The African Centre for Cities’ (ACC) new collection of essays Africa’s Urban Revolution (Zed Books) proposes a number of advances to both the policy and theory of Africa’s urbanisation experience in issues such as decentralisation, food security and armed conflict as the first part of this review learnt.
Two further chapters address an empirical problem that has always grated with economic geographers and which has very deep implications for all of the regulatory issues raised in the previous instalment. The massive urbanisation experienced in Western Europe, North America and East Asia as each of these regions underwent industrialisation in past centuries has cemented in place the theory that urbanisation is caused essentially by economic growth, that “growth begets urbanisation”. A major exception has been Sub-Saharan Africa, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, during which World Bank economists Marianne Fay and Charlotte Opal observed that “urbanisation continues even during periods of…
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