The informal as the “city” in urban Africa: Experiences from Kampala
Shuaib Lwasa
Makerere University, Uganda
Cities in developing countries have grappled with spatial planning, infrastructure, housing and, more recently, fragmented and “runaway” development. Spatial plans largely remain at a strategic level and less at the neighborhood scale, where there is a disjuncture between the envisioned urban layout and the actual development (Lwasa, 2013). The coupling of these multiple challenges has rendered planning a failure, resulting in a continued organic development of “informal” cities with diverse infrastructure and services that contrast with centralized systems used as the benchmark for measuring progress of a formal city. In this article, I postulate that the “informal city” is actually the city. From housing, diverse infrastructure, innovative livelihoods, patterns of growth and sprawl, economy, labor market, industrious innovativeness and social differentiation, these “informal” settlements are largest sections in many African cities and offer careers and lifetime experiences to many people in Africa (
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