COUNTERPOINTS

The Counterpoints series presents a critical account of

defining ideas, in and about Africa. The scope is broad,
from international development policy to popular
perceptions of the continent.

Counterpoints address “Big Picture” questions, without

the constraints of prevailing opinion and orthodoxy.
The arguments are forward-looking but not speculative,
informed by the present yet concerned with the future.

In publishing this series, Africa Research Institute hopes

to foster competing ideas, discussion and debate. The
views expressed in Counterpoints are those of the authors,
and not necessarily those of Africa Research Institute.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nancy Odendaal (School of Architecture, Planning and

Geomatics at the University of Cape Town) and James
Duminy (African Centre for Cities) provided additional
material and valuable advice.

The manuscript was edited by Edward Paice and Hannah Gibson.

Design and typesetting by Niki Wolfe.

Africa Research Institute would like to acknowledge the

generous assistance of Richard Smith, Chairman of the Trustees.

Published by Africa Research Institute, September 2013.

Africa’s cities are growing – and changing – rapidly. Without
appropriate planning, they will become increasingly chaotic,
inefficient and unsustainable. In many countries, planning
legislation dates back to the colonial era. It is ill-equipped to
deal with contemporary urban problems. A shortage of urban
planning and management professionals trained to respond
to urban complexity with progressive pro-poor approaches
exacerbates urban dysfunction.

As planning educators seek to train students for employment

within the existing system, the urban and rural planning
curricula of many planning schools are as outdated as planning
legislation. Some African countries have no planning school.
The reform and revitalisation of planning education – and
legislation – could contribute significantly to sustainable and
more equitable urban development in sub-Saharan Africa.

By Vanessa Watson and Babatunde Agbola

In 2012, planning students at Makerere University and members of the

National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda concluded a four-month
“urban studio”. The purpose of this unusual collaboration was to
survey living conditions in six Ugandan informal settlements. For many
of the students, this was their first experience of daily life in an informal
settlement. With residents and Federation staff acting as “community
professors”, and planning students contributing technical knowledge,
a vibrant two-way learning partnership was initiated.

Enumeration and mapping exercises provide invaluable evidence about

informal settlements. Many such settlements, throughout Africa, do
not even appear on official maps. At the conclusion of the urban studio
in Uganda, the students and Federation members presented reports
to the municipal authorities and communities. These included detailed
information on education, income and savings, land tenure and access
to basic services in the informal settlements. An indispensable resource
for guiding the planning of inclusive, pragmatic urban development in
the study areas had been created.

1
 Urban planners in Africa are confronted by a daunting task. An urban
crisis is being fuelled by growing numbers of inhabitants without
access to shelter, basic services or formal employment opportunities.
Vigorous, often unrestrained, development of any available and
well-located urban land is widespread. Environmental hazards are
escalating, compounded by waste, air pollution and the effects of
climate change. Conventional urban planning practices and systems
that remain trapped in the past are failing to counter these threats.

“
Planning is the single most important tool that
governments have at their disposal for managing

”
rapid urban population growth and expansion.

The prevailing image of urban and regional planning in Africa depicts

a disengaged, technical and apolitical profession. A more critical
view holds that planning is deeply political, its overriding purpose
being to further the interests of political and economic elites. There
is little enthusiasm for reform from within. Yet planning is the
single most important tool that governments have at their disposal
for managing rapid urban population growth and expansion. If
inclusive and sustainable planning replaced outdated, controlling
and punitive approaches it would underpin more equitable and
economically productive urban development in Africa.

Crucially, change depends on planners who are innovative problem-

solvers and willing to collaborate with all parties involved in the
development process, including local communities. Their actions
will need to be informed by explicit and progressive values. The
education of these future planners requires thorough reappraisal
of existing teaching methods, the introduction of new ones, and
remodelled curricula.

Old master plans…

In 2005, some 700,000 people were evicted from their homes in Harare,
Zimbabwe’s capital city. Operation Murambatsvina, or “Drive Out the
Rubbish” – also referred to as “Restore Order” and “Clean-Up” – was
legitimised by the 1976 Town and Country Planning Act. This was

2
in turn based on the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and
model town and country planning law widely implemented by the
British Colonial Office in Africa and the Caribbean.1 State-authorised
evictions carried out under the auspices of colonial-era legislation
have become a common feature of life in African cities. Planners are
often involved as the “handmaiden of state repression”.2

The master plans for many African cities were drawn up at a time when
current urban population growth rates and poverty levels were not
anticipated. The plan for Harare assumed an orderly and law-abiding
population that was willing to comply with zoning and building laws
designed for middle-income, mostly European, car-owning and formally
employed families. Long before 2005, the realities of land occupation
in the city bore no resemblance to official imaginings. In sub-Saharan
Africa, almost two-thirds of the urban population live in slums, lacking
acceptable shelter and basic services.3 For most inhabitants of Harare
and other African cities, outdated planning laws are an irrelevance – until
deployed against them by the vindictive or opportunistic.

The private property development sector is booming in Africa. The

number of housing estates and shopping malls is multiplying rapidly.
Most urban development in sub-Saharan Africa is occurring in a
completely non-planned and non-transparent manner – despite the
existence of master plans. Many cities along the West African coast do
not even have a master plan. Although some larger projects are satellite
developments, like the multibillion dollar Konza “Techno City”, 60km
south-west of Nairobi, developers are usually competing with shack-
dwellers for well-located land within city boundaries. Outdated and
rigid urban planning laws never anticipated this scenario.

In the absence of a well-resourced and functioning planning system,

development fosters dealmaking among the influential and financially
better-off – rather than compliance with accepted and transparent
planning processes. Private tenement block construction in and around
Kibera, Nairobi’s largest informal settlement, is a prime example of
this phenomenon. As most of the development does not conform
to planning or building regulations, it is as unauthorised as the
neighbouring shacks. The seven- or eight-storey tenements are largely
ignored by city authorities because they appear “formal” – or because

3
 of financial inducements. The fire, collapse and health risks of such
tenements are seldom subjected to rigorous official scrutiny.

“
Most urban development in sub-Saharan Africa
is occurring in a completely non-planned and

”
non-transparent manner.

The vision of the future for Africa’s cities was often shaped by
reference to cities in developed economies – like London, Paris
or New York. The master plan for Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city,
was based on the concept of the “garden city”, a quintessentially
British creation. The unanticipated scale of informal settlement
in contemporary Africa is typically ignored, or wished away, by
national governments and city authorities.

…new fantasies

A new genre of urban plan has recently emerged in Africa, usually

created by international architectural and engineering companies.
Nowadays, an urban future akin to that of Dubai, Singapore or Shanghai
is fancifully and inappropriately envisaged. The master plan for
Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where 80% of the inhabitants live in informal
settlements, is one of the most far-fetched examples – complete with
glass-box towers, landscaped lawns and freeways. It even features a
replica of “The Gherkin”, a skyscraper in the financial district of London.

The fantasy designs for African cities win awards. Typically, they nod in
the direction of the needs of shack-dwellers and purport to embrace other
laudable aims. But the implementation of plans that are unsustainable in
the extreme and inappropriate in terms of climate, available infrastructure
– particularly power – and affordability, exposes their shortcomings.
Few of the completed towers of Angola’s Nova Cidade de Kilamba are
occupied. This Chinese- and Brazilian-built development 20km south of
Luanda, designed to house half a million people, is simply too far away
from the capital city, and too expensive for most.

Master plans in sub-Saharan Africa – old and new – are almost always
drawn up by central governments. They are usually “top-down”

4
impositions informed by an anti-urban, anti-poor stance among
political leaders. Political and economic elites typically consider
removal to rural areas as being the best way of dealing with the urban
poor and unemployed – a point of view that overlooks the fact that
a majority of the poor inhabitants of African cities today were born
there. There are adherents to the Operation Murambatsvina approach
throughout the continent. This is symptomatic of a widespread denial
of the realities of contemporary urbanisation in Africa, not evidence
of the constructive management of urban transformation.

Old and new master plans are equally exclusionary, albeit in different
ways. Older plans, strongly influenced by colonial town planning, put
in place zoning schemes with mono-functional land use, plot sizes
and building regulations. The urban fantasies – more recent urban
master plans – assume either that the existing informal city can be
scraped away or that new “smart” or “eco” cities on greenfield sites
provide a better alternative to upgrading what is in situ.

Greater sprawl, rising inequality

The poor, the vast majority, have little choice in either circumstance. They
are being edged off better-located land with increasing frequency and
ferocity. As the “formal” city becomes ever more inaccessible, informal
settlement expands rapidly around, outside and beyond it. As one land
expert has put it, the poor have to step outside the law to survive.4

Current planning systems and practices ensure that social, economic

and spatial inequality will continue to rise in African cities. Instead of
allocating more of the state expenditure on urban infrastructure to
the provision of basic services to the poor, funds are diverted to new
developments that aim to attract investment and provide new homes
for the affluent minority. While those with adequate regular income
may be able to find rental housing in new “middle-class” suburbs,
on unplanned urban peripheries people are even more distant from
urban infrastructure and dislocated from basic services.

Sprawling development intensifies the effects of the scourges of African

cities – inadequate infrastructure and economic opportunity, and greater

5
 concentrations of people living in areas at high risk from flooding,
disease, fire or landslide. Conventional patterns of industrialisation
and formal job creation, which accompanied urbanisation in the global
North, are absent from most countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

A network for reform

Planning educators tend to train their students to operate within

existing planning systems. In 1999, academics attending a workshop
of three African planning schools* in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,
decided that this approach was no longer wholly appropriate.
Across the continent, planners and planning systems were failing
to meet the many and varied challenges of urbanisation. It was time
to try and revitalise the education of urban and regional planners.

The history of planning education in Africa is firmly ensconced in the

traditions and models of Europe – especially the UK – and the USA.
The curricula of African planning schools draw largely on the colonial
past and promote ideas and policies transferred from the global North.
Most planning text books used in Africa are produced for students in the
USA, the UK or other developed economies. The Association of African
Planning Schools (AAPS) was formed to mitigate the dominance of
unsuitable and irrelevant archetypes in planning education.

The principal objective of the fledgling AAPS network was to ensure

that future urban practitioners were equipped to respond effectively
and meaningfully to urbanisation in Africa. The gap between what
planning students were taught and the urban realities they confronted
after graduation needed to be reduced.

There was a shared belief within the network that even though
planning systems were broken, they were operated by individuals
who could interpret and implement them in different ways. If staff
and students could promote a different vision of urban planning,
systems could be challenged and change brought about from within.

From the outset, it was recognised that if planning schools were to

influence governments and planning departments, a pan-African network
*The three institutions were: Ardhi Institute (now Ardhi University), Dar es Salaam; Kwame Nkrumah
University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana; and University of Cape Town, South Africa.
6
would need to include as many institutions as possible. The distribution
of the 70 or more planning schools in Africa varies widely, as do their
educational approaches. Most countries have only one or two planning
schools. Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have no
planning schools, whereas Nigeria has 36 schools and South Africa
11. The École Africaine des Métiers de l’Architecture et de l’Urbanisme
(EAMAU), in Togo, admits students from 14 francophone countries. In
some countries, planning schools do not communicate with one another.

“
The gap between what planning students were
taught and the urban realities they confronted

”
after graduation needed to be reduced.

The establishment of a link with the Global Planning Education

Association Network (GPEAN), following the first World Planning
Schools Congress in 2001, was an essential spur to the AAPS. By the
end of 2007, membership had increased to 26 planning schools. Close
ties with the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, and the first of
three tranches of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, enabled the
network to launch its “Revitalising Planning Education in Africa” project.

New curricula

In 2008, the first major AAPS conference took place in Cape Town. It
was attended by academics from 22 member schools and focused
on planning curricula. Delegates were each asked to prepare a paper
on the most significant planning issues in their city or country,
setting out how local planning curricula did – or did not – respond
to these. Five main themes emerged from the papers:
• informality

• access to land

• climate change

• collaboration between planners, communities,

civil society and other interested parties

• mismatch between spatial planning and infrastructure planning

7
 Groups of delegates with common thematic interests were organised
into “communities of practice” tasked with producing papers on each
of the five themes. These were presented at the second major AAPS
conference in Dar es Salaam, in 2010, by which time the network had
expanded to 43 schools. There was general agreement at the conference
that the themes were largely unaddressed in African planning curricula.

“
The University of Zambia’s master’s programme is the

”
first in Africa fully to incorporate the issue of informality.

Educational reform is no easy task in most African universities – or

anywhere. Curriculum change is a highly centralised and usually
protracted process. Severe financial constraints are commonplace.
Underpaid staff undertake consultancy work to make ends meet,
library resources are poor, and there is a shortage of computers
and other essential equipment. Internet bandwidth is usually very
limited, technical support inadequate, and power outages frequent.

Despite these practical constraints, AAPS members drafted a new

two-year master’s degree curriculum that incorporated work on all
five themes. The pilot will be launched by the University of Zambia in
2013. It is consciously adapted to local issues and staff capacity and
embraces the use of community-based studios. Many of the first intake
of students are employed by Lusaka Municipality. At the third AAPS all-
schools conference in October 2012, in Nairobi, a draft undergraduate
planning curriculum incorporating the five themes was refined and is
ready for piloting. The University of Zambia’s master’s programme is
the first in Africa fully to incorporate the issue of informality.

The emphasis on a more positive and inclusive approach to urban

informality in research and teaching is the most contentious of the
AAPS’s objectives. Informality is widely regarded as synonymous
with illegality, inefficiency or unproductive chaos. Planning – modern,
orderly, emulating “clean” Western urban models – is equally
widely regarded as the antidote. Anti-informality still informs the
approach of many planning schools and educators, and appears to
be particularly strong in Nigeria. There, the educational accrediting
body, which has a high degree of control over planning curricula,
does not even specifically require informality to be addressed.

8
It could be argued that the emphasis on the five themes in the new
master’s and undergraduate curricula does not leave African planning
graduates well prepared for local job markets. On graduation, they
might be expected to implement outdated planning legislation,
or design golf courses or gated communities for the wealthy. But
unless planning students are exposed to the prevailing conditions
and trends in African cities, and encouraged to consult and interact
with local communities to assess how planning might best address
these, they will merely advance the marginalisation of the planning
profession – and of the poor – in sub-Saharan Africa.

Getting the shoes dirty

Planning educators and their students need “to get their shoes
dirty”. This imperative has been overlooked in traditional planning
education models – and by many practising planners. Local case
studies on the use of bicycle-taxis in Malawi, or resistance to
market removal in Ghana, or the informal recycling business in
Johannesburg, throw into stark relief the completely inappropriate
nature of current approaches to planning in African cities.

Case study research generates invaluable, nuanced teaching material

– as well as important contributions to our knowledge of African cities.
The lamentable deficiency of good data to assist planning practice and
policy development in Africa needs to be overcome. Many erroneous
assumptions about African urbanisation have gone unchallenged
for decades. Case study work is a pre-eminent means of addressing
the need to produce new knowledge relevant to practice, enhancing
skills and competencies, and establishing values that planers should
embrace in the course of their professional careers.

The AAPS organised three case study workshops in different

regions of sub-Saharan Africa between 2009 and 2011. For many
participants, the work entailed a different approach to gathering
and presenting data. They were more accustomed to producing
empirical – usually quantitative survey-based – urban research
reports. Others presented on the adoption of a case study
approach in their teaching and the benefits they had observed of

9
 placing students in urban learning studios, working closely with a
community or individual in the field.5

Work experience

Urban planners have historically been regarded by civil society

and community organisations as one of the main obstacles to
achieving more inclusive cities and greater utilisation of “bottom-
up” processes for upgrading informal settlements. Increasingly,
it is recognised that they are also potentially part of the solution.
A memorandum of understanding signed in November 2010
by the AAPS and Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a
global network of community organisations, articulates a shared
determination to “promote initiatives, plans and policies which
encourage pro-poor and inclusive cities in Africa” and “change
the mindsets of student planners”.

The link between the AAPS and SDI paved the way for joint urban
learning studios, such as the one described at the beginning of
this Counterpoint. The idea for these partnerships emerged from a
project in which Pamoja Trust, an SDI affiliate, provided internships
for students from the University of Nairobi’s Department of Urban
and Regional Planning. By mid-2013, AAPS member schools and
SDI affiliates had completed five studios in four countries – Uganda,
South Africa, Malawi and Tanzania.

The studios have underscored the potential of a two-way learning

process. Participating in community enumerations, data collection
and mapping, students and staff begin to understand more about
the dynamics of informal settlements – and the importance of
producing plans that take into account the everyday needs and
capacities of their inhabitants. The local knowledge of inhabitants
and technical knowledge of students are complementary. Both
are needed to shape new approaches to planning in the future.
Innovative partnerships have also been agreed between the AAPS
and Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising
(WIEGO) and Streetnet, an informal trader advocacy network.

10
Speaking truth to power

Planning systems and practices will not be reformed without

changing the mindsets of politicians, international donors and urban
policymakers, as well as those of planning educators and students.
By 2013, the AAPS included 50 planning schools from across Africa.
But if it is to be more than an academic network, it needs to take on
a more active advocacy role.

Planning ethics are at stake in the pursuit of more inclusive, collaborative

planning processes. In 2011, 16 participants in a workshop organised
by the AAPS informality and infrastructure groups visited the informal
“floating” settlement of Makoko, on Lagos Lagoon. A fishing village
whose origins dated back to the 18th century, Makoko was threatened
with imminent demolition and the eviction of its 100,000 or more
inhabitants. The workshop participants drafted a communiqué in
which the AAPS secretariat called on the Lagos city authorities and all
African governments to cease demolishing informal settlements and
engage in constructive in situ upgrading instead.

“ Africa’s future planners are faced with a prodigious task.

In the case of Makoko, the AAPS action was to no avail. But it is

vital that in future African planning schools are not, through their
”
silence, complicit in unethical planning interventions. There may
be a fine balance to achieve between the various AAPS members
on many issues, but the network should not remain neutral on the
issue of promoting inclusivity in planning. The AAPS aspires to
produce planners equipped with a critical openness to how things
are, but also imbued with creative anticipation – speculation and
imagination about how things could be. Reflexive and progressive
values are essential in planning. So too is a determination to ensure
that equitable outcomes are as important as process.

Countering inertia

In her address to the 2006 World Planners Congress, Anna Tibaijuka,

who was then Executive Director of UN-Habitat, pointed out that

11
 planning is often “anti-poor”, and can increase social exclusion
in cities. She criticised the widespread belief that “in the planned
city… the poor should at best be hidden or at worst swept away”.
Tibaijuka called on planning practitioners to develop a different
approach to planning that was sustainable, pro-poor and inclusive –
placing the creation of livelihoods at the centre of planning.

In Africa, little has changed in the intervening seven years. According to

Edgar Pieterse, Director of the African Centre for Cities, “the dominant
policy response to the deepening crisis associated with urban growth
and expansion [in Africa] is inertia”. 6 While there are many inspirational
and progressive planners across the continent, others have few qualms
about fulfilling the role of compliant “handmaidens of repression” –
governmental or economic. The planning profession in Africa has been
choked by acute political, institutional and financial constraints.

The reform of planning education will be a very long-term and

resource-intensive process. It will require practitioners and educators
alike to engage with different styles of research and teaching in order to
enhance the effectiveness with which the planning profession responds
to Africa’s rapid urban transformation. Africa’s future planners are faced
with a prodigious task. Educational reform alone will be insufficient
to drive a reorientation of planning values and skills. It must be
accompanied by reform of legislation7 and practice. If this does not
occur, the future in many African towns and cities will be bleak indeed.

Notes
1
See McAuslan, P., Bringing the Law Back in: Essays in Law and Development, Ashgate, 2003.
2
Kamete, A.Y., “In the service of tyranny: Debating the role of planning in Zimbabwe’s urban ‘clean-up’
operation”, Urban Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2009), pp.897–922.
3
Planning Sustainable Cities – Global Report on Human Settlements, UN-Habitat, 2009.
4
Fernandes, E., “Illegal housing: Law, property rights and urban space”, in Harrison, P., Huchzermeyer,
M. and Mayekiso, M. (eds.), Confronting Fragmentation: Housing and Urban Development in a
Democratising Society, University of Cape Town Press, 2003.
5
A selection of the workshop presentations on case study research are to be published in J. Duminy, J.
Andreassen, F. Lerise, N. Odendaal and V. Watson, “Planning and the case study method in Africa; the
planner in dirty shoes”, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming - 2014.
6
Duminy, J., Odendaal, N., and Watson, V., “The Education and Research Imperatives of Urban Planning
Professionals in Africa”, in Parnell, S., and Pieterse, E. (eds.), Africa’s Urban Revolution: Policy
Pressures, Zed Books, forthcoming – 2014.
7
See Berrisford, S., Africa Research Institute Counterpoint - forthcoming. In July 2012, the AAPS and
the African Centre for Cities launched a campaign for the reform of urban and planning law in Africa.

12
 AVAILABLE FROM OUR WEBSITE

www.africaresearchinstitute.org

By Deborah Potts By Michael Holden

COUNTERPOINTS

By Phil Clark By Harri Englund

THE AUTHORS

Vanessa Watson is Professor of City and Regional Planning

at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and co-chair
of the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS)
steering committee.
Babatunde Agbola is Professor of Urban and Regional
Development at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and
chair of the AAPS steering committee.

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