4. The Governance and Management of African Cities: Alternative Approaches and Models Towards Transforming into Successful Cities of the Future

Modern and often largely overpopulated or dense cities are increasingly becoming problematic, in particular, in the developing world, and specifically in regions such as Africa. Cities are set to be the precincts where on average 66% of global citizens will live in 2050, and are currently faced with many challenges. This includes the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) as set out in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Report (2015), and the contents of a recently published United Nations (UN) Report on The Weight of Cities (2018), and the challenges that they face as summarised below. These challenges according to the report will force us to devise new strategies for twenty-first century urbanisation: how we use resources that are normally critical for the maintenance of cities, and how we devise new tools, technologies and information-based interconnected interventions that can assist in improved resource management. The report emphasises low-carbon, resource-efficient, and socially just cities. This includes the monitoring of the flow of resources entering and leaving cities and the development of resource-efficient strategies to address these urbanisation trends. In monitoring growth and new developments, the planning of cities has to consider to ‘compact growth’ in order to mitigate rapid and uncontrolled urban sprawl and resulting squalor. This includes in particular the energy and water wastage that result from such uncontrolled and unplanned urbanisation activities, and requires future leaders to be skilled and directed towards innovative approaches and practices in management and governance in order to achieve the overall UNDP goal for sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11). This chapter explores the challenges that these demands will make on the governance and management of future cities, and it also considers and evaluates alternative forms of governance and management that may be found in the ideas surrounding the development of free private cities, start-up cities, charter cities or cities built within the arrangements for the development of special economic zones (SEZs). Will these models be a consideration for twenty-first century African urban reconstruction and development?