Perspective On Urban Land And Urban Management Policies In Sub Saharan Africa

This paper addresses the problems of governance in municipalities in Africa. The concern has been to adapt traditional systems of governance to the needs of modern urban management. This paper investigates the need for a new analysis of the twin problems of urban land and urban management in sub-Saharan Africa. This need is based on the apparent paradox between the dynamic, city-creating activities of civil societies in all of these countries, and the weak capabilities of states to guide and direct these activities. This paper focuses on governance at the community level, where empowerment and accountability begin. It argues that a prerequisite for dealing with these problems is an institutional environment with which the target populace is familiar and to which it is likely to relate in participating in managing the city. The importance of the particularly dynamic systems of traditional governance at the lowest level in managing urban growth is only recently being recognized.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces many development challenges, such as its size and diversity, rapid urban population growth, history of colonial exploitation, fragile states and conflicts over land and natural resources. This collection, contributed from different academic disciplines and professions, seeks to support the UN Habitat New Urban Agenda passed at Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016. It will attract readers from urban specialisms in law, geography and other social sciences, and from professionals and policy-makers concerned with land use planning, surveying and governance. Among the topics addressed by the book are challenges to governance institutions: how international development is delivered, building land management capacity, funding for urban infrastructure, land-based finance, ineffective planning regulation, and the role of alternatives to courts in resolving boundary and other land disputes. Issues of rights and land titling are explored from perspectives of human rights law (the right to development, and women's rights of access to land), and land tenure regularization. Particular challenges of housing, planning and informality are addressed through contributions on international real estate investment, community participation in urban settlement upgrading, housing delivery as a partly failing project to remedy apartheid's legacy, and complex interactions between political power, money and land. Infrastructure challenges are approached in studies of food security and food systems, urban resilience against natural and man-made disasters, and informal public transport.

Breaking with tradition, this volume identifies the causes of underdevelopment in sub–Saharan Africa by linking historical experience of colonial development policies with their current development problems. This book analyzes the impact of urban and regional planning schemes with (European) colonial roots, for contemporary socio-economic development efforts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces many development challenges, such as its size and diversity, rapid urban population growth, history of colonial exploitation, fragile states and conflicts over land and natural resources. This collection, contributed from different academic disciplines and professions, seeks to support the UN Habitat New Urban Agenda passed at Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016. It will attract readers from urban specialisms in law, geography and other social sciences, and from professionals and policy-makers concerned with land use planning, surveying and governance. Among the topics addressed by the book are challenges to governance institutions: how international development is delivered, building land management capacity, funding for urban infrastructure, land-based finance, ineffective planning regulation, and the role of alternatives to courts in resolving boundary and other land disputes. Issues of rights and land titling are explored from perspectives of human rights law (the right to development, and women's rights of access to land), and land tenure regularization. Particular challenges of housing, planning and informality are addressed through contributions on international real estate investment, community participation in urban settlement upgrading, housing delivery as a partly failing project to remedy apartheid's legacy, and complex interactions between political power, money and land. Infrastructure challenges are approached in studies of food security and food systems, urban resilience against natural and man-made disasters, and informal public transport.

Urban development in sub-Saharan Africa has posed more challenges in recent decades, shifting the focus from rural poverty to urbanised poverty. Because of a rapidly urbanising sub-Saharan Africa coupled with failures in urban management, urban economies have grown slower than correspondent population increase, slum growth has increased and poverty has urbanised. Of all urban challenges, housing has posed serious challenges in sub-Saharan Africa, yet the prime basis of urban housing is land. Land management is key to urban development due to its influences on the social, economic development and urban environmental management. Land and housing are important sectors as urbanisation and urban development accelerate. This book examines the relationship between operations of informal land markets and housing development for planning policies that are responsive to the land market conditions.

Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa provides a variety of conventional and emerging theoretical frameworks to inform understandings and responses to critical urban development issues such as urbanisation, climate change, housing/slum, informality, urban sprawl, urban ecosystem services and urban poverty, among others, within the context of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Africa. This book addresses topics including challenges to spatial urban development, how spatial planning is delivered, how different urbanisation variables influence the development of different forms of urban systems and settlements in Africa, how city authorities could use old and new methods of land administration to produce sustainable urban spaces in Africa, and the role of local activism is causing important changes in the built environment. Chapters are written by a diverse range of African scholars and practitioners in urban planning and policy design, environmental science and policy, sociology, agriculture, natural resources management, environmental law, and politics. Urban Africa has huge resource potential – both human and natural resources – that can stimulate sustainable development when effectively harnessed. Sustainable Urban Futures in Africa provides support for the SDGs in urban Africa and will be of interest to students and researchers, professionals and policymakers, and readers of urban studies, spatial planning, geography, governance, and other social sciences.

Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are unequally confronted with social, economic and environmental challenges, particularly those related with population growth, urban sprawl, and informality. This complex and uneven African urban condition requires an open discussion of past and current urban planning practices and future reforms. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa gives a broad perspective of the history of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa and a critical view of issues, problems, challenges and opportunities confronting urban policy makers. The book examines the rich variety of planning cultures in Africa, offers a unique view on the introduction and development of urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa, and makes a significant contribution against the tendency to over-generalize Africa’s urban problems and Africa’s urban planning practices. Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa is written for postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates, researchers, planners and other policy makers in the multidisciplinary field of Urban Planning, in particular for those working in Spatial Planning, Architecture, Geography, and History.

Renewing Development in Sub-Saharan Africa reviews the debates and brings together specialist contributions, to provide a clear guide to the major complexities of African development. They lay the foundation for designing a range of individual country-specific policy-sets, in which the strategic components are prioritized according to each country's constraints and opportunities. The emphasis of the book is on the identification of effective strategies that will enable individual countries to most effectively exploit their growth opportunities and to meet poverty-reducing and other key equity objectives.