigh Street, is the relatively orderly Congo Market. Inside, stalls run by Congolese and Nigerians sell blackened, smoked vundu, mostly from Zambia, salted, eviscerated tilapia, yams, brightly coloured Congolese wax fabrics, orange chillies and chilli oil, aubergines, sundry tins of groceries and plastic packets of tofu, rice and semolina. The prices are all much the same from stall to stall, and competitive.

Overlooking Hillbrow is Ponte City, a 54-storey, 173-metre-high steel and concrete toilet roll, the tallest residential tower on the continent. It was built in 1975, when Hillbrow enjoyed the moniker the ‘Manhattan of Africa’.

Designed by 29-year-old architect Rodney Grosskopff, as a symbol of 1970s skyscraper living and aspiration, Ponte was one of the first victims of inner-city decay as the middle class and their businesses fled for safer and more prosperous surrounds. By the late 1990s, rubbish had piled up five storeys high inside the building’s inner cylinder as the tower found itself engulfed by an area rife with crime, drugs, prostitution and guns. There was talk of turning it into a prison. Fifteen years later, however, Ponte City has been renovated and revitalised, and is now home to 3 000 students, professionals and workers, including South Africans, Nigerians, Congolese and Zimbabweans, all carefully choosing to ignore the Nigerians washing cars at the entrance and holding their noses against the thick smoke from burning rubbish. The monthly rent for a large flat is R5 000 – it’s good value and convenient, whatever the challenges of negotiating the vagaries of Primrose Terrace and Ponte’s neighbourhood.

‘Our residences have got to go up,’ says Grosskopff, ‘otherwise we’ll never get to work with the commuting distances and traffic involved. The question,’ he asks, ‘is not whether it’s the logical or scientific way to go; it’s whether society prefers it and will allow it?’3 And living where you work does significantly reduce the premium of transport.

Hillbrow is not an isolated case of unplanned African growth and unrealised development potential – far from it. Just past the signs declaring ‘No Idling Allowed’, a facsimile of two giant elephant tusks welcomes visitors to Mombasa’s Daniel arap Moi International Airport. At the start of 2016, major construction was under way, widening Barack Obama Road first to four lanes and then to eight from the Changamwe roundabout to Mariakani, 36 kilometres north-west of Mombasa, on the road to Nairobi.

The route through Mombasa to the Makupa Causeway, linking Mombasa Island to the mainland, is lined with dusty roadside stalls, their tatty tin frontages offering similar items: food, vegetables, fruit, Pepsi, Coke, airtime, shoes, clothes, cosmetics, books, building materials, and just about anything imaginable. The truck in front, its tailgate emblazoned with the words ‘Believe me I will be there’, weaves to avoid the tuk-tuks (when you switch on the engine they pronounce their name), boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis) and matatus (minibuses), and works its way around the other trucks straddling the pavement and road.

The Vatican Hotel, despite its name, offers little divine guidance at the busy Makupa roundabout leading onto Kenyatta Avenue, named after the country’s founding leader, where hawkers offer 10-shilling bags of peanuts, sliced pineapples, bananas and second-hand clothes. The traffic weaves to avoid the barrows laden with vegetables, fruit and household commodities, and their sweating human pushers. The four-lane Nyali Bridge, spanning the sea, provides the only route north and is next to the site of a new, top-end residential apartment development. To the south, plans are afoot to build a bridge to supplement the existing clumsy and time-consuming ferry service.

Visitors to Mombasa would have been astounded by the ease of the flow of traffic today, even without the new infrastructure under construction. Apparently, according to the driver, President Uhuru Kenyatta came to the coast for a month and things got tidied up. The solution was simple: increase the number of lanes depending on the flow of traffic, and allocate traffic officers to police key intersections.

As the primary port in East Africa, Mombasa is the centre of the coastal tourism industry in Kenya. Although it has the potential to serve as a motor of growth for Kenya and the East Africa region, Mombasa processes the same amount of cargo (780 000 containers4) in one year that the world’s most active ports (Shanghai and Singapore) handle in a week.5

Beyond the port, Mombasa continues to struggle to develop its economy. It’s a costly place to do business. Despite being the second-largest city in Kenya and one of its most prominent economic hubs, it ranked only sixth out of 13 Kenyan cities in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index.6 Access to finance is limited, and job and market information scarce.7 About 80 per cent of Mombasa’s population of 1.2 million live in informal settlements, which cover more than 90 per cent of the land area, and almost 40 per cent live below the poverty line.8

The majority participate only, or at least predominantly, in the informal sector, doing low value-added jobs.

There are also layers of insecurity, related both to Mombasa’s role as a transit point for drugs and the legendary corruption among port officials and customs officers. The city’s predominantly Muslim character adds further complexity. Between 2012 and 2014, for example, no fewer than 21 Islamic clerics were gunned down in the city. Radicalism and criminality have appeal in the absence of other opportunities.9 Some of Mombasa’s youth have, in particular, declared that they are ‘no longer part of Kenya’.10

Given its strategic location as the gateway to East Africa, Mombasa is so far a missed development opportunity, where the downsides of crime and terrorism both demonstrate and exacerbate the costs of weak governance. Dealing with the root causes will demand action on a wide range of fronts, from improving the efficiency of the port, which requires hitherto unseen levels of political will, to breaking and reshaping corrupt systems, to investment in both hard and soft educational and vocational infrastructure. It’s a big task.

Hillbrow and Mombasa are illustrative of Africa’s looming urban and demographic challenges, though cities hold out the promise of accelerated development.

The advantage of cities

In Europe the focus is now on African migration across the Mediterranean. The International Organization for Migration estimates that more than a million migrants arrived in Europe by sea in 2015 and almost 34 900 by land, compared to a total of 280 000 arrivals by land and sea for the whole of 2014. And these figures do not include those who got into Europe undetected.11 Migrants come mainly from West Africa, the Horn of Africa and, since 2013, those fleeing the civil war in Syria. The figures could be much greater, now and in the future. There may be as many as 1 million waiting in Libya alone to continue their often perilous journey across the sea to Europe.12

But, within Africa, for the last hundred years there has been a much greater number of migrants of a different sort – a number that is rapidly growing. These are the flow of rural Africans into cities, as Figure 1.1 illustrates, as well as the flow of Africans over their borders into other African states.

Historically, such urban growth has been good news for development and jobs. Urban agglomerations help provide economies of scale for people as a labour pool and ease the delivery of infrastructure and services. They also solve two major challenges to improved productivity: connectivity and energy.13 As developed countries move away from manufacturing towards services as a source of employment, density may become less critical, given that many can work from home. By contrast, however, in those economies where jobs are driven by manufacturing, which some in Africa hope to benefit from, density of housing with efficient transport to the workplace is all important. Success in mass transportation requires density in accommodation.

Africa has so far missed out on urban-led growth. According to a 2007 study of 90 developing countries, Africa is the only region where urbanisation does not correlate with poverty reduction (as highlighted in the Introduction).14 And, according to the Brookings Institute, unlike other regions, African urbanisation has not been driven by increasing agricultural productivity or by industrialisation. Rather, African cities are centres of consumption, where the rents extracted from natural resources are spent by the rich. Thus, African cities have largely failed to install the infrastructure that has made cities elsewhere places of prosperity.15

Instead of capitalising on the advantages of agglomerations, there remain acute problems in Africa (as will be explained in Chapter 7), notably in electricity generation and transmission, and where the effect of migration has been to produce more and more congestion, rather than enhanced connectivity. More than half of sub-Saharan Africans in cities live in slums, with just 40 per cent having access to proper sanitation facilities. These are the same ratios as in 1990. Africa’s urban child dependency ratio is 40 per cent higher than in Latin America and 65 per cent higher than that of Asia.

Cities inhabit the space where implementation occurs, where the policy rubber has to hit the road, where policymakers come face to face with society’s problems. Although the role of municipal actors is frequently overlooked, their direct influence is often greater than that of presidents. Indeed, the rise of national governments in policymaking and implementation is a relatively recent global phenomenon, spurred on by globalisation, the need to raise armies (especially given the last century’s world wars) and the national importance of managing inequality.

City governments are inherently pragmatic and less partisan, since their job is to ‘clean the streets’ regardless of their political allegiances. Mayors are by necessity not legislative but executive. Or, as Teddy Kollek, who ran Jerusalem for 28 years, once put it in trying to negotiate between Israeli and Palestinian communities, ‘Spare me your sermons, and I’ll fix your sewers.’16

Still, for all their coalface responsibilities, cities mostly lack the policy tools. As Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, an expert on urban development, said, ‘Cities are the best path we know out of poverty. They are the best transformers of civilizations. But, there are also demons that come with density.’17

Figure 1.1: Africa: Urbanisation and population, 1950–2050

Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DataQuery/

One challenge is that the political environment and boundaries have not kept pace with the rate and reality of expansion. There is a need for a clear demarcation between city and national responsibility, combined with the appropriate delegation of authority and allocation of resources to city governments. In an era when mayors are supposed to ‘rule the world’, given the burgeoning size of their immediate constituencies, local authorities have limited authority and few funding tools and resources.

A second challenge is that of inequality, and the stresses and strains this presents. For example, the centrepiece of South Africa’s tourism industry, Cape Town, is nevertheless a study in contrasts. Drawn by the backdrop of opulent coastal mansions, pristine beaches and ‘old’ wealth, visitors arriving at Cape Town International Airport are often shocked to pass through miles of squalid squatter camps where basic sanitation and electricity remain elusive luxuries. A reminder of the injustices of apartheid, the city’s wealth inequality is mirrored by spatial divisions. The poor and gang-ridden suburbs of the Cape Flats and the townships spread interminably away from the heart of the city, with the consequence that the people who live in those areas have a long way to travel to their places of work.

Still, the city remains an attractive destination for migrants from all over the country and the continent. The result has been massive pressure on housing, basic service delivery and public-transport systems, and more than anything, jobs.

According to Tim Harris, former Head of Investment for the City of Cape Town government, the authorities have three priorities for tackling the new urban-migration challenge: connecting citizens through investments in public transport and information and technology infrastructure; maintaining a high level of delivery for basic services as the city expands (including free allocations of water and electricity for those unable to pay); and ensuring sufficient and appropriate human-settlement solutions.18

Yet, like most African cities, Cape Town has very limited scope to act independently of central government in dealing with its specific challenges – or, more positively, to play to its strengths. The reasons for this, as in other areas, come down to money and autonomy.

Currently, the city, with its population of 3.7 million, has an annual budget of R36 billion ($2.6 billion), which includes R6 billion for capital expenditure – compared to the national budget of R1.25 trillion for a total population of 52 million. Eighty per cent of the city’s income comes from the premiums charged on utilities (especially electricity), property rates and other charges. The remainder comes from three sources: a tranche from the national government determined according to a countrywide formula; conditional grants from the Treasury (which remove the discretion for municipalities to spend as they may need to); and a portion of the fuel levy raised on sales within the municipal boundary. The vast proportion of these funds (like other municipal budgets) is spent on maintaining and expanding infrastructure, and delivering basic services, including water, electricity and refuse removal, on the back of that infrastructure. The shortage of funding is worsened by ‘unfunded mandates’, including library services and clinics, where the city is ‘left out of pocket by hundreds of millions of rands for services provided which are not matched by income or allocations from higher structures,’ says Harris.19

This fiscal and political environment severely limits the latitude of Cape Town, along with other South African cities, to act independently, for example, in designing strong investment incentives. It can offer ‘non-financial’ incentives: accelerated planning approvals, biodiversity offsets, an investment facilitation touch-point in the mayor’s office, and the overall ‘lifestyle’ advantages. On the financial side to support investments, the city has been able to offer discounted electricity tariffs and waive various application fees and development contributions that would normally be incurred by infrastructure projects. It can also offer discounted rates and land leases, though this is controversial within the administration, not least given the budgetary funding imperative.

From the city’s vantage, the most important reform allowing municipalities to shape their destiny would be the devolution from central government of the powers of taxation. Any intent in this regard on the part of the drafters of the constitution quickly ran afoul of the low capacity of many subnational governments and a move towards centralism by the national government. This has removed the potential for tax competition between subnational governments, a key tool in spurring development worldwide.

A common challenge for cities is to make full use of the potential for connectivity offered by high density of accommodation. But African cities generally expand by sprawling and not through increased density of the sort seen in Hillbrow, stretching out and not up.

But Africa can, again, learn from others. For example, the success of Curitiba, a city in southern Brazil, demonstrates how, with clever thinking, thorough planning, continuity in leadership and determined execution, a city can deal with apparently insurmountable problems. Curitiba is famous for how its invention and application of a novel transport system changed its transport environment and therefore the city’s connectedness. But a closer look reveals that it was just one element of a master plan that has delivered real improvement across the city and to the lives of its people.

Curitiba and bus rapid transport20

Curitiba, with a population of 2 million, is the capital of the Brazilian state of Paraná. In 2010 Curitiba was awarded the annual Global Sustainable City Award on account of its excellence in urban development. It deserved it, because it really did innovate and integrate.

‘We have many visitors from China, South Africa, Colombia and other countries,’ says Silvia Ramos of Urbanização de Curitiba, the transport regulator.

It’s little wonder. Curitiba originated a surface transport system, known as bus rapid transport (BRT), which has become an international role model that others have sought to replicate. There are now more than 250 cities worldwide with BRTs.

Getting this to work involves more than just mobility. Curitiba has successfully used a relatively cheap surface public-transport system to transform the city, not just in terms of the movement of people, but also in terms of how it uses land and public spaces. Integration has been achieved by connecting people, and this has been key to the city’s economic progress.

Back in 1966, when the city was drawing up a master plan, they looked at models from France and the UK, among others. But the cost of an underground was deemed prohibitive for the city, despite its agricultural-based wealth. So they opted for a surface transport system with dedicated bus lanes, which was about a 10th of the cost of an underground railway.

When the system was first implemented in 1974, it moved just 50 000 passengers annually. Today, the BRT carries 1.7 million people a day over a network of 85.6 kilometres, along six lines with an operating fleet of 1 368 buses, some capable of carrying 250 passengers, and pausing at 6 500 stops. The buses drive 328 kilometres each day and are supplied and run by private companies, which are paid by the kilometre. Passengers pay a standard fare of just under a dollar regardless of the length of the journey. This fee cross-subsidises those, mostly the poor, who live farther out from the city centre.

Jaime Lerner has been a pivotal figure in this system. He was part of the original team that decided on the winning bid for the city’s master plan and, in 1965, helped create the Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano de Curitiba (Curitiba Institute of Urban Planning and Research – IPPUC), a research, monitoring and implementation body funded by the municipality.

Lerner was elected mayor three times, the first in 1971. Although he implemented a number of important changes in the city, including establishing more parks, creating an apprenticeship system for deprived young people, and launching a successful recycling scheme, the BRT remains his greatest achievement, and Curitiba’s gift to the world.

‘You need to think of the BRT,’ he says, ‘not just as a transport system, but as a city design. It has been the engine of the city’s growth. We started small, but for each stage to solve each problem, we have used innovation.’

Not only have the number of lanes and buses increased exponentially, but the services have also radically improved. More than 90 per cent of the fleet is adapted for disabled users. Various feeder lines are fully integrated, with a range of bus types and sizes. Tubular stations improved the passenger experience. The three-lane systems of the BRT, the slow and fast car lanes, and staggered BRT alignment stations were introduced to reduce hold-ups. And now increasing numbers of buses use biofuel, while the electric and hybrid ‘Hibri-bus’ is imminent.

‘Everything in Brazil is dedicated to the car,’ says Lerner. ‘For example, there are at least 5 million cars in São Paulo alone, each car taking up 25 square metres of space on the road and in parking. This is the size of a small housing unit. Even if half of this was dedicated instead to housing, we could house another 2.5 million people closer to their place of work. But to do this, we have to provide public transport, to turn the space for cars from private to public.

‘Back in the 1970s, when we did it, it was said that every city which achieved a population of 1 million should have a subway. As we did not have the money, instead we asked: What is a subway? The answer was, it is a system that is fast and has good frequency, so you don’t have to wait. So, since we did not have the resources to go underground, we asked, “Why not the surface?” So we took the existing streets, and linked them to the structure of growth of the city – where we linked and integrated living, working, leisure and mobility.’

‘This is why Curitiba,’ he notes, ‘is different. It involved the renovation and evolution of the existing system.’

The BRT has resulted in an estimated reduction of about 27 million car trips annually. Given such efficiencies, Curitiba’s growth has been above 7 per cent over the last three decades, while per capita income is 30 per cent higher than the national average. Ironically, Curitiba is now the second largest producer of cars in Brazil, and also has a lively services and high-tech sector.

Curitiba has been able to make dramatic inroads into the perennial and similar challenges facing Brazil’s cities: transport, governance, infrastructure and security. Yet remarkably few other Brazilian cities have sought to emulate its success. The reason, says Lerner, is very simple: politics. The problem, he believes, is that ‘decisions today are closely tied to having consensus, but democracy is not consensus, rather conflict wisely managed’. Rather than attempting a perfect solution, which will take time, if not for ever, to be implemented, there is a need for pragmatism: ‘Improvement needs a start. You need to have a demonstration effect sometimes to get things moving.’

A key reason for Curitiba’s comparative success has been consistency in planning and implementation.

Daniele Moraes is an architect at the IPPUC. She reminds us that the 1965 master plan was not the first in Curitiba’s history. The first city plan was produced in 1853, which was followed 90 years later by the Agache Plan, which laid out a high-density city centre with suburbs radiating outwards – the design trend of the time – for the population of 180 000. The winning bid for the 1965 plan, by which time the city had 500 000 inhabitants, built on the Agache scheme but focused on a combination of land use, roads and public transport to deliver a better environment, and social and economic development. Since then there have been two further revisions, in 2004 and 2014.

It has not just been about plans, but continuity in terms of people as well, explains Moraes. She points out that ‘Curitiba has enjoyed six mayoral terms – 24 years – of mayors from IPPUC. Jaime Lerner, who served for three terms, Rafael Greca, who still works at IPPUC, and Cassio Taniguchi, who served two terms. They were all also from the same political group which ran the municipality for 40 years.’ She adds, ‘Jaime Lerner was a shrewd politician and diplomat. He taught children about recycling, for example, and in so doing created a whole generation concerned about urban planning and the environment. He created a lot of support for change.’

Critical mass is important too. A municipal-funded institution, the IPPUC has a staff of 160, of whom half are architects and engineers.

Of course, there are challenges. Noted local economist Carlos Guimaraes of FESP (the São Paulo School of Engineering), a private Brazilian university with a focus on commerce, observes that there is a difference between the IPPUC team and the ‘professors now in City Hall who are very theoretical about things, but they don’t know how to make them happen’. And there are always funding shortages, reminds his colleague Luis Fernando Ferreira da Costa because Brazil remains a very centralised country. ‘Taxes go from the cities to the states to the federal centre, but the amount that comes back depends partly on politics. It also reflects the size of the federal government: everyone in Brazil wants to work for the government. We need greater decentralisation and greater autonomy, like the United States, so that the states can raise and spend their own taxes.’ Cape Town is not alone.

‘Solving problems,’ Lerner notes, ‘is not related to scale, or the size of the city, or financial resources. The challenge is in organisation, and in creating shared responsibility between citizens and government, and the public and private sectors. Otherwise you won’t get the outcome you need.’

Curitiba’s success has been exported worldwide, including to towns in Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa and Morocco. Oscar Edmundo Diaz worked to implement the TransMilenio BRT system in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, together with Mayor Enrique Peñalosa. The system started in 2000 with two corridors, 400 000 passengers and four private operators. By 2016 it had expanded to 12 routes, 2.5 million passengers and 10 operators. Some routes were carrying 52 000 passengers per hour in each direction, equivalent to the most efficient metros in the world. But this is still deemed insufficient for a city of 9 million, and reflects challenges, too, in opening up more routes.

Peñalosa returned to office after a 14-year absence in 2015. One of his challenges was to meet the 2015 target of 366 kilometres of corridors on the network and to ensure that 85 per cent of the population live within 1 kilometre of a mass transport system by 2030. Diaz also returned as a special adviser to the mayor, having spent time in the interim assisting African countries with their own BRT plans. He highlights, with the benefit of reflection, the importance of managing the politics of routes, providing security on buses and adequate ticketing facilities, and the need for density as prerequisites for the success of mass transportation systems. ‘Build up’, he says, ‘or these systems cannot deliver.’21

Managing the challenges that allow full exploitation of the advantages of urbanisation is, however, not just a planning problem. Development solutions hinge on having appropriate skills and investing in creating such skills. They also require improving security and ensuring the rule of law. Poor security works directly against the advantages of urbanisation, since the answer to poor security in the cities is to keep people apart, behind high walls or on separate transport systems.

As noted in the Preface, Africa is the most violent continent in the world, experiencing two-thirds of non-state fatalities worldwide.22 The Ibrahim Index of African Governance for 2016 notes that weaknesses in the provision of safety and the rule of law on the continent have ‘held back further governance progress’. Some 33 countries ‘have experienced a decline in safety and rule of law since 2006, 15 of them quite substantially’. As the index notes, all four subcategories within the safety and rule of law category show negative trends, with personal safety and national security showing the largest deteriorations at the subcategory level. Moreover, almost half of the countries on the continent recorded their worst ever score in this category within the last three years. The index concludes there is a ‘strong link between Safety & Rule of Law and governance performance’.23

The on-the-ground reality of such statistics can be seen in parts of Cape Town.

The security dimension

Father Craven Engel has the stocky physique of a rugby player. Just like his famous namesake, Doctor Danie Craven, he represented South Africa at scrumhalf.

For 27 years he has worked in the once coloured-only township of Hanover Park, Cape Town, one of the most violent neighbourhoods in the world. The annual murder rate in and around its cinder-block two-storey flats has been as high as 100 deaths per 100 000 residents. Due to high rates of violence in other townships, including Nyanga, Langa, Khayelitsha, Kraaifontein, Delft, Bishop Lavis and Philippi, Cape Town is the most violent city in South Africa as well as Africa.24 In the reporting year from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016, the Philippi East police precinct recorded the highest murder rate in the country at 203.1 per 100 000 residents, followed by Gugulethu at 140.1 per 100 000, and Nyanga at 130.6 per 100 000 people.25 Indeed, at 52 murders per 100 000, eight times higher than the global rate, Cape Town is among the world’s most dangerous cities, in the company of Caracas in Venezuela, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, and San Salvador in El Salvador.

Hanover Park, at just two square kilometres, is formally divided by the police into two sectors. In reality, though, as the Google Earth map displayed in Engel’s conference room illustrates, it is fragmented into several gang-run communities: Cowboy Town, Back Streets, The States, The Taliban Area, The Valley of the Plenty and The Jungle. Each is controlled by a grouping that is essentially an affiliate of two predominant major gangs, the Mongrels (under the ‘British flag’) and the Americans. The Americans have recently spawned another affiliate – labelled ISIS – though the pastor is understandably keen to downplay the religious dimension in an already fraught and volatile environment.

Father Engel runs a programme under the Pentecostal Church, funded by the City of Cape Town, to prevent violence, mediate between gangs and rehabilitate their members. Five ‘interrupters’, all former senior gang members, are employed along with the same number of outreach workers; there are also four data capturers and researchers. The team monitor security events using a system of ‘shot-spotters’, microphones installed on street lights linked to a Google Earth system and cellphones. This technology allows real-time monitoring of shootings, and immediate intervention and mediation. Although they share ‘analytical’ information, the police here are little trusted or used. Indeed, there are claims that the increasingly heavy weapons used here – including 16- and 21-shot Uzis – have found their way into Hanover Park from police armouries.

Father Engel has plenty on his plate, with an average of between 40 and 50 murders a year. During May 2016, for example, 325 gunshots were logged in the township, with five dead and eight wounded from 36 gang-related incidents, about 30 per cent of which were related to drugs and turf wars. The rest of the violence, the pastor notes, is ‘sporadic’ – often tit-for-tat attacks. The day before we visited Ceasefire, Father Engel’s NGO, two gangsters were shot in retributive gunfights, one of them a bodyguard of just 15.

Gangs are a way of life, Father Engel admits, among Hanover Park’s 55 000 people. Unemployment is endemic here, despite the city’s relatively low overall rate of joblessness (21.1 per cent) compared to the South African average of 36.3 per cent. Gang members often leave school early, earning their ‘rank’ in prison – known as the ‘University of Crime’ – in a strict hierarchy defined by ‘generals’, ‘captains’ and ‘shooters’. Violent activities centre on the borders between the ganglands, where there is little movement of people, or where lighting is poor at night.

He says that the proportion of high-risk individuals in Hanover Park is less than 8 per cent of the population. ‘If you can get the violence out of the areas, just like you would use a toilet and sewer to remove waste, then a solution is possible.’ This is not easy, however, in an area where confidence is low, transport to places of work costly and insecurity pervasive. Father Engel has stepped in where the state has failed, stabilising the situation. But, for this to stick, more than a civil-society initiative is required. Sustained policing that deploys available technologies is one aspect, increasing the police-to-population ratio, averaging 439 officers per 100 000 people in Cape Town (with some areas, such as certain townships, well above this figure) towards the international norm of 220 to 100 000.26 There is an overlap between the lack of policing attention and the rates of violence, where just 15 areas of the city, says its mayoral security chief J.P. Smith, account for half the crime.27 Still, more will be needed, says Father Engel, ‘to create alternatives – jobs. If we can create jobs for just 10 per cent of them, then the rest will start dreaming.’ It is not surprising that in those police precincts in the Cape characterised by high murder levels, there are high levels of socio-economic inequality and increasing unemployment.28

Africa is not the only continent that has grappled with such challenges. Seemingly hopeless situations can quickly be turned around, within a generation. The story of Medellín, Colombia, illustrates this promise.

What success looks like

The turnaround of Medellín, the second-largest city in Colombia, has in part been due to better leadership and city planning. But it has also been made possible by a changed security environment in the city once eponymous with the drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Medellín once boasted the highest rates of violent crime in the world, reaching nearly 7 000 murders a year at the peak of Pablo Escobar’s reign in the early 1990s. By 2008, the figure was down to little more than 1 000 homicides, falling to 658 by 2014.29 In 1991, to use a different measure, Medellín experienced 381 homicides per 100 000 residents, twice as much as the rate 20 years later in Ciudad Juárez, then the epicentre of Mexico’s drug war. By 2015, Medellín had the same homicide rate as Washington DC.30

The spark for these improvements and the economic growth that followed came 20 years earlier, when Escobar was tracked down and killed by the authorities in a Medellín barrio in December 1993. His end signalled the advent of a new security and intelligence regime, a renewed war on drugs, and a whole-of-government approach to dealing with security and development.31 The election of the government of President Álvaro Uribe in 2002 in particular saw a dramatic turnaround in Colombia’s security situation by providing increased resources to the security services, greater spending on infrastructure and attention to detail by leadership to even the most remote areas of Colombia. This set in motion a process that enabled a truce to be agreed with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known as FARC) by the end of 2016.32

Policing is now controlled from Medellín’s high-tech dispatch centre located in the mayoral offices, where officers monitor feeds on giant television screens. The capabilities of the police have also grown hugely. By 2015, for example, there were 10 211 police officers for the estimated 3.5 million citizens living in the wider metropolitan area around Medellín,33 virtually double the number deployed 15 years earlier.34 At the same time, the quality of policing has improved, notably because of a higher percentage of graduate officers in the force35 and improved cooperation with the military.

Medellín is now a global trendsetter in urban development. For the city, as for Colombia as a whole, security has been the door through which much else has followed. There have also been important changes in the planning and infrastructure of the city, along with a realisation that security, like growth, depended on a different operating system, using public spaces better and linking outlying areas with the central business district (CBD). The Integral Urban Project provided the city’s so-called ‘gondola’ transport system of cable cars, which now connect various outlying informal settlements across extreme topography to the metro system and thus to the city centre. The project also encouraged development around the metro stations in the form of libraries and green spaces.

Line J of Medellín’s Metrocable network now passes over La Comuna 13, one of the city’s toughest barrios. Inaugurated in 2007, the funicular transport system connects the 28 000 inhabitants of the comuna, and others, to the centre of the city. The journey, which would once have taken hours of travelling up and down winding, narrow roads, takes 10 minutes, and costs just $1.

Looking down at the rusted tin roofs and red-brick dwellings perched on the hillside, a local policeman observed in 2014: ‘We had a problem at the start of the cable car. The locals were shooting at it from the ground.’ The security problem was solved by improved patrolling. Line J, one of three spanning the city, carries 30 000 people a day, the cable cars travelling quickly over the barrios at 16 kilometres per hour, dispatching people efficiently to San Javier Station, at the bottom, and at La Aurora, on the top of the hillside 2.7 kilometres away.

Once at San Javier Station, commuters hop onto the Metro, first opened for service in 1995, and built by a Spanish–German consortium. Smart and litter-free, the system’s 27 stations and modern carriages are a symbol of the change in Medellín’s fortunes. Once the town of Escobar, the city is now the epicentre of Colombia’s mining and manufacturing industries. The Metro carries half a million passengers daily, including 350 000 residents from the north-eastern quarter, where many of the working class live. It is breaking down the barriers between once disparate poor and rich areas, and enabling new business growth.

With construction costs for the Metrocable at $10 million per kilometre and the Metro itself costing $2 billion, developing the city’s transport system was a bold step. The use of the Metro as a development axis was recognised by Medellín’s planners as critical in meeting the city’s modern needs in a period of social change and instability. Medellín’s urban growth since the 1960s had filled the entire Aburra Valley with communities, where harsh living conditions were heightened by drug trafficking, joblessness and violence.

In this positive cycle, improved security has led to economic prosperity, which, in turn, has cemented stability. Medellín boasts some 1 750 export businesses, the largest number of any Colombian city, from textile manufacturers to services. They are supplemented by mining, electricity generation, construction and, increasingly, tourism. Medellín’s success is connected to openness, both between its own communities and to international markets.

These developments have helped change local attitudes and integrate communities into city life, merging the formal with the informal. Medellín gained the Urban Land Institute’s Innovative City of the Year award in 2013, beating New York and Tel Aviv in the process.

Moving up and with the times is not something most African cities have yet managed, at least not in quite the same positive way.

Conclusion: A new urban agenda

Medellín was, not that long ago, synonymous with a level of anarchy that even the most challenged African cities have yet to achieve. However, a dedicated government with a comprehensive security, economic and infrastructure plan was able to turnaround a situation that many had deemed hopeless. The critical ingredients were the recognition the severity of the situation and the leadership taking responsibility for both the problems and the solutions.

The positive lesson for African leaders from Medellín is that change can happen and even extraordinary difficult situations can be addressed in a relatively short period of time. There is another dimension too. Positive change in an urban environment affects proportionately greater numbers of people than in the rural areas, and in so doing releases considerable entrepreneurial dynamism and economic growth.

Achieving this demands a concerted effort by the state and its leaders. Sometimes, as in the case of Father Engel, there are heroic individuals who try their utmost to improve their neighbourhoods. However, they cannot ensure the security of even small areas, let alone highly complex and combustible African cities, and it is difficult for them to sustain their programmes. The dynamics of high population growth, lack of employment and rapid urbanisation can create large areas where government rule is not apparent, and criminals and others can move freely. As a result, the future, as long as ‘business as usual’ continues, is of increasingly anarchic urban areas where people attempt to pursue lives under great stress and insecurity. Given current policies, governments in Africa will not be able provide either the conditions or resources needed for cities to make best use of their inherent advantages of density and scale.

The solutions have to be vested in the overall political economy if urban environments are to provide an answer to Africa’s extreme challenges of social and economic exclusion. Within this framework, can a solution be found that links housing, financing, security, internet connectivity, transport and governance to education, economic growth, healthcare and job creation? Key in this is certainty in the rule of law and avoidance of corruption.

There is little gainsaying the extent of the African challenge. Africa’s current urban frameworks, as will be seen in Chapter 6, are less a product of positive push and pull factors than of desperation. Using this opportunity to deliver a different future involves an acceptance of, on the one hand, the need for density in housing and, on the other, the role that informal communities and business can positively play. Planning, governance and architecture, in this way, become less about building afresh and more about inserting structures into the informal sector and building on the resources and resourcefulness already present.36

Whatever the scale of these challenges, and the constraints of time and resources, Medellín illustrates that 20 years is long enough to fundamentally break the negative patterns of the past if good leadership and the right sets of incentives are in place. The challenge to African leaders is that such dramatic results require a sharp deviation from the status quo that gave birth to these conditions.

The security aspect cannot of course succeed alone. Committing substantial military and financial resources to contexts as diverse as Iraq and the DRC illustrates that there is no such thing as a security solution to a country’s problems. Security crackdowns might provide space, but a political and economic solution is required for longer-term stability.