Climate: 21st century Africa must reinvent its cities
Due to climate change and pollution, entire neighbourhoods and cities on the continent are destined to disappear. A new vision of African urbanism is needed.
Sebha will disappear. The capital of Libya's hydrocarbon-rich Fezzan had become the largest city in the Sahara. For years, it has seen public and private capital converge, and migrants by the thousands. Subjected to very strong demographic pressure, the city of the sands is today condemned. Sooner or later, the lack of water will empty it of its inhabitants. It will be necessary to return its territory to nature.
Sebha is not an isolated case. Everywhere, neighbourhoods and cities are threatened with extinction. Here, because of rising waters, there, because of rampant desertification, mega-fires, or repeated cyclones. These are the devastating and unprecedented consequences of climate change, of course, which the latest IPCC report has just reminded us of, but not only that. By participating in toxic production systems, we have degraded nature and climates. At the same time, since the industrial era, we have massively adhered to this crazy fantasy of the limitless city, capable of absorbing ever more inhabitants, without questioning its capacity to meet their basic needs.
Absolute urgency
Look at Los Angeles: for a long time now, California's largest metropolitan area has not had enough water resources. It gets its water from the Sierra Nevada, nearly 600 km away. Even in one of the richest regions in the world, this infrastructure, which does not care about borders and distances, is running out of steam. Los Angeles has suffered from water shortages for two decades, a problem that is out of step with the standard of living of its residents.
In rich countries, the system is breaking down faster than anyone thought. In Africa, it is an absolute emergency. It is the last continent to urbanize, and the one that is doing so the fastest, without a state structure capable of financing the infrastructures that this implies. Between the high birth rate and the rural exodus, Africa is home to 86 of the 100 fastest growing cities in the world. At least 79 of them - including 15 capitals! - are facing extreme risks due to climate change.
Urban hell
The 13.2 million inhabitants of Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, are already regular victims of flooding. They will be twice as many by 2035. In Ethiopia, the number of city dwellers will rise from 24 to 74 million in the next three decades. Egypt's urban population will then reach 85 million, compared with 43 million today. This will push the authorities to create a new capital to relieve the urban hell of Cairo.
How to provide housing and equipment, roads and transport, drinking water and sanitation at such a sustained pace? It is impossible. Tensions over access to water, energy and telecommunications will grow as the needs of cities continue to exceed their territorial production capacity. Conflict is inevitable. We are heading for disaster.
The thinking must be reversed, to find a balance between population, resources and territory
Unless we radically change our way of building the world. In Africa, as elsewhere, this means first of all putting an end to the illusion of the limitless city. Some, like Sebha, will have to be abandoned to nature, and thousands of new ones will have to be built. But the thinking must be reversed, to find a balance between populations, resources and territories. The new city must be sized, limited by its own resources: if a given territory can provide water and energy for 50,000 people, then the future city must not exceed that size.
Re-learning to be nomadic
To do this, we must reconnect with the visible infrastructures of the past, which were part of the landscape, thus calling for collective governance. This was the case with the Roman aqueducts, but also with the basins of the Agdal, which integrated urban agriculture, or with the wells located in each district, as is still the case today in Venice. This is now being tried in Morocco, with the creation of the city of Mazagan, near El-Jadida, which we already know will have no more than 200,000 inhabitants.
The consequences of climate change, demographic pressure and galloping urbanization leave us no choice: Africa must be the scene of the reinvention of the city in the 21st century. And for this, it is urgent that it becomes once again a laboratory for architectural and urban experimentation, with all the more legitimacy since it will no longer be, as in the past, a colonial laboratory.
If Africa continues to impose urban planning models designed elsewhere, without a critical dimension, it will lead to chaos.
On the contrary, we must call on what Africa is capable of offering the world, through modes of organization, traditional resource management or the use of materials that have fallen into oblivion. This kind of experimentation is, for example, the raison d'être of the Moroccan Pavilion at the Dubai 2020 World Expo. Made of raw earth, the building reaches a height of 34 meters, a new height. More durable than concrete, raw earth, an African material par excellence, also makes it possible to do without air conditioning in one of the hottest places on earth.
If Africa continues to impose urban planning models designed elsewhere, without any critical dimension, it will end up in chaos. Here too, we must decolonize our thinking and imagine collective organizations that will enable us to adapt to the major displacements that climate change is already imposing on us. It is in Africa that we can learn to be nomads again, so as not to become refugees.
Source: paddel-afrique.org
