In 2015, Africa had a population of nearly 1.2 billion inhabitants, 40 % of whom live in urban areas. It has 56 urban agglomerations with more than 1 million inhabitants and 3 megacities with more than 10 million residents. The African urban population is expected to account for 50 % of the population by the mid 2030s (UN 2014). 1 This growth trend varies among regions and from country to country and may be slower in some cities than has usually been reported (Potts 2009; UN-HABITAT 2014). Urban informality, poor basic urban services, weak or nonexistent local self-government and insufficient planning capacity are distinctive characteristics of most African cities. 2 The continent continues to have a relatively small share in the world economy, and some African countries are among the least developed in the world. Nonetheless, there are signs of change in Africa. After years of decay and financial restrictions associated with several structural adjustment programs, African economies have recently experienced a period of relative growth, coupled with the introduction of democratic multi-party political systems.
The unparalleled urban growth rate of the last few decadesāwhich is positively correlated with development (Njoh 2003), the introduction of democratic political regimes in numerous countries and the continent-wide economic growth experienced in recent yearsāconfronts cities in Africa with new and complex urban governance challenges and opportunities for development. The shift from a predominantly rural to an urban society, with cities being increasingly the drivers of national economies, raises new problems and challenges in the governance of cities on the continent. This population and economic growth has not been followed in most countries by the creation of the necessary institutional capacity at the local level, which makes it difficult to introduce new policies in the local urban agendas. On the contrary, in most African countries, planning laws and systems proved time and time to be inadequate to manage the complexity and intensity of the continentās urban problems. In most countries, urban management has been a function of central government through local administration de-concentrated entitiesānot elected and without administrative or financial autonomyāwith very low levels of revenue. In addition, both in sub-Saharan Africa and in North Africa, the colonial planning legacy continues to influence urban decisions, even though the context and the dynamics are already different from the period during which such planning rules and tools were first introduced.
Despite the still largely rural approach to development in most African countries, 3 cities and urban development became an important focus in the policy agendas of national governments across Africa and in the main pan-Africa organizations. 4 In this new context, it is widely accepted that African states need to decentralize and planning laws to be reformed and updated if the challenges and opportunities created by the rapid and extensive urbanization process are to be met. In other words, a certain degree of decentralization is needed to guarantee political stability and development capacity, in a context in which states continue to be fragile in numerous respects. In some cases this will require constitutional revision; 5 in others it may be enough to put into practice the already existing constitutional norms that recognize local self-government as an autonomous sphere, with administrative and financial autonomy, 6 and with democratically elected deliberative and executive boards, as is the case in some Lusophone African countries in which local self-government is established in the constitution but has not yet been implemented in practice.
Nonetheless, despite the existence of these institutional weaknesses in numerous African countries, the reform of local government and the removal of institutional barriers has been taking place, in particular since the early 1990s, when a wave of democratization and decentralization initiatives were put in place in Africa, in ways not seen before in the continent, as the research conducted, for example, by the United Cities and Local Governments of Africa and by the Cities Alliance, among other entities, shows (UCLGA 2013; USAID 2010; UCLG 2008, 2010, 2013). 7 The institutional landscape has been changing since then through decentralization initiatives, in the north (GarcĆa and Collado 2015) as well as in sub-Saharan Africa, involving both local and meso-layers of sub-national government. 8 Related with these initiatives are the efforts made to improve transparency and accountability in local government, seen as essential elements of good urban governance.
In some African countries the process of decentralization has progressed continuously over the years, while in others the process has suffered ups and downs as a consequence of political shifts. As the implementation of these reforms has been gradual in some countries, there are cases in which only part of the country experiences decentralized forms of local self-government while other parts continue to be governed directly by central-government-appointed officials, as is the case in Mozambique. The importance and the role played by local traditional authorities is an additional variable responsible for the differences found among African countries in the field of local governance.
As the USAID (2010) study shows, the level of decentralization varies between unitary states and federal states, being more decentralized in the later, and also according to the colonial legacy (UCLG 2008; USAID 2010), with Francophone countries being in general more centralized than Anglophone African countries. These differences are then reflected in the capacity of local government to steer the rapid and extensive urban growth experienced by African cities in recent decades and in the mixed perceptions citizens have of the responsiveness of local governments in Africa, which are seen frequently as weak institutions with limited functions (Bratton 2010).
The book aims to explore some of these key challenges confronting the governance of cities in Africa and the kind of reforms implemented in response to them in the field of urban governance. In doing this, we aim to discuss innovative approaches in critical areas of local governance, namely in the broad field of decentralization and planning law reform, citizen participation, good governance and the governing of informality.
Decentralization based on the principle of subsidiarity emerges as a critical reform if African cities are to be appropriately empowered to face the challenges created by the continentās unprecedented urban growth rate. This requires, among other initiatives, the implementation of an effective local self-government system; the reform of planning laws, including the adoption of new planning models; increased citizen participation in local affairs; and new approaches to urban informality. The intensity of these changes is largely dependent on the role assigned to local self-government, its competencies, financial capacities and autonomy. The lack of a national urban strategy limits the capacity of the entire local governance system. Cities and local self-government in general need to be empowered with the appropriate competencies in the planning field and human and financial resources as well. Citizen participation in local governance is a key condition for the effectiveness of local self-government (ECA 2010). It can take different forms and its real application varies among African countries (Lewis et al. 2014; Hagberg 2010). Some countries have adopted laws and regulations on citizen participation, while others have not. In some cases, the legal framework exists but is not applied, and when it does not exist there is evidence in some cases pointing to the existence of local schemes that allow consultation and participation of different local stakeholders.
The book is organized around three main themes: decentralization and planning law reforms, issues and challenges in urban governance and citizen participation in urban governance. The following chapters explore and discuss these issues based on evidence from 16 African countries, located in different regions of the continentāfrom sub-Saharan Africa but also from North Africa and from Western, Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa too; thus they offer an interesting sample of the African institutional diversity. The countries include Algeria, Angola, Cape Verde, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, some of which are examined in more than one chapter, as is the case of Angola, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania.
The first sectionādecentralization and planning law reformsācomprises four chapters on decentralization reforms and on the reform of planning laws in the continent. The first of these chapters provide an overview of local self-government reforms in Lusophone African countriesāAngola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principeāand the consequences these have had in the local governance systems in these five countries, particularly after the introduction of multi-party political systems in the early 1990s. It is followed by two chapters on decentralization, one on Kenya and the other focused on Ghana, Malawi and Tanzania. In the case of Kenya, the new 2010 Constitution initiated an important governance reform, known as devolution, which included the creation of 47 autonomous counties with deliberative and executive boards and with extensive powers. This devolution process and its impacts on the planning system and in rapidly growing areas are examined by Ellen M. Bassett in Chap. 3. In the following chapter, Daniel Kweku Baah Inkoom and Adwoa Yeboah Gyapong examine the decentralization process in the health care delivery systems in Ghana, Malawi and Tanzania, focusing in particular on the objectives, the implementation process and the challenges with which these reforms have been confronted. The last chapter in this section, by Babatunde Samuel Agbola and Olusegun Falola, examines and compares the planning law reforms in Uganda, South Africa and Nigeria, discussing the origins of these reforms, their rationale, the reform procedures undertaken, the stakeholders and opportunities and challenges.
The second sectionāissues and challenges in urban governanceāwhich includes seven chapters, explores different problems and challenges confronting urban planners in Africa, and discusses some of the consequences for the governing of cities, including issues of elite interests and accountability in local affairs, publicāprivate collaboration in urban and regional planning, social classes and urban inclusion, informality, the use of public spaces and new methodological approaches in the management of urban heritage. Current planning practices in Africa are still affected, to different degrees and in different ways, not only by the legacy of the colonial planning culture, but also by new influences due to an increasingly intense transnational flow of planning ideas, some of which are not always adapted to African cultural and social contexts (Watson 2013).
In the first chapter of this se...