Book review: The Urban Challenge in Africa: Growth and Management of its Large Cities. Carole Rakodi (ed.). United Nations University Press, Tokyo, 1997, 628 pp., ISBN 92-808-0925-0.
✍ Scribed by Michael Mattingly
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 46 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0271-2075
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This book is worth diving into just for the editor's own chapter on global forces and urban change in Africa. Rakodi's tale of the making of today's African cities is as substantial and satisfying as it is impressive. Other chapters round out a picture of the growth of large cities in Africa, the like of which is not to be found in any other single document.
Urban management runs through the book as a second theme. Kadmiel Wekwete provides the most sustained account. He charts the changes which have occurred in the ways that large cities have been run, noting particularly that there have been important changes in who manages them and what is managed.
Together, these two themes describe the challenge of the book's title. This challenge is distinctive for the speed of growth of many of the continent's large cities and the poverty of the new population, both of which have coincided with a decline in the eectiveness of the institutions of the state to manage these cities.
The book's plan is to place the urbanization of Africa in the context of the world's economy and to explore the details of this process in individual studies of Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Kinshasa and Abidjan. It then considers, in general, residential land markets, city economies, governance of cities and urban living (Deborah Potts' depiction of contemporary life in African cities is particularly arresting: household survival strategies, rural linkages, food growing, informal jobs, services, housing and the eects of structural adjustment policies), before examining the potential of urban management to respond to the challenge. Many cross-references among the chapters tighten the presentation.
Practitioners will easily disregard the editor's fear that the contribution to contemporary analysis of urbanization in Africa is limited by the enormous dierences between these cities and the lack of good data about them. Instead, they will ®nd they have a basis for a much deeper understanding of any particular urban area on the continent.