Reexamining the Vulnerability of African Cities through Sustainable Urban Development

Abstract

Studies on sustainable cities gained traction in the late 1990s as a result of worries about how vulnerable cities were to falling productivity. Subsequently, the focus of the urban discourse shifted to cities' adaptive capacities and resistance to environmental challenges. The sustainable cities notion faded at the turn of the twenty-first century, possibly as a result of the general trend toward a people-centered planning paradigm. When it reappeared in the new decade, it had undergone a paradigm shift toward sustainable urban development in response to Agenda 2063 and Habitat III's Goal 11 for Africa's urban transition. This contribution argues that, given the new paradigm's reinforcement of city-centered regionalism, attention should be directed toward cities' resilience to "structural adversities," a term recently coined to describe spatial disconnects in the structure and operation of cities. Due to the ongoing nature of these difficulties, which have an impact on city development, African cities are compelled to implement unofficial productivity management techniques. This study makes the assumption that structural obstacles will hinder sustainable urban development; therefore, it aims to define how these obstacles fit into the overall picture of cities' susceptibility to external mechanisms promoting growth.