Asia and Africa have urbanised at similar speeds. Africa is undergoing the fastest urban transition the world has experienced to date with projections that nearly 1 billion more people will live in Africa’s cities by 2050.There’s a difference too. Across China and south-east Asia, urbanisation has been coupled with industrialisation and, through increases in economic productivity, has been unlocking growth dividends and reducing poverty. The same pattern has not happened in Africa. Although the urban transition in many African countries is even quicker than China’s, it has largely been decoupled from industrialisation. What the African experience is showing is that when urbanisation is not linked to investments in public infrastructure and services, it will amplify the downsides of dense living, such as the proliferation of informal settlements, congestion and contagion, as seen most recently with the COVID-19 pandemic.
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