Urban transformations and rural-city connections in Africa

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Introduction

It is projected that by the middle of this century, the majority of Africans will be urban residents, although with huge variations between countries, as is the case today (McGranahan & Satterthwaite, 2014). Currently, only a small proportion of the region’s population lives in cities and towns, but this is rapidly changing. Thus, urbanization and rural–urban transformations are critical qualities of contemporary societal change in sub-Saharan Africa. The articles in this issue all address these processes and discuss how planning and governance systems are lacking behind in their abilities to address the social and spatial consequences of the complex and rapidly shifting rural–urban connections.

Often the concept Rurban has been used to capture rural–urban transformations. The term can be traced back to 1920s’ economic planning literature where it is used to describe land in the countryside on the edge of a town or city. It has been used in a similar vein by researchers studying the peri-urban zone. The term has also been coined by the French philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre who did not exclusively use the term as a spatial category but also included the social, cultural and political dimensions of rural-to-urban transformation (for a discussion see Brenner, 1997; Lefebvre, Kofman, & Lebas, 1996). However, the term has also been used for policy purposes: For example, during the 2000s by the European Parliament to promote partnerships for sustainable urban–rural development among, and within, member states. Most recently, the Indian Government has launched a RURBAN mission to develop 300 rural growth clusters in order to (1) bridge rural–urban gaps; (2) reduce migration;(3) provide economic opportunity; (4) improve quality of life (For more information see, http://rurban.gov.in/about.html, retrieved 3 August, 2017). However, in this special issue, with reference to the RurbanAfrica project (see www.rurban.ku.dk/), the term is mainly descriptive, while insisting on the need for a holistic approach to rural and urban development.

In the following, we will provide an introduction to the special issue. The presentation of the seven articles is grouped under three thematic headlines; (i) Urban expansion and changes in rural–urban land use, (ii) City dynamics: the role of migration, mobility and urban–rural connections and (iii) Social inclusion and access to urban services. Addressing these themes in turn, we conclude the article with a discussion of the connections between rural and urban transformations, based on insights from the RurbanAfrica research and the preceding thematic sections, and related to this, reflections on the planning and governance challenges associated with rural–urban transformation.

Urban expansion and changes in rural–urban land use

The first article in this special issue addresses the nexus between urban sprawl and compactness being an inevitable outcome of urban growth (Fox, Bloch, & Monroy, in press). Abo-El-Wafa, Yeshitela, and Pauleit (2017) model urban expansion and assess its impacts on food production in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. The authors are particularly concerned with how urban sprawl in the city may lead to excessive loss of farmland. Empirically, the article combines geospatial modelling quantifying future urban growth with a detailed analysis of the impact on the agricultural land located in peri-urban areas, within and beyond the existing municipal territory. They analyze the farming and food production potentials of the land areas that will potentially be populated in the future. On the basis of this analysis, the authors detail the potential negative impacts of urban sprawl on food production, and in turn on sale and subsistence for the city’s growing population. In describing the possible urban land use changes of different peri-urban areas, the authors discuss how the development and revisions of urban master plans need to consider variations in food production potentials and to continue the planning of compact housing.

The article makes a strong argument for the importance of including urban food security issues in the development of city master plans, not only in Ethiopia but also in sub-Saharan Africa in general. In doing so, the article inscribes itself into an expanding field of research that addresses urban food security (Battersby, 2013). As argued by Satterthwaite, McGranahan, and Tacoli (2010, p. 2809),

one of the key issues with regard to agriculture and urbanization are whether the growing and changing demands for agricultural products from growing urban populations can be sustained while at the same time underpinning agricultural prosperity and reducing rural and urban poverty.

Also, while acknowledging that the connections between urbanization, food production and food consumption are of critical importance in the peri-urban interface of big cities, it needs to be considered that interactions of rural and urban spaces are many, being part as they are of the bigger picture of rural transformation and small town development, (Tacoli & Agergaard, 2017).

City dynamics: the role of migration, mobility and urban–rural connections

Urban expansion is also addressed in the subsequent set of articles that nevertheless primarily are preoccupied with the importance of migration, residential and daily mobility and how urban residents are staying connected with their rural family/kin and communities in forming their livelihoods. This focus mirrors one of the main ambitions of the RurbanAfrica project’s approach to urban transformation being to explore how cities in sub-Saharan Africa change and grow in relation to natural population growth and residents’ increasingly mobile livelihood arrangements, while at the same time keeping attention to the continued importance of rural-to-city migration and connections (Gough, Esson, Andreasen, Yemmafouo, & Yankson, 2013; Gough et al., 2015a, 2015b). Secondary cities form an important aspect of urban growth (Marais, Nel, & Donaldson, 2016; McGranahan & Satterthwaite, 2014; Roberts, 2014). While, being mainly characterized as a city in the next layer of the urban hierarchy after a nation’s primary city, the term secondary city is loosely defined. It is nevertheless interesting to understand how and if secondary cities’ smaller size, more recent growth (compared to primary cities) and/or role as regional administrative centres make their urban transformation distinctive from that of the primary cities.

In the second article of the special issue, Andreasen, Agergaard, Kiunsi, and Namangaya (2017a) explore the role of migration and mobility in forming city growth in Arusha, Tanzania, while Yankson, Gough, Esson, and Amankwaa (2017) in the third article do the same for the city of Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana. The city of Arusha is among the largest secondary cities in Tanzania ranking just below Dar es Salaam, and was up until the 1990s a fairly modest-sized secondary city. Based on qualitative data from three very different residential areas, Andreasen et al. (2017a) show how rural–urban migration and residential mobility are central dynamics in shaping urban transformation. Migrants mainly originate from the regions around Arusha and many new migrants settle in the centre of city while residents of the newly developed peripheral areas are mainly long-term residents of the city, having moved to the periphery in order to become homeowners. The data tell us that residents of the city are highly mobile and shift residency several times. The article argues that although Arusha is the modest size city, it, struggles in the same way as larger cities with increasing informality in housing and land transactions, social segregation and unequal access to basic social services. Finally, the case is used to demonstrate how secondary cities can fulfil many functions at the same time and therefore accommodate many different types of migrants.

While Arusha serves as a centre of attraction for migrants originating from within the region itself, attracted by the city’s urban potentials, this is less the case of Sekondi-Takoradi (Yankson et al., 2017). Instead, the city has become a migration hub that attracts migrants from all over Ghana in relation to the discovery of oil and gas occurring in the late 2000s that had developed into commercial exploitation from 2010 onwards. Interestingly however, few of the migrants to the city make direct reference to the booming rubber economy as being their main reason for moving to the city. The article documents how increased migration to the city has put pressures on an already overloaded housing market, further accentuated by the transformation of inner city areas from residential to commercial use, and caused increased competition for services. These pressures have also resulted in residential mobility to the urban fringes also characterized by inadequate service provision. Taken together, these developments have spurred more everyday mobility, within and beyond the formal city borders, which challenges the existing infrastructure. In conclusion, the authors emphasize how urban planning and management systems need to respond to all these challenges and, like (Andreasen et al., 2017a), insist that the effects of spatial mismatch (cf. Gobillon, Selod, & Zenou, 2007) have to be addressed.

Focusing on the two Cameroonian cities, Douala and Bafoussam, the fourth article by Yemmafouo, Ngouanet, Keumo Songong, Djikeng Teufack, and Djuidje (2017) also addresses the dynamics of migration and urban mobility in forming the urban. The article’s central concern, however, is how and when urban residents make themselves at home in the city: what the authors term urban integration. Based on detailed qualitative studies of select communities in the two cities, the authors suggest that urban residents can follow three trajectories towards integration: (1) search for integration into the city; (2) securitization of integration and (3) urban disintegration/reintegration. The trajectories mirror the challenges that migrants to the city are facing in achieving some permanency in the city, dealing with the quality of housing they can afford, proximity to their workplace and the potential for homeownership. While long-time residents of the city often have good opportunities to become homeowners and thus achieving urban integration, socio-economic factors, life crises (e.g. divorce etc.) and social connections are critical to the success of homeowners at the periphery. Additionally, the analysis reveals the importance of bi-locality; where residents of the periphery may live in the house of relatives closer to the city centre for two to three weekdays in order to make ones’ duties. The Cameroonian cases thus add important insights into how mobility and multi-local practices are central constituents of urban transformation in cities of sub-Saharan Africa.

The fifth article by Mainet (2017) is also concerned with the Cameroonian cities of Douala and Bafoussam and explores how urban dwellers make use of their rural connections in forming their livelihoods. While analyses of urban dynamics in Dar es Salaam (Andreasen & Agergaard, 2016; Andreasen, Agergaard, & Møller-Jensen, 2017b) have reported that the majority of urban residents plan their livelihoods disassociated from their rural connections, Mainet’s analysis documents how urban residents are travelling to meet with their rural family on a regular basis. In the case of the secondary city of Bafoussam, up to 70% of these visits are related to farming and food supply, while in the primary city of Doula it is only the case for about 10% of visits. However, urban residents’ visits to their village are also motived by other factors such as participation in funerals and mourning, and family meetings. That these visits are of central importance for the sustenance of urban–rural connections is further confirmed by in-depth qualitative interviews. Mainet therefore concludes that these connections show how urban livelihood strategies are critically organized around urban–rural connections and urban residents’ continued commitment to their village.

Social inclusion and access to urban services

Although not being the main topic, the four articles presented above, have accentuated that social and spatial inequalities in access to social services seems to follow in the wake of city growth and expansion. These dynamics are addressed more explicitly in the two final articles. In the sixth article, de Haan (2017) discusses the need for adjustments in social policies and how they can be better integrated in social protection programmes. The article argues that parts of sub-Saharan Africa are moving towards economic growth and urbanization levels similar to other parts of the developing world, meaning that the relative share of urban poor increases. This necessitates adjustments in social policy, moving beyond the established “rural bias” in social protection programmes. Thus, de Haan suggests, social protection practices should be developed in ways that acknowledge changes and diversities in needs along the rural–urban continuum and be prepared to deal with the relative share and absolute growth in urban poverty (cities and small and medium-sized centres included). Thus, social protection programmes will have to develop a capacity to tackle social exclusion in a transformative way.

Moving from de Haan’s holistic approach to reforming social policies in sub-Saharan Africa, the final article by Oteng-Ababio, Smout, Amankwaa, and Esson (2017) explores the divergence between acceptability of municipal services and urbanization. Using the case of Accra, Ghana, the analysis illustrates how urban service provision varies in space and time. The article questions the dominating narratives and macro level data for Accra that conclude that access to water, sanitation and electricity services has improved substantially. By unpacking an otherwise neutral quantification of service provision, the article documents how access to services depends on peoples’ ability to accept services. Based on interviews with users, it is explained how, for instance, payment systems associated with complex housing arrangement and many ownership forms prevent people from using (accepting) a service. However, it is not only high costs for some users but also opaque responsibilities that exclude certain households from accepting services. With reference to similar case studies in Cameroon and Tanzania, the authors advocate for a better involvement of users in the decision-making processes over how services are made available to urban residents.

Concluding remarks

In the preceding presentation of this special issue, we have addressed critical aspects of urbanization and rural–urban transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. This has also been at the fore of the EU-funded RurbanAfrica project although the scope has been broader: the overall objective of the project being to explore the connections between rural transformations, mobility and urbanization processes and analyze how these contribute to an understanding of the scale, nature and location of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (Agergaard, 2016). Geographically, research has been conducted in four African countries: Ghana, Cameroon, Rwanda and Tanzania with the overall ambition of understanding the nature of the connections between rural areas and cities in order to adequately plan for and address the future needs of the residents of sub-Saharan African countries. In doing so, research was designed to critically scrutinizing the assumption that migration from rural areas to cities is the outshining developmental challenge faced by national and local governments in their efforts to stimulate economic growth and curb poverty.

With a focus on urban transformation, the articles in this issue have all addressed these processes and emphasized how planning and governance systems are lacking behind in their abilities to address the social and spatial consequences. As emphasized in the two final articles by de Haan (2017) and Oteng-Ababio et al. (2017) this has huge implications for how the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and social protection programmes are addressed in policies for development in sub-Saharan Africa. In this respect it should be acknowledged that while local governments are critically positioned to support the growing urban populations, they do not necessarily have the capacity or the incentive to take up this challenge (Tacoli & Agergaard, 2016). Hence, as emphasized by de Haan in this issue there is a need for more structural interventions that from the top stimulate innovative decentralization and include citizens better in the formation of inclusive social policies (see also Parnell & Robinson, 2012; Pieterse, 2017).

Returning to the first article by Abo-El-Wafa et al. (2017), the importance of a land use perspective on urban growth and sprawl has been highlighted. While this was not an explicit research theme of the RurbanAfrica project, it has nevertheless been addressed in several of articles of this special issue showing that processes such as rising land prices, insecure forms of tenure, urban informality and homeownership aspirations, all are stimulating residential mobility and urban sprawl. Adding to this, policy dialogues of the RurbanArica project have shown how contemporary land use plans are caught between complex sectoral and governance structures from national to regional levels (see e.g. Agergaard & Tacoli, 2014) such as lack of coordination between sectoral ministries (e.g. double counting of the same land for separate land use), lack of adequate plans for urban expansion, with rural and urban land speculations being important dimensions of this. In this respect, the RurbanAfrica research confirms that land investments and the socio-economic challenges of elite land grabs in Africa are critical aspects of rural–urban transformations, which in an urban context have critical impacts on intra-city and peri-urban dynamics, and the emergence of new cities and new infrastructure corridors (Zoomers, van Noorloos, Otsuki, Steel, & van Westen, 2017).

In relation to the group of articles reporting on migration and mobility practices of urban residents in the cities of Arusha, Accra, Douala and Bafoussam, it can be argued that “the city can best be envisaged as a mobile networked whole” (Yankson et al., 2017) (with reference to Skelton & Gough, 2013). The four articles, and RurbanAfrica research more generally, confirm that vulnerabilities and increasing pressures on the cities are far from exclusively the direct effect of rural-to-urban migration, but impacted by many forms of mobility, including residential mobility, everyday mobility, urban–rural connections and migration. Thus, migration to the cities is only one among many aspects that explain demographic growth and spatial expansion in sub-Saharan African cities, keeping in mind that urban expansion can occur without growth in the size of a city’s population (Fox et al., in press). Also, despite similarities, the articles document that different urbanization levels, socio-economic and cultural legacies, and recent developments in urban growth accentuate that we are faced with huge variations in urbanization dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa (Gough et al., 2015a).

Interestingly, mobility and migration are of similar importance for understanding rural transformation. The RurbanAfrica research is also reporting on how mobility and rapidly changing settlement arrangements form part of the livelihood transformation in dynamic rural regions of sub-Saharan Africa (Steel & van Lindert, 2017). Likewise, multi-local livelihood arrangements, as emphasized by Yemmafouo et al. (2017) as being important for residents of Douala and Bafoussam, is at the heart of rural transformation in all of the rural regions studied by the RurbanAfrica project: this being closely connected to improved access to mobile telephony that stimulate connections at all scales with implications for both rural and urban transformations (see also De Bruijn, Nyamnjoh, & Brinkman, 2009; De Bruijn, van Dijk, & Foeken, 2001). It has been beyond the scope of this special issue to present more in-depth analyses of agrarian change and rural transformation based on the RurbanAfrica cases (see Mynborg, Fold, Steel, & van Lindert, 2016; Steel & van Lindert, 2017). Let it suffice for now to emphasize that rural transformation and the formation of small towns are crucial aspects of Africa’s urbanization and urban growth (Berdegué, Proctor, & Cazzuffi, 2014; Berdegué, Rosada, & Bebbington, 2014; Curiel, Heinrigs, & Heo, 2017; Fox et al., in press; Racaud, Nakileza, Bart, & Charlery de Masselière, 2017). For this reason and due to the very fact of rural and urban transformations being connected, academic and policy engagements with Africa’s rapid urbanization need to look beyond the big cities.

Funding

This work is supported by the ‘African Rural-City Connections’ (RurbanAfrica) research project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Research Framework Programme (theme SSH) [Grant Agreement Number 290732].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Jytte Agergaard
Section for Geography, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
[email protected] Borby Ortenbjerg
Section for Geography, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Acknowledgements

This special issue is an outcome of the RurbanAfrica Conference that was held in Copenhagen, January 2016 (http://rurbanafrica.ku.dk/conference_2016/). The conference was organized by the authors as part of the research project: African Rural-City Connections (RurbanAfrica), supported by the European Commission under its 7th Research Framework Programme from 2012 to 2016. Research collaboration has involved researchers from the following institutions: University of Ghana, University of Dschang (Cameroon), National University of Rwanda, Ardhi University (Tanzania), Sokoine Agricultural University (Tanzania), Utrecht University (the Netherlands), University of Loughborough (UK), the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED, UK), the University of Toulouse, le Mirail (France), and University of Copenhagen (Denmark). An overview of the project and project reports and publications is available on: http://rurbanafrica.ku.dk/ . The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the generous funding and all participants in the RurbanAfrica project and conference for their valuable contributions to the research and critical debate on the rural-city connections in sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, we would like to thank the editor of the Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography for his constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.