African cities are expected to experience a significant increase in population over the next 30 years. According to United Nations projections, these cities will welcome an additional 900 million inhabitants by 2050. This demographic shift will create both opportunities and challenges that will reshape the nature and structure of these cities. These challenges include the need for economic growth, increased demand for housing and infrastructure, and the development of supplementary transportation systems. So far, most African cities have responded to this rapid population growth with sprawling horizontal development patterns that expand the fringes of the city, increase social fragmentation, and ultimately lead to greater car dependency.
Due to the irregularity and poor planning of urban sprawl patterns, there is often a mobility deficiency that requires heavy investment in road infrastructure. New road networks are constructed and existing ones are rehabilitated to accommodate more cars, effectively connecting existing city centers to their expanding borders.
In 2022, the Addis Ababa city administration inaugurated road projects throughout the city, totaling nearly 20km in length with varying widths of 13m to 120m, in order to complement the city’s growth. Lagos, the city with the highest population on the continent, has been rehabilitating 175 roads since 2019, including flyovers and dual carriageways, to resolve the city’s mobility issues. Nairobi has also begun expressway road projects of up to 27km to reduce the city’s congestion and help ease traffic flow across its entire northern corridor.
As road projects are implemented in various African cities, flyovers, dual carriageways, and multi-lane carriageways widen the roads and push the city's architecture further apart. Large car parks form obstacles between pedestrians and buildings, increasing the scale at which people relate to the city. This relationship projects the vehicle as the sole means of interacting with the city while alienating the reasons for pedestrian circulation. In the absence of proper public transportation systems, commuters respond by owning more private cars, making journeys between any area in the city impossible without them. These cities have become car-dependent, leading to a decline in pedestrian intimacy with the urban environment.
Moreover, as African cities evolve into new car-dependent forms, the typologies that house their informal retail still summon pedestrian circulation. Various forms of informal architecture are the reasons people walk to interact with the city. For example, small kiosks in residential areas encourage residents to take short walks from their homes instead of driving to malls. Retail stores that are extensions of houses on streets act as focal social points for surrounding households. Informal markets in the city with small-scale architecture, such as umbrellas and wooden stalls, require customers to walk through and interact with them. Restaurants that spill out onto the roadside activate the street and create a connection between people walking by and the informal gathering. Through these examples, informal urban forms create a direct and smaller relationship between people and architecture.
Informal spaces are temporary structures that appear and disappear within urban spaces, making them transient in nature. This unique quality allows them to mutate the form and spatial configuration of street networks, constantly enticing pedestrians to experience the new types of spaces informal architecture offers.
In an informal scheme, owners of these retail spaces also act as designers. They engage in mass customization of their spaces to reflect the products they sell, creating a distinctive spatial interface that advertises the products and draws customers to engage with the stall's facade as a shopping gallery. This could be a facade of hats and caps for a headwear store, a stepped elevation of groceries for a grocery store, or a curtain of dresses for a clothing store. These facades invite people to interact with them intimately, activating all the senses - touch, smell, and sound - as ways to engage with the architecture.
Although informal architecture is essential to the locals of African cities, the directors of these cities' development ignore them in urban planning decisions. Road design is projected as grand infrastructure that predicts a certain kind of future for the city but doesn't complement its current realities. Pedestrian walkways alongside roads are not built to harmonize with the existing informal architectural forms. Flyovers move cars and people to levels above informal spaces, and development patterns implement policies that eradicate informal retail to make space for formal designs.
Instead, the relationship of informal architecture with residents in African cities presents an opportunity for new kinds of urbanism. One that is informed by the realities of these informal spaces, accommodates them within the design of road infrastructure and has zoning rules that encourage small retail units within walking distance of rapid transit corridors. Through this, the urban area aims to be a walkable city that is inclusive, feels compact, and is pedestrian-friendly.
