More than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas, many of them in low- and low-middle-income countries with limited ability to support urban growth. Urban areas are inherently fragile. Many cities are desperately overcrowded, with poor building construction, limited access, poor or absent waste disposal, limited or no access to clean water, irregular supplies of food, unreliable power supplies, inadequate emergency services, and problems with crime and violence. Healthcare is often poor or absent, with an increased risk of communicable disease outbreaks. Supply chains can easily be interrupted. Urban poverty and slums are proliferating with informal dwellings in areas vulnerable to natural disasters. The nature of urban areas can increase the impact of disasters, as was shown by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Informality, once associated with poor squatter settlements, is now seen as a generalised mode of metropolitan urbanisation. The chapter identifies the gaps in urban planning systems in selected African countries, focusing on Nigeria for the empirical survey. The study was based on a literature review from other African countries but used information from Ogun State as empirical support, with 227 houses selected using a random sampling technique. The findings reveal a significant relationship between planning approval and the socio-economic characteristics of the residents. The chapter argues that a weak urban planning system is one of the contributing factors to informality in African cities. Legal/institutional and political ideology frameworks for urban planning are the major causes of the weak urban planning system; but political will and interest also shape urban planning in Nigeria. The chapter calls for urban planning not only to be carried out within the legal and institutional framework in African cities; the diverse socio-economic characteristics of the residents and jurisdictional partitioning at the local level should also be considered.

Informal settlements are projected to host future increases in Africa’s urban population growth. This has led to calls within African urban scholarship and practice for a capable and enabled urban planning response that promotes inclusive and sustainable principles in urban planning and management. Tracing the scholarship on Angola, this chapter reviews the literature on the consolidation of informal settlements in Luanda to shed insights into this intractable challenge of urban planning and its socio-political and historical dimensions to foreground the imperative to reimagine the urban planning regime. It highlights post-colonial planning ambivalence, a centralised, and project-oriented urban planning approach to the challenge of informal settlements. The chapter submits that reimagining urban planning in Luanda, and African cities in general, demands a forward-looking planning praxis that de-centres urban planning from state control and builds local institutional capacity to integrate social equity, local participation, empowerment and experimentation within a pro-poor urban planning framework.

Access to affordable water and sanitation services is crucial for the realization of the human rights to water and sanitation. Where these services are available but not affordable, people will not be able to use sufficient amounts of water and adequately maintain latrines, or will turn to cheaper, unsafe sources or practices. Another consequence is that people, in order to support the costs of water and sanitation, might compromise the realization of other human rights such as food, housing, health or education. However, the issue of affordability does not always receive the attention it deserves. As people will go to great lengths to pay for water to ensure their survival and health, there is often an assumption that people will obtain the water they need even without the state support.

This chapter takes up the first of the four development “problems” highlighted in Part III. Whether in the name of civilization, modernity, or modernization, interventions to transform the composite materials, structural designs, and locations of African homes represented the development agenda to reform African domesticity and labor. Discourses on improvement masked the political and economic agendas at work and ignored the indigenous logic of African residential construction and organization. From the nineteenth century development efforts urged Africans to build square or rectangular houses in place of round huts. The scientific work of early twentieth-century urban planners set the stage for what “modern” urban spaces would look like in African cities. In the postcolonial era urbanization has far outpaced the ability of states and private enterprise to provide affordable, modern housing for citizens. Urban Africans have begun to fight back against the assumptions made about informal settlements by development specialists and city planners from the global north. These activists are challenging their governments to see urban residential areas as social spaces that belong to all citizens, not just wealthy ones. In their challenge, informal settlement dwellers are forcing the international development community to Africanize the development episteme.

Chapter 4 provides background on the ten aspiring global cities and their theoretical and empirical comparability. Despite important variations, the cities examined share these core features: (1) They are key national and regional nodes of business and politics. (2) They experienced major and controversial redevelopment, which has caused different forms of displacement. (3) They have intensified the use of branding and cultural policies as engine of economic growth, often thereby promoting the “creative class.” The chapter presents data showing their shared prominence and discusses the high degree of institutional variation between the cities.There is significant variation in how markets and governments combine to pursue international competitiveness policies and the associated urban redevelopment. In developmental states, an essential feature is the elimination of informal settlements, with the consequent massive and brutal displacement of the poor, as examined in Seoul, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. In more advanced economies, a key dynamic is the erosion of public-sector housing, as illustrated for Hamburg. Redevelopment policies weresupported by city branding and legitimized by connections to cultural industries as new engines for economic growth, as examined in Tel Aviv, Seoul, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles.