The future runs through African cities

Getting African cities right is a defining development challenge of our time.

You can listen to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also watch this conversation on YouTube.

No country ever got rich without also urbanising. Cities make people more productive, more innovative, better paid, and, in the modern age at least, healthier and longer-lived. A rough rule of thumb from the research is that every 10% increase in a country’s urban population share is associated with an increase in output per capia of around 30%. Between 2010 and 2020, 80% of private sector jobs created globally were generated in big cities.

But urbanisation alone is no guarantee of development. And in the world’s fastest urbanising region, the link between cities and prosperity is breaking down. In this opening episode of our new Ideas in Development series on cities, we are joined by Kurtis Lockhart, founder and executive director of the Africa Urban Lab, to set the scene. We discuss why everyone who cares about development should be thinking about Africa’s urbanisation, what’s currently going wrong, and where policy changes should happen.

The scale of what’s coming

By 2050, roughly 900 million people will be added to African cities, more than doubling the continent’s current urban population. That’s the equivalent of building the entirety of American and European city systems from scratch, in 25 years.

African cities are growing at roughly 3.5 to 4% per year, meaning many will double in size every 18 to 20 years. Some faster-growing cities will triple or quadruple in that period.

And this building boom will happen at income levels far below those at which other regions urbanised. When the United States hit 50% urbanised around 1920, per capita incomes were roughly $7,500. When South Korea crossed the same threshold in the late 1970s, incomes were around $4,500. Much of Africa is approaching 50% urbanised at per capita incomes of around $2,000 to $2,500. This means a far smaller tax base to finance the water, sanitation, roads, power, and housing that functional cities require.

About half to two-thirds of the physical urban space Africa will need by mid-century does not yet exist. It all needs to be built, and getting that right is crucial, as once it’s built, it’s sticky. Urban form has a lock-in effect that makes poor early choices extremely costly to reverse.

Why Africa’s urbanisation is different

In a paper titled Urbanisation With and Without Industrialisation, Doug Gollin, Remi Jedwab, and Dietrich Vollrath show that across every region in the world bar one, urbanisation is positively correlated with structural transformation, the shift of economic activity from agriculture into manufacturing and services. Every region, that is, except Africa, where the relationship is a flat line.

“if this link is not restored, it effectively means that the nearly one billion people being added to these cities between now and mid-century… they lead worse lives.”

Without structural transformation, rapid urban growth produces not prosperity but informality, slums, disconnected sprawl, low productivity, and limited upward mobility. So, getting African urbanisation right is, in Kurtis’s view, “one of the biggest policy imperatives of the 21st century.”

Cities as engines of growth

“Once you start thinking about growth, it’s hard to think about anything else.” Robert Lucas

Kurtis’s interest in cities ultimately boils down to economic growth itself. Cities, he argues, are a primary driver of that growth. The evidence is extensive: cities boost productivity at both the individual and firm level, increase human capital, concentrate innovation, and generate higher wages. The mechanisms are the classic Marshallian forces of agglomeration, i.e. thick labour markets, supplier networks, and knowledge spillovers, amplified by the density of interaction.

But Kurtis is quick to add that this is not purely a laissez-faire story.

“Just as there are no atheists in the foxhole, there are no libertarians in the city” Kurtis Lockhart, borrowing a quip from Ed Glaeser.

The externalities that arise from density, both positive and negative, are so large that effective urban governance is indispensable. Markets alone will not produce functional cities.

Bridging planners and economists

One of the Africa Urban Lab’s core missions is to close the gap between urban planning and urban economics, two disciplines that study the same object but often talk past each other.

Kurtis sees planners as tending to place too much faith in top-down rules, without adequate tools to anticipate the second and third-order economic consequences of their decisions. Zoning rules, building codes, and land-use regulations all have enormous implications for housing costs, firm location, labour markets, and growth, which planning curricula often fail to teach.

Economists, on the other hand, can be too comfortable with the idea that markets will sort things out. In cities, where congestion, pollution, crime, and infrastructure all involve massive externalities, they won’t.

The Lab’s professional diploma programme, currently training 50 students from 15 countries, is designed to sit at this intersection, equipping urban planners and city leaders with the economic reasoning they need to make better decisions, and grounding economists in the institutional realities of how cities are actually governed.

The Africa Urban Lab: Research, training, and implementation

Housed at the African School of Economics in Zanzibar, the Africa Urban Lab operates across three pillars.

The first is education. The diploma programme trains mayors, deputy mayors, senior planners, and ministry directors from across the continent. A key pedagogical commitment is integrating the insights of urban economics, such as the work of Alain Bertaud, whose book Order Without Design Kurtis recommends as essential reading for any planner wanting to understand the economic consequences of planning decisions.

The second is research. The Lab conducts rigorous academic work across four research themes (detailed on their website), and is launching a network of fellows this month for scholars working on African cities.

The third, and Kurtis emphasises this as critically important, is policy implementation.

“We realised that we can write these amazing research papers and these amazing policy recommendations, but nobody reads them”

Two active workstreams translate research into practice: an urban expansion programme working with around 30 fast-growing East African cities on proactive planning for peripheral growth, and an urban finance programme focused on helping cities raise revenue, improve budget execution, and eventually tap into domestic capital markets.

The stakes are high

Africa is home to 16% of the world’s population but roughly two-thirds of the world’s extreme poverty. By the end of the century, it’s estimated that four out of every five human beings on the planet will be African. Post-2050, Africa will be the only region driving global population growth.

These demographics make the urbanisation question inescapable. If the link between cities and prosperity can be restored in Africa, through better planning, smarter finance, functional land markets, and effective governance, the payoff will be transformative. If it cannot, the consequences will be felt not just on the continent but globally. As Kurtis puts it, this is not an abstract policy debate. It is about whether nearly a billion people arriving in cities over the next quarter century lead worse lives or are given the chance to build better ones.