Skyscrapers and Slums: Building Africa
These days, change appears the only constant in Africa’s largest cities. Across the metropolises of Lagos, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa, half constructed apartment buildings reach toward the sky. New roads quickly find themselves overburdened, unable to carry the ever-growing flow of cars and buses that compete to conquer every square inch of asphalt. Shopping malls and gated residential compounds slowly encroach upon nearby savannah, wetlands, and hills.
African cities are among the fastest-growing in the world — a result of rapid population growth and continuous urban migration by rural individuals seeking opportunity. The number of urban dwellers on the continent is predicted to rise from 400 million to 1.26 billion between 2010 and 2050, when urbanization rates will reach 60%. By next year, Lagos may outpace Cairo to become the largest city on the continent. With a staggering 4.4% average annual growth rate between 2006 and 2020, (Mumbai’s urban growth rate over the same period is expected to be 2.32%), Lagos could become the world’s seventh most populous metropolis by 2020. For city governments, this means improving — or in some cases, creating — public transportation systems; expanding road networks, water and electricity infrastructure; and planning for new or repurposed neighborhoods. Millions of housing units must be built, as well as office towers, schools and hospitals to house growth. Failure to plan adequately for urban growth will result inexponential swelling of the continent’s slums, increasing food and water shortages, low economic productivity, insecurity and threats to public health.
But building Africa isn’t only about infrastructure needs. It’s also about people needs. Across the continent demand is rising for creative ways to lower construction costs, repurpose or rediscover local materials to reduce the current dependence on imports, and invent new models for low-cost, high-density housing that can be adapted to local lifestyles.
For local architects and urban planners, they must invent a new identity for the modern African city. The trouble is, these professionals aren’t only largely absent from this much-needed process — they hardly exist at all on the continent today. In Kenya, there are only 1308 registered architects for a population of 43 million. In Rwanda, just 33 serve 11 million, In Nigeria, about 6000 in Nigeria build for 169 million. By comparison, the U.S. has over 222,300 registered architects for a population of 318 million, and the U.K. has 33,500 architects for 63 million people. They are understandably swamped by the amount of construction taking place on the continent.
Flagship buildings like airports, stadiums, regional headquarters and conference centers are often designed and built by foreign firms. Apartment buildings and houses replicate styles and construction models from Europe and North America, that often are not adapted to local weather patterns and require importing materials at high cost. Often, they are designed without the input of an architect. The conversations on contemporary African architecture — and whether such a concept even makes sense, given the large cultural and geographical disparities on the continent — that would serve as a baseline to address such problems is happening at a slow and uneven pace. One of the main reasons is that the continent’s underfunded universities have fostered few academics to reflect on this issue.
Globally, African architectural studies remain stuck between ethnological studies of traditional dwellings and the Eurocentric colonial city. “African architecture has been systematically marginalized as either nonexistent or uninteresting and too remote to deserve attention,” writes José Forjaz, a Portuguese architect established in Mozambique. “Like for all other continents or regions of the world, Africa needs its own architecture, adapted to its climate and to the physical conditions of the site, to the economic parameters, to its technological capacity and to the rhythms and lifestyle of the people.”
Although worldwide academics and institutions like UN-Habitat are taking a deeper look at urbanization and cities in Africa, they appear to omit the role that architecture can play in building sustainable cities, and focus instead on city planning and economic development. For example, UN-Habitat’s latest State of African Cities Report doesn’t once contain the word “architecture.”
Still, city planning is experiencing its own set of challenges. University training remains heavily influenced by colonial city planning. Students learn about old planning ideals such as the Garden City, but are not equipped to plan for high-density living, informal housing, or urban poverty. Slums are often excluded altogether from curricula, which persistently focus on the “formal city,” despite the troubling fact that close to 70 percent of Africa’s city dwellers live in slums.
“Students are being educated in an outdated way,” says Vanessa Watson, a professor of city planning at the University of Cape Town. Certain countries cannot even train their own planners. Rwanda, for instance, has no school of city planning, despite an astounding annual urban growth rate of 4.48 percent. Most new construction across Africa has so far been targeted at the upper and and upper-middle classes, mostly because developers have not yet found a way to bring construction costs down. “The high-end market is saturated,” warns FatouDieye, an architectural designer at the Kigali office of city planning. Additionally, city governments and developers are hiring foreign firms that are out of tune with local context. The latest visions for urban development include luxury gated neighborhoods (Lagos’s Eko Atlantic, Kinshasa’s La Cité du Fleuve) and isolated techno cities (Kenya’s Konza City, Ghana’s Hope City). None of these projects promote inclusive growth, or provide lasting solutions to urban poverty.
“These plans will have devastating consequences for African cities,” writes Watson in a scathing critique of these new satellites. “They are environmentally unsustainable and car-oriented, and will lead to massive displacement of the urban poor which make up the majority of these cities.” These issues are all further complicated by a lack of access to housing finance. 70 percent of Africans are thought to be excluded from the housing market because local banks are not offering enough mortgages. This means even families whose income would allow them to graduate to ownership are stuck in rentals. The poor have no other solution than to turn to informal housing and flock to the already overcrowded slums.
While many of the challenges faced by African cities depend on local politics and economic development, architects and planners can work together on defining new housing models, construction methods and urban patterns that answer local economic, environmental and cultural needs. A large part of the solutions are likely to be found in traditional architecture, from cheap and local construction materials (e.g. mud walls, earth blocks, adobe), to designs that facilitate the cooling of air, to the way families inhabit their houses. The Gabonese, for instance, appreciate a terrace to spend time outside; the Rwandese are private people who like their dwellings to be somewhat hidden from the street. A growing number of African architects practicing at home or abroad are producing informed projects and helping shape the debate about contemporary African architecture. Burkina Faso-born, Berlin-based Diébédo Francis Kéré has built a number of schools using local building materials; Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, of Senegal, returned to the continent after studying and working in the U.S. His firm, Atepa Group, gained international recognition for massive institutional projects such as Banjul’s international airport in Gambia. Tanzania-born David Adjaye, acclaimed for his buildings in Europe and the U.S., contributed a groundbreaking study of architecture on the continent with his book African Metropolitan Architecture.
An increasing number of projects are also led by foreign firms interested in tackling the challenges of the continent. Firms like MASS Design Group, Sharon Davis Design and Active Social Architecture have been praised for designs that pool from local resources to find creative solutions to social needs.
Some schools are looking forward as well. Rwanda recently launched it’s first architecture program ever at the Kigali Institute of Technology in the country’s capital; it’s producing its second cohort of graduates this year. The program’s instructors — though mostly foreign as well — have designed a curriculum that emphasizes the need for local solutions to local problems. And the Association of African Planning Schools is pushing for a continent-wide reform of urban planning programs.
“We have to push for what tradition should move towards, how the culture of housing and building should evolve to be for the betterment of the future, rather than a copycat of Shanghai, or Switzerland, or whatever Rwanda gets compared to,” says Michelle Stadelman, an American architect who teaches at KIST. “Rwanda needs to be Rwanda, and the students will hopefully be able to help create that identity.”
