Politics & Governance / Public Policy / Urban Planning & Governance

Why World Bank Plans Are Making African Cities Worse: The Hidden Crisis

African Cities and Collaborative Futures: Urban Platforms and Metropolitan Logistics

Michael Keith, Andrea Uuska Suzaantos

In this video, we dive into the groundbreaking book 'African Cities and Collaborative Futures: Urban Platforms and Metropolitan Logistics' edited by Michael Keith and Andrea Uuska Suzaantos. The standard narrative says urbanization lifts people out of poverty, but the reality is a terrifying paradox: the very processes meant to help are structurally trapping billions in unlivable conditions. We explore how international experts, from the World Bank to green energy projects, misread the city's operating system, leading to devastating outcomes. From the five faces of the urban periphery in Addis Ababa to the 'risk development paradox' in Malawi and Nigeria, we reveal how top-down solutions often harm the poorest. But there's hope: community-led initiatives like the Mukuru special planning area in Nairobi and the FeUP self-building projects in Durban show a better way. Discover why informal economies are not chaos but highly organized survival systems, and why the next big threat might be AI ignoring the unquantifiable human networks that keep cities alive.