Urban infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa

Harnessing land values, housing and transport

Presented by Stephen Berrisford Research by Stephen Berrisford and Liza Cirolia, ACC

20 July 2015

The limits of planning

The lament

Planning in Africa is an expensive waste of time.

Grandiose and out-of-touch, out-of-date plans have no impact on corrupt and chaotic land use regulation.

Inefficiency, exclusion, displacement, disease, marginalisation, poverty are all worsened by this.

The African city is doomed by bad planning, bad planners, rotten politicians, no commitment to implementation or enforcement.

Our questions

1. Planning and land use regulation are vital for land-based financing, so can they be developed/improved/reformed to work better?

2. How is planning and land use regulation effort actually shaping cities, and how can land-based financing instruments be designed to work better in this actual context?

The legacy of master-planning

Part of colonial and post-colonial history.

Unrealistic, exclusionary and utopian, but emblems of state legitimacy.

Widespread global critique of master-planning has had little impact on the practice in African countries. It carries on.

A blanket critique of master-planning in the African context is thus not helpful.

Three cities’ experience

Addis Ababa

•Master planning since city founded

•Nominal political devolution, thorough financial and administrative devolution

•City owns land and infrastructure assets

•Land use tied to land land tenure (lease)

•Development patterns largely reflect those set out in the master plans

Nairobi

•Ongoing stream of master plans

•Devolution to City County shortchanged Nairobi

•Land use regulation slow, corrupt and not guided by master plans

•But main structuring element is road construction, which is following the master plan

Harare

•Enigmatic master plans

•Rigid but selective land use control

•No financial resources for infrastructure investment

•City being structured by extraneous forces (land reform in peri-urban areas, new capital, informal activity)

Learning from the three cities

• the political economy of city planning is crucial

• infrastructure finance is what implements plans, not land use regulators

• understanding the interplay between land use regulation, planning and land prices is weak across the (official) board

• different cities have very different attitudes to land use regulation

• national and local government have different priorities in terms of facilitating and regulating development

Concluding thoughts

• rehashing the failings of African city planning is not useful

• look at cities through the lens of plan implementation, rather than critique only

• understand plan-making in terms of what happens with plan implementation

• design instruments, such as LBF instruments, to work within a particular city’s unique nexus of planning, land use regulation, governance and infrastructure finance.

End

Urban infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa – harnessing land

values, housing and transport