As African cities chart their own paths toward sustainability, the focus shifts from imitation to mutual learning. Exchange across the Global South becomes a form of solidarity, where shared experience is in the center of transformation.
There is no single pathway to sustainable city-making given the wide range of contexts across the African continent. Models from the Global North are neither adequate nor just for African cities, often replicating existing global inequalities and resource flows. Exchange across the Global South can prepare the ground for more appropriate visions, approaches and practices.
Sharing experiences, information and ideas across regions with similar challenges can become a type of currency that creates value and validates existing knowledge. This non-commercial transaction or exchange can be strengthened when underpinned by principles of solidarity and inclusion that acknowledge the historical disadvantages and continued inequalities prevalent in cities of the Global South.
Much has been written about the process of disseminating ‘best practices’ across cities1 and many entities invest heavily in the promotion of peer learning across cities2. Here we reflect on the practice of facilitating exchange from our own experience and reflect on its significance while offering a set of suggestions for implementation.
Faced with long-standing levels of inequality and social injustice, government officials, civil society and others in the Global South may feel overwhelmed and alone in the mammoth task of confronting the climate crisis. However, exchange presents several significant opportunities.
Exchange Provides Appropriate Comparisons
Global South cities face particular sets of conditions, constraints and challenges that differ from those in the Global North. However, the tendency is more often to compare with and draw from the latter. In meetings on urban issues with public officials, for instance, it is common for speakers to use examples from cities like New York City, London and Paris as aspirational models for urban solutions. Notwithstanding the laudable intention to inspire and encourage an ambitious vision, the challenges and solutions are very different. For example, New York City has a GDP of roughly $1.7 trillion3 while Cape Town’s GDP is closer to $86 billion4. To put this into perspective, New York City’s GDP is roughly four times that of the whole of South Africa.
A smaller, more focused approach, such as the Rwandan capital Kigali’s car-free zone might be a more appropriate model than a London-style initiative that would never be implementable.
The kinds of ideas that are so often presented to contexts like Cape Town are not only virtually unimplementable but also lead to despondency and even paralysis. For instance, the London model for creating a Low Emission Zone (an LEZ restricts polluting vehicles in a designated part of a city to improve air quality and encourage sustainable transport) includes different levels of restriction and incentives across the entire city5, which would be impossible in a place like Cape Town given its extremely low density levels, unreliable public transport and prohibitively high costs of electric vehicles. A smaller, more focused approach, such as the Rwandan capital Kigali’s car-free zone might be a more appropriate model6 than a London-style initiative that would never be implementable. This does not mean that Global South cities should not be ambitious, but rather that being ambitious should entail finding pragmatic, practicable solutions based on realistic implementable policy.
Exchange Shows What’s Both Possible and Feasible
Using examples of comparable conditions illustrates feasibility and can inspire new ideas. It allows shifting the conversation from theory to practice while prompting decision-making. Instead of working only with imagined futures, people can work with real presents and learn from what their counterparts are doing. This approach may also create a sense of healthy competition in which cities with similar resources, size and challenges can set goals that are appropriate yet ambitious enough to stand out in a global landscape.
The case of Medellín, Colombia, is a popular reference on the potential to radically improve urban safety. From carrying the inglorious title of the ‘world’s murder capital’ in the early 1990s, the city has turned itself around in the past thirty years7. With a GDP of $59,9 billion and a slightly smaller population than Cape Town, Medellín is significantly closer to the economic size of this South African city.
Medellín city officials have been invited to share their experience with their counterparts in Cape Town on different occasions and we have seen that such reflections resonate with and provide practical ideas to officials struggling with increasing crime rates in the city. Hearing that long-lasting projects are possible within limited resources and despite the pressures of short political cycles can encourage and inspire the private and public sectors alike.
Exchange Facilitates Reflection on One’s Context
In a recent transport exchange visit by government officials from East African cities to Bogotá8, a delegate from the City of Kigali remarked on the usefulness of understanding the technical minutia behind Bogotá’s cable car public transport system given its location in a poor area of the city. These were the conditions in the neighbourhood where they wanted to implement a similar system in Kigali. Another participant in the mobility exchange, from Montevideo, Uruguay, connected with the person who played the role of ‘bicycle manager’ for the municipality in Bogotá to understand her role and to explore if something similar could work in his city.
Providing space for self-reflection can be particularly useful. While the scale of the challenges cities face can be overwhelming, engaging in a parallel but different context allows for seeing one’s city with new eyes and ideas.
Ways to Promote Better and More Exchanges
There are at least three ways we can build meaningful and impactful exchanges across Global South cities.
First, there is significant research showing that participatory and action-based methods are often the best way to absorb information during learning processes9. This is borne out by our own experience in facilitating such learning and exchange. In practice, this means limiting traditional lecturing formats and incorporating activities such as walks, informal conversations, bicycle rides, site visits and games. Showcasing what projects look like in real life is critical. A municipality in India used the term ‘seeing is believing’ as a campaign strategy to roll out a solar panel programme in their city by getting one resident to show how it was done in his home10. This can be applied to exchanges across different cities.
Second, when designing an exchange, it is important to manage the risk of creating myths. Simple stories are popular and easy to disseminate. As Montero (2018) points out, often what are termed ‘best practices’ refer to “policy solutions that can be easily abstracted, measured, and packaged under a narrative of urban success so that they can seduce key decision-makers in city governments across the world11.
A municipality in India used the term ‘seeing is believing’ as a campaign strategy to roll out a solar panel programme in their city by getting one resident to show how it was done in his home.
To avoid this pitfall, a nuanced analysis and discussion is crucial, although creating a safe environment where people can share challenges freely is not always possible. For instance, the spread of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems across many Latin American cities has raised interesting lessons and many challenges. However, it is often difficult to engage officials in transparent conversations because they fear showing their city in a bad light or are concerned about how the information will be used. This can result in missed opportunities to learn from such challenges.
In this context, building relationships should be the long-term goal of exchanges, rather than the event itself. Exchanges should, therefore, be seen as steps in a much longer process that facilitates honest discussions and genuine learning.
Building on Existing Efforts
African cities can learn from each other and are doing so. However more is required and once the paradigm shifts the resource flows will hopefully follow, so that more and longer-term forms of exchange can be facilitated in the Global South.
Shifting the perception that all the knowledge and information lies in the Global North will take time. The more stories we share about the work that is being done, the more we can collectively build and imagine appropriate models and practices. The result will be greater value and recognition of the efforts that are already bearing fruit as well as more solidarity with and support for collective efforts for a just transition in the Global South.
