Rethinking African urbanisation and putting urban transition on the G20 agenda

Daily Maverick

2 days ago

The Urban20 (U20) is a G20 engagement group, and the only one where subnational government is represented. Its function is to prepare a communique of recommendations on inclusive economic development, climate resilient infrastructure and planning, and urban management issues for the president of the G20.
The U20 is co-hosted by the Cities of Tshwane and Johannesburg, which will host a second U20 Summit in mid-September. The first convening took place in June in Pretoria and a second one is planned for 12-14 September 2025 in Johannesburg.
Fittingly, the host cities have decided to focus the agenda of the U20 meetings on the challenges and opportunities that African cities face amid rapid urbanisation — inadequate infrastructure investment, limited political and fiscal devolution, and restless young people unwilling to accept having no voice in the governance of their cities and neighbourhoods.
Urban development pressures
The addition of the African Union (AU) as a full member of the G20 took place in 2023 during the Indian presidency, but politically it is South Africa's presidency this year that will be judged on the extent to which it can focus the attention of G20 members on the urgent development pressures facing the African continent.
A concept paper prepared for the Assembly of African Mayors in June highlighted key urban imperatives that the AU's membership brings into the U20 debates. The hope is that the clarity of the African urban focus will infuse the broader G20 agenda.
Greater clarity on the spatial, territorial and urban dimension of macro-development policymaking across the AU and the G20 is the primary purpose of the U20. It is deeply significant that the voices of African mayors are being heard, given that for too long the urban question has been a low policy priority.
The AU clarified its agenda for advancing sustainable urbanism across Africa in the declaration of the inaugural African Urban Forum hosted by the Ethiopian government in September 2024.
The declaration asserts the imperative to 'establish national urban forums for the implementation of integrated and inclusive national urban policies that underpin the national territorial plan in each member state to address urban planning and inequalities, consequences of climate change, and financing needs for the development and management of cities and towns, or the development of such policies where they do not yet exist'.
This political mouthful is less significant for its content than for its tone. There is, for the first time, an insistence that inclusive mechanisms for debating national urban policy priorities are essential, alongside the notion of a 'territorial' plan that spells out the spatial imperatives of national infrastructure investments.
Still, most African countries do not have these mechanisms in place, undermining the role of city governments in driving national development objectives such as structural economic transformation and climate resilience.
State hostility, squandered opportunities
In the wake of the African Urban Forum, the AU is putting forward a strong case for focusing on urban development as central to structural economic transformation, but in truth, the G20 policy framing will have to combat the political inertia, and at times hostility of AU member states towards urbanisation.
There is a history to these regressive positions. In 2008, I attended the High-level Symposium as part of the Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank in Maputo. The event was convened under the theme, Fostering Shared Growth: Urbanisation, Inequality and Poverty in Africa.
During the session, Zimbabwe's minister of finance addressed the packed auditorium and extolled the virtues of forced removals of communities and markets in inner city Harare during Operation Murambatsvina, circa 2005.
Shockingly, he got a standing ovation from the other African leaders in attendance.
Using force to displace the urban poor was often the only policy tool in a broader context where governments were in denial about the reality of urbanisation and reluctant to empower city governments to proactively harness the demographic transition for economic development and cultural purposes.
Consequently, enormous economic and social development opportunities were squandered.
Greater AU attention
For more than a decade, the AU has been giving far greater attention to the potential of cities and empowering local governance. The African Charter on the Values and Principles of Decentralisation, Local Governance and Local Development sets the stage for the empowerment of subnational governments.
However, devolution has simply not been a priority for most AU members, evidenced in the fact that only nine countries have ratified the Charter's adoption on 27 June 2014. South Africa is one of them.
The political economy of this reluctance is not hard to fathom when you consider that opposition political parties tend to first get a foothold in cities, and opposition to government is often concentrated in poorer, more politically active city neighbourhoods, as we witnessed recently with uprisings in Nairobi and Maputo.
Africa Urban Forum
Urban hesitancy may be waning as the AU sharpens the spatial focus of its developmental aspirations. In September 2024, a decent political clearing was finally created by the AU with the hosting of the inaugural Africa Urban Forum.
A palpable sense of urgency pervaded the event rooted in an acknowledgement that the continent had lost an enormous amount of time to understand and optimise the inevitable urbanisation transition.
The AU, in its positioning in the G20, is now heeding leading African economist, Carlos Lopes, who argues that urbanisation is an essential dynamic that can be 'the central axis of Africa's structural transformation — an opportunity to reorganise economies, multiply productivity, and rewire the foundations of development'.
It is against Africa's belated but welcome embrace of the urban challenge that we must evaluate the significance of the work of the U20 Engagement Group during the South African presidency of the G20.
The priority topics will include inclusive economic growth, municipal finance, social inclusion and equity, and innovation in service delivery.
Hopefully, these will not be empty signifiers in a world of excess jargon, but a true political reckoning with the price we will pay for continuing to neglect our cities, and most importantly, our citizens. DM