African Urbanization: Assimilating Urban Metabolism into Sustainability Discourse and Practice

Abstract

Summary Shaping sustainable, equitable African cities requires strengthened investigations into the cities’ current resource flows, infrastructure systems, and future resource requirements. The field of urban metabolism (UM) offers multiple forms of analysis with which to map, analyse, and visualize urban resource profiles. Challenges in assessing UM in African cities include data scarcity at the city level, difficulty in tracking informal flows, lack of standardized methods, and the open nature of cities. However, such analyses are needed at the local level, given that city practitioners cannot rely purely on urban planning traditions of the global North or the typically broad studies about urban Africa, for supporting strategies toward sustainable urban development. This article aims to draw together the concepts of sustainable development and UM and explore their application in the African context. Further, the article estimated resource profiles for 120 African cities, including consumption of biomass, fossil fuels, electricity, construction materials, and water, as well as emissions of carbon dioxide. These resource profiles serve as a baseline from which to begin assessing the current and future resource intensity of these cities. It also provides insights into the cities’ relative resource impact, future consumption trends, and potential options for sustainability interventions.

Towards Measuring the Informal City: A Societal Metabolism Approach

“…; Guibrunet et al. ; Currie and Musango ). This has led several authors to call for a politicization of UM (Newell and Cousins ; Smit et al.…”

“…; Guibrunet et al. ; Attia and Khalil ; Currie and Musango ). Furthermore, effective policy and infrastructure planning requires understanding the variations of resource consumption within the city (Horta and Keirstead ).…”

“…UM provides a conceptual framework for understanding the functioning of cities with regard to the technical, socioeconomic, and socioecological processes that result in growth, production, and consumption of material flows and the elimination of waste, thereby influencing sustainable urban planning and design (Kennedy et al 2007(Kennedy et al , 2011Pincetl et al 2012;Currie and Musango 2016). While UM is useful for shaping urban sustainability (Kennedy and Hoornweg 2012), existing studies have not effectively engaged with the institutional and political contexts, which shape and influence urban material flows (Pincetl et al 2012;Guibrunet et al 2016;Currie and Musango 2016). This has led several authors to call for a politicization of UM (Newell and Cousins 2015;Smit et al 2017) and the inclusion of urban informal settlements or slums in the study of UM (Smit et al 2017;Guibrunet et al 2016;Attia and Khalil 2015;Currie and Musango 2016).…”

“…While UM is useful for shaping urban sustainability (Kennedy and Hoornweg 2012), existing studies have not effectively engaged with the institutional and political contexts, which shape and influence urban material flows (Pincetl et al 2012;Guibrunet et al 2016;Currie and Musango 2016). This has led several authors to call for a politicization of UM (Newell and Cousins 2015;Smit et al 2017) and the inclusion of urban informal settlements or slums in the study of UM (Smit et al 2017;Guibrunet et al 2016;Attia and Khalil 2015;Currie and Musango 2016). Furthermore, effective policy and infrastructure planning requires understanding the variations of resource consumption within the city (Horta and Keirstead 2016).…”

“…Conventional UM methods 1 tend to incorporate accounting methods that rely on secondary data (Beloin-Saint-Pierre et al 2016), or statistical methods for downscaling aggregate data (Horta and Keirstead 2016;Currie and Musango 2016), rather than utilizing primary data based on bottom-up approaches. These studies therefore tend to ignore informal flows and processes of informal settlements, which are deemed data scarce areas (Currie and Musango 2016). Therefore, in cities where informal settlements represent the largest population, the UM results may not be a complete representation of metabolic flows.…”