Sustainable Urban Development: Revisiting the Vulnerability of Cities in Africa

Abstract

The increase in momentum of sustainable cities studies in the late 1990s leveraged concern for the vulnerability of cities to declining productivity. Then the resilience of cities to environmental adversities and adaptive capacities dominated the urban debate. At the turn of the twenty-first century perhaps due to the prevailing shift to a people-centered planning paradigm, the sustainable cities concept went under. When it re-emerged in the new decade it has undergone a paradigm change to sustainable urban development following Africa’s urban transition of Agenda 2063 and Goal 11 of Habitat III. As the new paradigm reinforces concern for the city apparently in anticipation of the city-centered new regionalism, this contribution argues the need for attention to focus on the resilience of cities to ‘structural adversities’ – a new phrase that refers to spatial disconnects in the form and function of cities. These adversities subsist as a continuous process that affects city development, forcing cities in Africa to adopt informal strategies to manage productivity. This paper presumes that sustainable urban development is up against structural adversities thus it attempts to conceptualize the place and function of these adversities in defining the vulnerability of cities to exogenous processes for growth.