Designing African Cities

Over the past few months, I have continually wrestled with many questions stemming from an expose on Norman Foster. Norman Foster, the mastermind behind the utopian technology showcase known as Masdar City, feels that his next life challenge rests in Africa, designing urban spaces for the populations that currently fill the world's slums.  A short excerpt (seen below) has repeatedly sent my mind imaging thousands of possibilities of future urban developments, however, I constantly come back to a single quandary: how to create a city in the developing world that largely consists of young, connected, unemployed masses.  This drastically differs from the Masdar model that includes self-driving cars for its wealthy residents.  Accepting demographic constraints as reality and not having false hopes for instant fixes, the true challenge of the 21st century will be to transform urban living for masses of the world population.

Masdar City (click to enlarge)
Source: NYTimes, 9/26/2010

The following are taken from J.M. Ledgard's Norman Foster's New World in Intelligent Life magazine, November/December 2012:

Africa's population will double to 2 billion before 2050. Its urban population will more than quadruple. There are unlikely to be enough jobs for young people to stave off populist unrest. Climate change is likely to jack up food prices and exacerbate water shortages...

[Norman Foster] oversaw a project with Sagoo and others to look more closely at the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. They discovered that what people there needed was horizontal space. "They needed to make and move their products across the ground floor of a dwelling. The other side of the dwelling was the railway line where the goods were displayed and sold. This community could easily subsist in a low-rise settlement, two, maybe three or even four storeys. What would never work would be to put one dwelling on another. It would offer an improved environment, but it would be impossible for them to bake bread to earn a livelihood, or to recycle waste." What is needed in African slums", Foster ventures, "is the industrialisation of units that provide the sanitation, kitchens, energy-harvesting, run-off of rainwater, and a proper infrastructure of drains and sewers. That would be transformational, but that's a very different approach to the design-profession response to wipe it clean and superimpose another order, which completely disregards the fact that, notwithstanding the horrific deprivation, there is an underlying social order and an organic response to needs."

Photo from Foster sponsored research of African cities

Foster emerged from Manchester on his own merits and is not inclined to socialism based on sentiment. Still, the cause of African future cities need not be philanthropy. There is plenty of money to be made from squatters. Most of the economic growth in the world in the coming years will be from the poorest bits of cities in the poorest countries. Companies such as Coca-Cola and Unilever expect their profits from these communities to swell. Nokia will rise or fall according to whether slum-dwellers continue to buy its low-end phones. There is money in Foster's idea of laying down grids, especially for cities yet to be built. And there is reason to be optimistic about new technologies, such as solar-panel roof sheeting, affordable windows, LED lighting, gargantuan rainwater tanks, and high-tech latrines that pay for themselves by filtering urine into water and microwaving excrement into fuel. Africa's dense gatherings of young people present a high degree of political risk, but they also create economic value.

2012 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship Winning Proposal
(click to enlarge)

"...in an African continent [says Foster] you are creating an urban infrastructure from scratch. So instead of thinking as in the past that you have one authority talking about pylons, another rail, another roads, why not bring those together with tremendous economy and elegance?...Olmsted laid out Central Park at the time when people were herding sheep, horses and carts. Now, bringing back a pedestrian-friendly experience, taking away the dependence on gasoline, why drive when you could walk, design with an understanding that these are very scarce commodities—Africa has that opportunity."

Update (2/18/2013):  It looks like others are reaching similar conclusions...see "These May Be The Least 'Livable' Cities, But They're the Future"

Designing African Cities