아프리카 도시의 스프롤 현상

 

사진 출처 : https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/19/urban-explosion-kinshasa-el-alto-growth-mexico-city-bangalore-lagos
Where the urban sprawl of Kinshasa meets the surrounding countryside. Photograph: FredR/Flickr

스프롤 현상의 패턴

 

 

 

Bourgeois shanty towns

The great cities of Africa and Asia are spreading fast, and in bizarre ways

Rural areas are turning urban far faster than planners expected

Jun 29th 2016 | International

 

INSIDE, Essa Mwaitulo’s house on the edge of Dar es Salaam is the picture of middle-class African domesticity. The sofas are luxurious; the curtains are golden; the walls are shocking pink; the floor, on which Ms Mwaitulo’s daughter has crashed out, is polished stone. “We are free, actually,” she says contentedly, sounding like anyone who has ever moved from a rented city-centre flat to a suburban house of her own. “I can do whatever I want.”

 

Step outside, though, and the impression of harmony and control dissolves. The scene around Ms Mwaitulo’s house in Mikwambe is chaotic. Houses are rising higgledy-piggledy. Many are half-finished and look abandoned, although they are not: one has no floor and a tree growing inside. What appears to be a small village square turns out to be a plot on which the owner has not yet got around to building. The neighbourhood has only one paved road, no central water supply and no sewer. It is a kind of bourgeois shanty town.

 

A huge and growing number of people live somewhere like Mikwambe. Between 2005 and 2015 the world’s cities swelled by about 750m people, according to the UN. More than four-fifths of that growth was in Africa and Asia; specifically, on the fringes of African and Asian cities. With few exceptions, cities are growing faster in size than in population. Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, is typical: it doubled in population between 1990 and 2010 but tripled in area. In short, almost all urban growth is sprawl.

 

In some ways African and Asian cities are following the path of American and European ones. London, Paris and New York all sprawled in the 19th and early 20th centuries while their inner-city slums hollowed out, as though giant hammers were beating the cities from above. The population of Paris increased 20-fold between 1800 and 2000 as the metropolis expanded more than 200 times. Commentators wrung their hands: London was likened to an invading army and a giant octopus.

 

 

Not like Levittown
Next to today’s fast-growing cities, though, it was a rather tame octopus. London took two millennia to grow from fewer than 30,000 people to almost 10m; Shenzhen in China managed that within three decades. And most African and Asian cities are growing more chaotically. Although no two are quite the same, their suburbs tend to be unplanned, with scant space for roads, let alone public parks. Many new suburbanites have a weak claim on the land they build upon. To planners the sprawl seems haphazard, and it has bad consequences, especially in Africa. But it has a logic of its own, and in any case cannot be wished away. Like it or not, this is how the great cities of the 21st century are taking shape.

 

Dar es Salaam is a case in point. The British governors who ran Tanzania (then called Tanganyika) until the 1960s envisaged it as a small, orderly city. With 5m people, population growth of more than 5% a year and some of the world’s worst traffic jams, it is now neither of those things. And the colonial rulers made another assumption, with great consequences for the modern metropolis, says Wolfgang Scholz of the Technical University in Dortmund. The city was to be planned, with Western-style owner-occupied homes on large plots, at least in the European areas. The countryside beyond was to be unplanned and African, with property owned collectively.

 

Dar es Salaam has swelled so much that almost all building now is in what is technically countryside. Land there can be bought and sold, but only informally; commercial developers will not touch it. The buyers, largely families moving out of the city centre, cannot encumber land that they do not truly own, so they cannot obtain mortgages. They build slowly, adding bricks when they can afford them. The urban fringe is littered with “almost houses” and shops selling building supplies. Ms Mwaitulo’s house, which was financed partly by personal loans, was built in four years—fast by local standards.

 

If house-building is slow, installing roads and other infrastructure is much more so. When Ms Mwaitulo arrived, Mikwambe was always dark at night. Homes now have electricity but little else. She gets water from a private borehole and sells some to neighbours. Residents cut informal deals over public space. Aisha Hassan, a farmer who sold most of her land but still lives in Mikwambe, says she asked the homebuilders who bought from her to leave space for a road. The narrow track will be woefully inadequate when the neighbourhood fills up with car owners.

 

It is a typical arrangement. Shlomo Angel of New York University has studied seven African cities in detail: Accra, Addis Ababa, Arusha, Ibadan, Johannesburg, Lagos and Luanda. He calculates that only 16% of the land in new residential areas developed since 1990 has been set aside for roads—about half as much as planners think necessary. And 44% of those roads are less than four metres wide.

 

“First the people come, then the development comes,” explains one resident of Mikwambe, a teacher in a madrassa. To an extent this is true. As the suburbs of Dar es Salaam fill up, their residents will gain officials’ ears. But retrofitting chaotic districts with roads and sewers will be slow, hard and pricey: some homes must be knocked down and their owners compensated. Dar es Salaam’s new suburbanites are less secure, and less free, than they believe.

 

 

Urbs in rure
Almost 10,000 km away, in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, another city is spreading. Working the till at a petrol station not far from where she grew up, Chen Xiaomei remembers how, two decades ago, most of Xiaoshan was farmland inhabited by local peasants who seldom travelled to the city of Hangzhou, about 20km away. Now Xiaoshan is a sprawling suburb which grew from 1.77m people in 2005 to 2.35m last year. It looks nothing like Mikwambe; nor does it remotely resemble a European or American suburb.

 

Homes in Xiaoshan are a mixture of grubby apartment blocks and grandiose four- and five-storey homes decorated in joyous combinations of pastel colours. Locals call these “villas” and many feature European gabled fronts or Chinese pagoda roofs (or both). They are connected to the electricity grid, the sewer system and the road network. Roads account for fully 29% of land area in the newly developed suburbs of Hangzhou, according to Mr Angel. The western edge of Xiaoshan even has a subway line. For the past two decades Zhejiang’s economic performance has been among the best in China. Hangzhou’s GDP per person reached $17,000 last year—more than double the national average. Local people who abandoned farm work for city jobs have grown richer, as have migrants from elsewhere in China. Yuan Hong, one of many people who migrated to Xiaoshan from Anhui province, north-west of the city, came to open a small electronics factory in 2004. His pot belly and the gold chain around his neck testify to its success, as does his four-storey house with an exterior of baby-blue tile.

 

Xiaoshan looks fairly orderly. Most roads follow a grid pattern, and buildings line the roads. Close to the urban core it has sprouted factories, car dealerships and the odd high-end apartment block. (“Money and cars,” says one shopkeeper. “That’s what we have here.”) On the fringes, though, Xiaoshan is taking on a deeply strange form. Behind the lines of tightly packed houses and apartment blocks are large fields divided into strips. A lattice of urbanity has been overlaid on an agricultural landscape.

 

Xiaoshan is hardly a farming titan: vendors at a nearby market say their produce is trucked in from elsewhere. The fields remain because government policy makes it hard to convert farmland into housing. So residents build their homes as large as they can and rent rooms to city workers for extra income. Although it would have been roundly condemned as ideological heresy in the days of Chairman Mao, Mr Yuan chuckles at the suggestion that peasants have become landlords. “Yes,” he says, “I suppose you could put it that way.”

 

Though prices have wobbled in the past few years, housing in Hangzhou is expensive. Residential floorspace sold for an average of about 16,000 yuan ($2,400) per square metre last year, roughly double the going rate in Hefei, a lower-tier provincial capital in Anhui. As a result, the pressure on land is enormous. Some people in Xiaoshan admit to having built on open land without permission, knowing that they face the risk of demolition without compensation if enforcement toughens.

 

So Xiaoshan is not as different from the fringes of Dar es Salaam as it appears. In both, rural areas are turning urban far faster than planners expected, making land-use laws seem ridiculous. Yan Song, who follows Chinese city planning at the University of North Carolina, says that until recently many Chinese cities were spreading because of administrative and zoning changes pushed by the central government. These days much pressure comes from below, driven by the desires of an increasingly mobile people. Urban sprawl is out of the government’s control.

 

The suburbs of Europe and North America, with their well-ordered streets and parks, increasingly seem like exceptions to the global rule. They emerged in strange circumstances: property rights were strong and rural estates were large enough to allow big housing developments. A few suburbs in the emerging world resemble them. Nuvali, south of Manila, is inspired by Irvine in California; Beijing even has a development called Orange County. But such clones tend to be for the rich, whereas the whole point of Western suburbs is that they provided middle-class people with the space and privacy once available only to the elite.

 

Perhaps the biggest difference is that Western suburbs emerged fully formed. Willingboro Township, on the edge of Philadelphia—the classic American suburb that Herbert Gans wrote about in “The Levittowners”—still looks much as it did when it was built in the 1950s and 1960s. Mikwambe and Xiaoshan cannot but change drastically over the years. They are opening gambits in a long, unpredictable urban game.

 

 

 

African cities
Left behind

All over the world, people escape poverty by moving to cities.
Why does this not work so well in Africa?
Sep 17th 2016 | LAGOS

 

IT HAS been a week since Mohammed Sani moved to Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. A scrawny 22-year old from Kebbi State in the north-west, he came looking for work. He has certainly found it. At 5am each morning he fills ten 25-litre plastic jugs with water from a borehole, paying 20 naira for each one (about $0.05). He then pulls them around Yaba, his new neighbourhood, on a cart, selling each one for 25 naira. By sunset at 7pm he has perhaps 700 naira of profit ($2) in his pocket—not much in Lagos. “If I find a better business, I will try it,” he says. But for the moment, this is as good at it gets.

 

Young people migrate to cities the world over looking for opportunity. Lagos, a sprawling lagoon city of some 21m people (pictured), is no exception. In dense traffic jams, young men weave through the cars selling plastic pouches of drinking water and tissues. On street corners they run generators and will charge your phone or photocopy a document. But most people never get much further than where they start: working extraordinarily hard for very little. Migrants to African cities are not worse off than they were in the countryside. If that were the case, they would move back. But urbanisation in Africa does not provide nearly as good a ladder out of poverty as it does elsewhere.

 

Africa is the world’s fastest urbanising continent. In 1950, sub-Saharan Africa had no cities with populations of more than 1m. Today, it has around 50. By 2030, over half of the continent’s population will live in cities, up from around a third now. The fastest growing metropolises, such as Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, are expanding at rates of more than 4% per year. That is almost twice as fast as Houston, America’s fastest-growing metropolis.

 

In most parts of the world, crowding people together allows businesses that wouldn’t otherwise exist to thrive. In Africa this process seems not to work as well. According to one 2007 study of 90 developing countries, Africa is the only region where urbanisation is not correlated with poverty reduction. The World Bank says that African cities “cannot be characterised as economically dense, connected, and liveable. Instead, they are crowded, disconnected, and costly.”

 

Not all African cities are the same, of course. Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, is amazingly clean—the result of having a stern disciplinarian as a president. South Africa’s big cities somewhat resemble American ones, only with shanty towns at the edges. What ties them together, and sets them apart from cities elsewhere in the world, according to the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, is that urbanisation has not been driven by increasing agricultural productivity or by industrialisation. Instead, African cities are centres of consumption, where the rents extracted from natural resources are spent by the rich. This means that they have grown while failing to install the infrastructure that makes cities elsewhere work.

 

In Lagos, the island of Ikoyi, which was once a garden suburb for British colonial officers, is now a wealthy residential area lived in by oil executives and politicians, with a golf course. But if you want to live here, you must “bring your own infrastructure”, jokes Giles Omezi, a Nigerian architect. Every private home or apartment block has not only its own security guards and generator, but its own borehole and water treatment system too. Even street lighting and roads can be privately provided: a thriving business in Lagos is reclaiming land on which to build fancy gated communities. The biggest of them, Eko Atlantic, is being built by a Lebanese family business, and stretches way out into the Atlantic Ocean.

 

The poor new arrivals, meanwhile, get by with almost nothing. Underneath a bridge that connects the Nigerian mainland to Lagos’s islands, the slum of Makoko sprawls out into the lagoon—the houses at the edge are built on stilts in the water on foundations of rubbish. Once a fishing village, it is now home to anywhere between 80,000 and 300,000 people from all over west Africa. Water has to be brought in by cart. Sewage runs in the narrow streets. The police, when they come in at all, do so mostly to demand bribes. “The government doesn’t want us to be here,” says Isaac Dosugam, a resident who works as a driver. In 2012 part of the slum was indeed demolished by the authorities. But it has grown back since.

 

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s commercial capital, 28% of residents live at least three to a room; in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s economic hub, the figure is 50%. In Nairobi, around two-thirds of the population occupy 6% of the land. Slums bring with them filth and disease. Across sub-Saharan Africa, only 40% of urban residents have access to proper toilets—a figure that has not changed since 1990.

 

Formal jobs are rare. Most slum dwellers scrape by on informal work in their neighbourhoods. Those who can find jobs with salaries usually have long commutes to distant city centres. In Nairobi, the primary means of transport is on foot. In South Africa the average commute by bus is 74 minutes each way.

 

The unequal distribution of land doesn’t just create slums: it also raises costs for businesses. In Lagos, expat tenants of new apartment blocks are typically expected to pay an entire year’s rent in advance. For a modest three-bedroom apartment on Ikoyi, this might come to $65,000. And yet the city is littered with empty and half-finished buildings, even in the most fashionable districts. Much of it is government-owned: office blocks abandoned since Nigeria moved the capital from Lagos to Abuja in 1991. But privately owned land is often underdeveloped too, partly thanks to a law which requires any sale to have the governor’s consent.

 

There is some progress. Traffic in Lagos is no longer as punishing as it once was, largely thanks to new roads built by Babatunde Fashola, the city’s previous governor. A light-rail system—expensive, long delayed and badly planned—is almost complete. When it opens, Lagos will join Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, which opened the first sub-Saharan metro system outside of South Africa last year. In cities such as Abidjan and Kampala expressways funded by tolls are easing bottlenecks and opening up agricultural land to developers, fuelling suburban construction booms.

 

But the trouble is that changes often seem to benefit the relatively rich most. Better roads typically do not reach into slums; new apartments are never targeted at people earning a few dollars a day. Politicians across Africa often seem to see the poor as a problem to be swept away, rather than people whose lives need improving. In Lagos, the state government frequently bulldozes slums, but almost never provides alternative housing. In Kigali, according to Human Rights Watch, a lobby group, unsightly street traders are often beaten up and imprisoned without trial.

 

Real change is possible, but politically hard. If Africa’s wealthy paid more taxes, the extra cash could pay for infrastructure that would eventually benefit everybody. Clearer land registration would lower the cost and risk of building new homes. Devolution that made city leaders more accountable might produce planning policies that help the poor. Some of these reforms are being tried in a few African cities, but rarely all at once.

 

So most African city dwellers have to rely on their own hard work and enterprise. In his tiny shop on the Lagos mainland, Colin Alli is one of the luckier ones. He explains how he built up his bedsheets business from a single market stall. Now he employs four men. “Tomorrow I can be governor,” he jokes.

 

From the print edition: Middle East and Africa