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Are you interested in the governance of urban informal settlements?
Our debate today works with the article titled Governance of urban informal settlements in Africa: A scoping review from 2025, by Behailu Mulate Ewnetu and Bo Kyong Seo, published in the Heliyon journal.
This is a great preparation to our next interview with Carina Tenewaa Kanbi in episode 436 talking about the need to involve the informal settlements more into the urban futures.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what has been done to involve informal settlements into the urban fabric. This article investigates current governance practices regarding informal settlements and advocates for collaborative governance models while identifying key knowledge gaps for future research.
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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
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Speaker 1: Imagine a city of millions functioning day in and day out, water flowing, commerce booming, houses being built.
Speaker 2: A massive hub of activity.
Speaker 1: Exactly. But all of this is happening without a single legal blueprint, government permit, or municipal dollar. It sounds like dystopian fiction, but that is the daily reality for over half the urban population in Africa.
Speaker 2: It’s a staggering reality. When you look at rapid urbanization across the continent, African urban areas now host, I think it’s fifty-one point three percent of their populations in informal settlements. We are talking about hundreds of millions of people living entirely outside the formal lines of city planning.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And for listeners used to municipal zoning boards and predictable city grids, it might be really hard to even conceptualize. We’re looking at environments with severe infrastructural and socioeconomic deficits.
Speaker 2: Definitely.
Speaker 1: So today, we’re dissecting the governance of these exact settlements. We’re drawing heavily on a massive scoping review. They analysed thirty different studies across twenty African nations.
Speaker 2: Which is a huge data set. And look, we both recognize there’s a profound urban governance crisis here, but we fundamentally disagree on the framework needed to actually solve it.
Speaker 1: We do. I argue that a prescriptive, state-led, top-down approach is really the only viable path forward. Only formal government authority can resolve massive structural barriers like legal land tenure and citywide infrastructure.
Speaker 2: And I argue that relying on the state is, frankly, a proven dead end. African city governments have fundamentally failed these communities through political manipulation and outright hostility. So an innovative bottom-up network of community and civil society actors isn’t just a nice alternative, it is the absolute only pragmatic solution we have.
Speaker 1: The core of my argument really comes down to one absolutely critical concept. And that is legal household land tenure. If you don’t legally own the dirt under your house, you are economically paralysed.
Speaker 2: You have no security.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Think about it from the perspective of a family living there. You will never invest your life savings in a permanent concrete foundation or, like, a modern plumbing system because a city bulldozer could flatten your neighbourhood tomorrow without any warning.
Speaker 2: And that is absolutely a fear they live with every single day.
Speaker 1: And that lack of legal standing blocks any meaningful infrastructure development at scale. Because the state is largely absent from these areas, we currently just rely on this uncoordinated patchwork of NGOs and external charities.
Speaker 2: But those charities are doing the actual work on the ground.
Speaker 1: Sure, but they step on each other’s toes. You have fragmented groups digging a well here, putting up a solar panel there, with zero top-down strategy. It’s like trying to build a transcontinental railroad by asking everyone to forge their own individual tracks in their backyards.
Speaker 2: Okay, that’s an interesting way to frame it.
Speaker 1: You might get a lot of iron on the ground, but the trains will never connect. You absolutely need a capacitated national and local government to wield the legal frameworks and allocate resources.
Speaker 2: I hear your point on infrastructure, and the railroad analogy makes sense in a vacuum, but that prescriptive approach assumes the state actually wants the trains to run.
Speaker 1: Which I believe is the basic function of a state.
Speaker 2: In theory, sure. But the reality on the ground in so many of these 20 nations is that city governments totally lack the goodwill to implement these policies. They look at informal settlements, and they don’t see a community waiting for a master plan. They just see eyesores, or worse. They see inherently criminal areas.
Speaker 1: I wouldn’t say they view them strictly as criminal, but they certainly struggle with how to formalize them.
Speaker 2: But the hostility is real, and when the state does step in, it’s almost entirely performative. The researchers call it political instrumentalization. Let’s break down what that actually looks like for the people living there. In places like South Africa and Ghana- Politicians will suddenly roll in equipment to pave a single road, or they hand out a few land deeds a month before an election. They initiate these upgrades purely to buy votes.
Speaker 1: Politics always plays a role in public works.
Speaker 2: But the day after the election is won, they completely abandon the project. They leave half-dug trenches and torn-up roads. They frequently leave the built environment worse off than before. So the state’s pen, which you want to rely on so heavily, is actively used to secure electoral support, not to secure water mains.
Speaker 1: That is a very cynical view of local politics. But even if we accept that some politicians act in bad faith, it still doesn’t solve the macro-level engineering problem. How can a community network legally zone land or build a municipal sanitation grid?
Speaker 2: They find alternative ways to manage waste.
Speaker 1: If you want to lay down infrastructure or facilitate relocations out of dangerous flood zones, you need massive government intervention
Speaker 2: I’m not sure intervention always equals protection, though.
Speaker 1: You need the legal power of eminent domain to acquire that land safely and legally. A neighbourhood association or a local microlender cannot negotiate large-scale land acquisitions.
Speaker 2: But you really have to look at what happens when the state exercises that power. State intervention routinely ignores the informal economy, which is the actual lifeblood of these residents. The data shows us that tension often explodes over economic hotspots, like informal markets and investment districts.
Speaker 1: Urban upgrading inevitably changes the economic landscape. Yes, that’s part of modernization. There are always growing pains with urban renewal.
Speaker 2: It’s not just growing pains, it’s forced eviction, and this is exactly where traditional leaders step in. They are the ones mobilizing the community, physically and legally standing between the residents and the aggressive development plans of the state. They negotiate block by block to protect basic rights.
Speaker 1: I acknowledge they play a role.
Speaker 2: So I have to ask, how does your prescriptive approach protect residents from being bulldozed by the very authorities meant to help them?
Speaker 1: I see why you think that, but let me give you a different perspective. Yes, traditional leaders play a vital role in advocacy, but advocacy does not build a water treatment plant. Advocacy does not manage a national budget.
Speaker 2: It keeps people in their homes, though.
Speaker 1: Sure, but relying entirely on local networks or the informal economy creates a massive vulnerability, which is external dependency. So much of the bottom-up upgrading we see in sub-Saharan Africa relies heavily on international social organizations and foreign funding.
Speaker 2: Foreign aid is certainly part of the ecosystem, I’ll grant you that.
Speaker 1: It is a massive part, and what happens when that grant money dries up? The international NGO leaves, and long-term upkeep and strategic planning become completely impossible.
Speaker 2: The communities often adapt.
Speaker 1: But a local group might have a new water pump installed today, but they do not have the supply chain or the municipal tax funds to fix it when it breaks two years later. You cannot sustain a city of millions on microloans and temporary foreign aid. You need macro-level state infrastructure backed by a steady tax base to achieve genuine permanence.
Speaker 2: I come at it from a different way. I really think we need to completely redefine what governance means in this context. You are talking about governments purely as official mandates and official tax revenue.
Speaker 1: Because that is how modern cities function globally.
Speaker 2: But these specific states are facing massive national budget deficits. They have a complete inability to provide formal employment or housing for the millions of rural to urban migrants arriving every single year. The government is essentially bankrupt and absent.
Speaker 1: Which is why capacity building is so important.
Speaker 2: But while we wait for capacity, people need to live. So governance, in reality, has become a horizontal network. It’s local operators, civil society, and private sectors engaging in the everyday affairs of the city.
Speaker 1: But is that truly governance or just basic survival?
Speaker 2: It is functional governance. Look at the mechanics of microfinance institutions. Instead of waiting decades for a paralysed city council to approve a public housing block, a private microlender steps in.
Speaker 1: With very high interest rates usually.
Speaker 2: Sometimes. But they give a family a small line of credit to buy corrugated tin and a few bags of cement. The family builds their own roof this week. That is a sustainable immediate reality. It transforms a neighbourhood’s economy today, utilizing the informal markets that already exist.
Speaker 1: It transforms one house. It doesn’t build the sewage system for the street.
Speaker 2: But it keeps people sheltered while the state plays politics or waits for a budget surplus that will literally never come. When the government fails, this collaborative network isn’t just a nice-to-have addition to a master plan, it is the only functional governance mechanism available right now.
Speaker 1: When I look at all this, I just can’t get past the fact that while community involvement and microloans are incredibly necessary for immediate survival, they cannot substitute for the heavy prescriptive legal lifting.
Speaker 2: They are doing the heavy lifting, though.
Speaker 1: On a micro level. We cannot piece together a fragmented fix to a systemic urban planning crisis without a formalized state authority to actually manage land tenure and macro resources. The sheer scale of the problem simply demands state-level solutions.
Speaker 2: And for me, at the end of the day, until governments stop viewing these settlements as isolated criminal eyesores and start respecting the informal economy, pragmatic progress is only gonna come from the ground up. We really have to empower the civil society and local networks who are actually delivering tangible results.
Speaker 1: Roofs, water, basic protection.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We need to support them rather than waiting for a hostile state to suddenly become benevolent.
Speaker 1: I think where we absolutely converge on this, and this is a critical takeaway from examining the literature on these 20 nations, is that disjointed initiatives fail. Whether it’s a fragmented NGO digging a single well- Or an absent government paving a single road just for votes, neither addresses the root causes of informal settlements.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We both acknowledge that an ideal hybrid approach where competent urban managers actually coordinate with these diverse on-the-ground stakeholders is desperately needed. But currently, as the research shows, that ideal model is basically non-existent.
Speaker 1: The complexity of urban governance in the Global South is staggering. We encourage our listeners to further explore this literature to truly understand how marginalized populations survive, organize, and innovate in the face of incredible structural neglect.
Speaker 2: It’s a fascinating area of study that challenges all our assumptions about how societies function and what actually makes a city.
Speaker 1: It really is, and it brings us right back to our opening thought. When the master blueprint of the city fails, people don’t just stop building. They pick up whatever tools they have, and they build anyway.
The question we leave you with is, who should hold the pen for the next draft?
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