Online Reporter
Wellington Muzengeza
AFRICA’S urban future is not being stolen by colonial ghosts or foreign conspiracies; instead, it is being sabotaged from within.
The true saboteurs are not external forces, but internal delusions masquerading as doctrine.
Chief among these is the persistent romanticisation of informality and the academic inertia that props it up.
Across planning schools, policy platforms, and donor-funded think tanks, a troubling orthodoxy has calcified: that informality is inevitable, even virtuous; that it embodies resilience, creativity, and organic urbanism.
This is not just naïve, it is intellectually bankrupt, professionally irresponsible, and strategically suicidal.
Let us dispense with euphemisms. Informality is not a benign inevitability to be managed with sympathy and improvisation. It is the principal engine of dysfunction in African cities. It disfigures the urban form, overwhelms infrastructure, and sabotages governance. Through unregulated settlements, unauthorised land use, and sprawling informal economies, informality has entrenched itself as the architecture of disorder.
From the congested townships of Johannesburg to the chaotic sprawl of Kampala, from the decaying peripheries of Harare to the ungovernable markets of Lagos, Accra, and Luanda, the evidence is not only visible but also visceral. Informality is not just a symptom of poor governance; it is its most potent cause.
Yet, a cadre of theorists, most of whom have never endured a single day in an informal settlement, persist in glorifying this dysfunction from the insulated heights of academic privilege. They publish prolifically, speak eloquently, and train future planners with no lived experience of the dysfunction they defend. Most would not survive a day in the very environments they romanticise. This is the dearth of urban planning in Africa: a profession steeped in theory that has become allergic to practice, and increasingly divorced from reality. It is a discipline that has lost its moral compass, its spatial logic, and its civic responsibility.
Urban Suicide by Sentimentality
It is not only profoundly naïve but strategically reckless to suggest that traditional planning methods from old African cities can be transposed wholesale onto the cities of the future. This is not cultural pride; it is professional malpractice masquerading as heritage.
Beyond the aesthetic borrowing of architectural motifs, there is little in the legacy of ancient African urbanism that offers scalable, technology-driven, governance-ready solutions for today’s rapidly urbanising continent. Nostalgia is not a strategy.
It cannot power a smart grid, regulate a transport corridor, or manage a megacity. The future demands innovation, not inheritance. It demands systems thinking, digital infrastructure, and anticipatory governance, not the reanimation of precolonial spatial arrangements that were never designed for populations in the tens of millions.
Equally tired is the accusation that planners who reject informality are simply viewing cities through a “Western lens.” This is a lazy deflection, not a serious argument. There is nothing Western about rejecting chaos. There is nothing colonial about demanding order. Planning, by definition, is the imposition of structure on space. It is the art and science of coordination, not improvisation.
The kind of informality that plagues African cities, sprawling slums, unregulated economies, and infrastructural collapse, is categorically different from the shadow economies and precarious housing seen in Western capitals. In Paris or New York, informality is embedded within formal systems. In Nairobi or Kinshasa, it has replaced them. To equate the two scenarios is to flatten complexity and excuse failure.
Informality is not a virtue; it is a pathology. It is the visible scar of failed planning, collapsed development control, and political cowardice. Those who tolerate it often do so to mask their own professional impotence, deflecting blame onto colonial legacies or imported theories, but the cities of the future, Shenzhen, Dubai, Singapore, and Seoul, are not built on improvisation. They are built on precision, coordination, and unapologetic order. They are governed by data, not guesswork, by regulation, not resignation.
Africa’s emerging urban imagination is already rejecting the informality trap. Cities like Kigali, Konza Technopolis, Eko Atlantic, Diamniadio, and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital are not indulging chaos; they are dismantling it. They are investing in smart infrastructure, sustainable design, and governance systems that prioritise control, not compromise. These are not Western impositions; they are global best practices, and Africa must learn from them, not as imitators, but as innovators who understand that dignity begins with design, and justice begins with order.
The planning profession must undergo a radical transformation. It must abandon its gentleman’s club mentality, an obsession with theoretical publishing, and a profound detachment from lived urban realities. It must widen its worldview, embrace practice over posturing, and reassert its relevance in the built environment.
If planners continue to operate in silos of theory, they will be swallowed whole by other disciplines, architecture, engineering, and surveying, that are already leading the charge. This erosion has been underway for 25 years. In another decade, planning may be reduced to a ceremonial function, a footnote in its own domain.
Let us also be clear: crime and informality are not separate crises. They are co-conspirators in the breakdown of urban governance. High crime rates thrive in informal environments where planning has failed, infrastructure is absent, and law enforcement is overwhelmed.
The dream of 24-hour economies, safe mobility, and inclusive growth cannot coexist with unregulated sprawl and systemic disorder. Informality is not just a spatial problem; it is a security threat, an economic drag, and a moral failure.
As a practitioner, I hold a simple principle: if I cannot live in the city I help design, I will not recommend it. We must plan cities we are willing to inhabit.
Cities that offer dignity, safety, and opportunity, not improvisation, insecurity, and decay. The future of African urbanism depends on our willingness to confront hard truths, reject seductive myths, and build cities that are not only liveable, but governable, resilient, and just.
Adapt or Die: The Last Call for African Planners
The planning profession in Africa stands at a precipice. If it does not confront its complicity in the continent’s urban crisis, its theoretical inertia, its romanticisation of informality, its detachment from lived realities, it will not merely become irrelevant.
It will be remembered as the discipline that watched cities collapse while it debated footnotes. The future will not wait for theorists to catch up. It will be built by those who understand that cities are engines of economic transformation, not museums of academic nostalgia.
Africa does not need planners who pontificate from conference podiums. It needs planners who walk the streets they design, who engage the chaos they claim to understand, and who build systems that outlive their tenure. It needs professionals who can lead, not lecture. Who can build, not just theorise. Who can confront disorder with design and dysfunction with discipline.
The time for romanticism is over. The time for radical, practice-driven, globally informed planning has begun. This is not a call for cosmetic reform; it is a demand for intellectual reorientation. Planners must dismantle the gentleman’s club of insular academia and step into the arena of real-world governance.
They must abandon the comfort of publishing for the discomfort of practice. They must stop hiding behind colonial critiques and start delivering post-colonial solutions.
If African planners do not rise to this moment, they will be buried in the dustbin of failed cities, outpaced by architects, engineers, and technocrats who understand that the future is not theorised, it is built. The erosion of planning authority is not hypothetical; it is already underway. In another decade, planning may be reduced to a ceremonial function, a relic of what could have been.
Corrective action is not optional; it is existential. Planning curricula must be overhauled to prioritise practice, data, and governance. Professional bodies must demand accountability, not just accreditation.
Urban planning must be redefined as a tool of transformation, not a theatre of nostalgia. Africa’s cities deserve nothing less. If African planners do not radically rethink their allegiance to failed paradigms, they will not be remembered as visionaries; they will be indicted as enablers of collapse.
This is a reckoning; either planners rise, or they are replaced. The continent cannot afford another generation of theorists who mistake chaos for culture and failure for resilience. The future belongs to those who build it. Let planning reclaim its place, not as a footnote to development, but as its architect.
Wellington Muzengeza is a Political Risk Analyst and Urban Strategist offering incisive insight on urban planning, infrastructure, leadership succession, and governance reform across Africa’s evolving post-liberation urban landscapes
