Five Trends that will Shape Urban Africa in 2025

Uncovering the politics of African urbanization

Here are five trends that will shape urban Africa in 2025.

1. The Addis Ababa model

Addis Ababa is at the center of Abiy Ahmed’s political ambitions. In his quest to elevate Ethiopia while also consolidating power, Abiy is transforming Addis into a modern metropolis. He has liberalized the economy by opening up the real estate market to foreign investment. Early in 2024, Addis showed off this glitzy charm for the African Union Summit. The country is building a six billion dollar airport, and is becoming a cultural hub. Icons like Marcus Samuelsson are opening restaurants.

The city builds new roads and highways, but it also displaces communities and demolishes neighborhoods. Residents resettle in new housing schemes far from where they work. The borders of the city are expanding into neighboring states, especially the Oromo homeland, sparking political tensions.

While the history of Addis is written in its public spaces like Meskel Square, critics worry that Abiy is erasing history. For example, the government razed the historical center of Addis called Piassa, threatening the “soul of the city.” In addition, the massive construction boom does not come without risk: Its crumbling metro which only opened a few years ago is already showing the risks of borrowing money from China. Rachel Dubale explains how the modernization of the city rests on a crucial question: Who is Addis for?

For context and analysis, check out Marco DiNunzio’s ethnographic work here and here, Biruk Terrefe’s analysis of urban infrastructural development (here and here), Fikir Haile’s article on housing displacement, and Ezana Weldeghebrael’s articles here and here.

Stay tuned: Addis might serve as a model city for other authoritarian leaders to emulate as Abiy pushes forward with his grand ambitions.

2. Construction booms

Paul Kagame is using similar methods to Abiy Ahmed as he transforms Kigali. The city has unveiled a new Master Plan 2050 which focuses on building flexibility, social inclusion, and sustainability. The city is clean and green. He has bid for Formula 1, partners with the NBA, and hosts international conferences. But the construction boom has made it difficult for informal settlement residents to stay in the city.

In Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda, Shakirah E. Hudani argues that this focus on the master plan misses the minor acts, or the quotidian practices and “shared ties that enable neighbors to forge conciliation and cooperation in relation to the built environment, the neighborhood, and the home” (3). These practices are as simple as helping a neighbor place a roof tile on a home or gathering a pile of firewood together. The fear is that these top-down construction booms are undermining national reconciliation and erasing the past.

But African cities continue to build, build, build. Alex Thurston reflects on the construction boom in Dakar. Gunvor Jónsson’s excellent Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market examines how changing Dakar affects those on the ground. The construction boom is also occurring on the periphery of African cities. For example, Dar es Salaam’s suburbs are growing to new heights. Read Claire Mercer’s The Suburban Frontier for more. Capitalism and modularity are remaking contemporary Luanda. The Aesthetics of Belonging provides a nice analysis of the role of the oil boom. And this review essay of “concrete times” is great.

The construction boom is reshaping the built environment of African cities, but it also leads to winners and losers in the remaking of its cities.

3. Informal urbanization

While Africa’s rapid urbanization is changing Africa’s cities, the process is largely taking place outside of official rules and regulations. Part of the importance of informality is simply its scale: many Africans live in informal settlements, and most build homes and purchase property outside of a formally sanctioned market.

But informal urbanization is not necessarily a bad thing. Brandon Marc Finn argues that informality at the heart of sustainable development, and with Patrick Cobbinah argues that understanding informality is crucial to fighting climate change. Gideon Abagna Azunre reminds us that housing informality is not just for the poor, but is an elite strategy as well.

In DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice, Stephen Marr and Patience Mususa highlight the different forms of associational arrangements and social practices that are active in daily life to provision services and manage infrastructure in cities, playing a necessary role in contexts of economic crisis and state failure. Check out Melanie Lombard and Philipp Horn’s Urban Informality: An Introduction for a nice background to informal urbanization.

Informal urbanization will continue to define African urbanization well into the future, and governments and planners will need to confront this reality sooner rather than later.

4. Experiments in governance

Governments are experimenting with new forms of governance in the attempt to confront their urbanization challenges. Satellite cities, charter cities, smart cities, new cities, and even celebrity-backed eco-cities dominate the headlines. Jason Warner and Toyosi Ajibade examine China’s smart cities in Africa. While many of these ambitious new cities have yet to materialize, there is some progress being made in places like Rwanda and Kenya.

But there are other experiments in governance as well. For example, this is a fascinating story of a town in Ghana where a chief gave plots to the diaspora for free to “return home,” and how locals resisted. This project offers nature-based solutions to build sustainable cities. Kounkey Design Initiative is doing very cool work in Nairobi and elsewhere. I have drawn attention to the ways in which local populations build permanence in the city outside the attention of government authorities.

New research sheds light on what is necessary to build inclusive, just, and sustainable cities. For example, Ben Bradlow explains how cities reduce inequality and how to build them. Read his book Urban Power for more. Astrid Haas argues that we need to build cities for all, not just for the privileged few. Kristian Hoelscher and his colleagues (including me!) emphasize the different ways that urbanization is contributing to political change, potentially impacting governance processes. Stay tuned for my forthcoming review essay “Building the City from Below” which outlines a model of citizen-centered city-making.

Follow the Africa Urban Lab in Zanzibar (summary here), the Informal Sustainability Lab, the Wits-Tub-UNILAG Urban Lab, Makerere University’s Urban Action Lab, the African Cities Lab, and the African Cities Research Consortium for research findings.

Experiments in governance will continue to proliferate across Africa’s urban landscape, yet it remains to be seen whether they will improve livelihoods or exacerbate inequalities.

5. Revisiting the past

Scholars, planners, and architects are revisiting the past to provide insights on how to design the best cities for tomorrow. Heba Elhanafy argues that we need to look back at pre-colonial African city-states in order to move forward. Isaac Samuel’s “African History Extra” Substack does an excellent job of recounting this history. His series Journal of African Cities (this post is an example) is especially helpful. Ambe Njoh emphasizes the importance of indigeneity and identity in urban life in his new book Africa in Urban History.

Revisiting the past is important for many reasons, as Omar Degan explains with reference to Mogadishu, Somalia. He writes:

“Today, Mogadishu is one of the fastest-growing urban centres in Africa, yet this growth comes at a significant cost. The lack of urban planning has resulted in an architectural landscape that often disregards the city’s history and climate. Traditional homes, once defined by shaded courtyards, wide balconies, and natural ventilation, have been replaced by high-rise buildings that are poorly adapted to the coastal environment.”

He worries that Mogadishu is losing its aesthetic identity. Other cities are too. Centering Africa’s past in the design of African cities today can help maintain this aesthetic identity.

Jennifer Hart’s Making an African City tells the story of the making of modern Accra, where British colonialists used regulation, capital accumulation, and modernist conceptions of order to rebuild the city according to new logics. Yet indigenous Africans made these practices of city-making their own. Hart shows how an indigenous urbanism emerged across the infrastructural domains of sanitation, health, economy, mobility, and housing that integrated local histories, values, and practices of residents into a process of city-making.

These examples demonstrate how the past continues to inform city-making, urban politics and development, and the aesthetics of the built environment. African urbanites will continue to confront the past as they reimagine what their cities will be into the future. How the past is incorporated into the African cities of tomorrow remains an open question.

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For more on African cities, check our trends from 2022 and 2023 (which are still relevant!), as well as these 11 books about urban Africa from 2024.