Governance / Urban Development / Global Policy
Planning for Growing African Cities
Urban expansion planning and training for Africa's city builders
projected growth in the land area of Sub-Saharan Africa's cities, 2020–2050
the cost of providing basic infrastructure in unplanned areas compared with planned ones (estimate)
Executive Summary
Fast-growing cities need to reserve land for roads and services before settlement makes that land hard to secure. The Africa Urban Lab, founded by Kurtis Lockhart in Zanzibar, helps city governments reserve that land and trains the officials and planners who run growing cities. It aims for plans that local governments can carry out with the money and authority they have.
Why African cities struggle to plan for growth
Africa's cities are growing faster than their governments can plan for them. Kurtis Lockhart points to three bottlenecks in money, legal authority and skills. When cities cannot plan ahead, growth spreads to their edges as informal settlement. In his view many of these bottlenecks are policy choices, which governments can change.
Three bottlenecks
A thin tax base
Sub-Saharan Africa passed 40% urban in 2010 at a GDP per capita of about $1,480. East Asia passed the same mark in 2000 at about $5,450 (both in 1990 dollars at purchasing-power parity; Henderson and Turner, 2020). When a country urbanizes at a lower income, its cities have less revenue for the roads, water and power they need.
Little legal authority
Central governments and rigid land-use rules constrain many cities. Lockhart, citing Resnick (2021), writes that only 3 of Africa's 55 countries legally allow their cities to set their own tax base and rates, collect their own revenue and borrow on international capital markets.
Too few planners and engineers
A 2011 survey of 12 African countries found 0.89 urban planners per 100,000 people, against about 12 in the US and 37 in the UK. Hoornweg and colleagues estimated in 2014 that by 2040 Africa would need the equivalent of about 600,000 engineering graduates a year to build and run its cities' infrastructure.
The cost of planning late
A city's street layout is hard to change once land is built on. Lockhart estimates that half to two-thirds of the urban space Africa will need by 2050 does not yet exist. The Africa Urban Lab and a 2026 International Growth Centre (IGC) working paper estimate that providing basic infrastructure in areas that grew without a plan costs three to seven times as much as in planned areas.
On average, Sub-Saharan Africa's cities are projected to triple their populations between 2020 and 2050 and to grow to about 2.5 times their 2020 area (Chilonga, Angel and Bjornsson, Africa Urban Lab working paper, 2025).
Planning for expansion before settlement
Patrick Lamson-Hall directs the Africa Urban Lab's Urban Expansion and the Periphery program (UXP). It helps fast-growing cities lay out a grid of arterial roads and protect natural areas while the land is still undeveloped. Roads and natural areas are hard and costly to secure once people have settled the land. The method comes from New York University's Marron Institute, where Shlomo Angel led the urban expansion program and Lamson-Hall worked on its initiative in Ethiopia.
A plan cities can afford
The Lab calls the method urban expansion planning and describes it as a simplified, barebones approach. A grid of arterial roads about 30 meters wide and 1 km apart takes about 6% of the land in an expansion area, the zone a city is expected to grow into. A full street network like Manhattan's, with every local street, takes up to 35%. So a city has less land to secure up front, and it can plan the streets inside each block of the grid later. UXP has five steps:
Predict: use data to project the land needed for 30 years of growth
Control: identify an expansion area and bring it into the city's planning area
Preserve: map environmentally sensitive areas and protect them in the plan
Plan: lay out a network of wide arterial roads about 1 km apart
Protect: acquire the land for the roads and mark the rights of way, for example with trees
Local officials run the process. The Lab offers participating cities three years of technical collaboration.
What happened in Ethiopia
Starting in 2013, 18 Ethiopian cities outside the capital used the method. They worked with NYU's Marron Institute, the Cities Alliance and Ethiopia's Ministry of Urban Development and Construction (now the Ministry of Urban and Infrastructure). Municipal staff projected where their cities would spread, then surveyed and secured arterial roads across land that was still largely rural. Of the 18 cities, 11 carried out their plans to some degree.
About 570 km of arterial roads
By mid-2017 the four pilot cities (Bahir Dar, Hawassa, Mekelle and Adama) had built about 570 km of arterial roads, mostly dirt. Together they invested about $35 million over five years in roads and land, roughly half of each city's infrastructure construction budget over those five years.
Households near the new roads earned 7–14% more
An evaluation surveyed 4,000 households in the eight cities that had built enough roads to study. Households within about 500 meters of the new roads, roughly a 15-minute walk, earned an estimated 7–14% more a year than comparable households farther away. They had better access to piped water and sanitation and were more likely to run a business from home (26% against 22%). The comparison was not randomized, and the study found no statistically significant fall in poverty (NYU evaluation, 2025; Haile, Lamson-Hall and Molla, IGC, 2026).
Training Africa's city builders
The Lab also trains today's city officials and the next generation of city builders, planners and urban leaders.
A "teaching hospital" for cities
The Lab calls its model a "teaching hospital" for urban leaders. Students learn current research in the classroom and apply it to real city problems alongside experienced practitioners. The Lab's diploma is aimed at professionals with 2 to 10 or more years of experience. In the first cohort, roughly as many students had ten or more years of experience as had one to three.
The Professional Diploma in Urban Development has four modules: Urban Economics, Urban Planning, Urban Finance and Urban Governance. They are taught in Zanzibar in two blocks of two weeks each, in November and April, with a five-month capstone project in between.
In the capstone, small groups of students work with an organization on one of its problems, in areas such as timber value chains or mortgages for affordable housing. Monthly online workshops teach the technical skills the project needs.
The first cohort, which began in November 2024, had 38 students from 11 countries, including Bashir Farah, mayor of Degahbour in Ethiopia's Somali region. The second had about 50 students from 15 countries.
Scholarships
Every diploma applicant is considered for a scholarship based on merit and need, with no separate application. Awards cover tuition, sometimes with part of living costs, and some are reserved for East African and Zanzibar-based professionals.
A new curriculum for African urban planning
The Lab argues that most urban planning programs in the region still follow mid-20th-century models that do not fit the cities their graduates will work in, and that many do too little with modern digital tools.
In June 2025 the Lab, Ardhi University, Makerere University's Urban Action Lab and Kenyatta University formed the University Coalition on Curricula for Cities, with support from the World Bank. The coalition has since held workshops in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Its plan has five steps:
Audit what's taught now
Desk analysis of curricula across East Africa, surveys of faculty and employers, and student focus groups.
Name the gaps
Gaps in content and skills, especially in informality, data science, urban economics, municipal finance and urban governance.
Co-design a new curriculum
A modular African Urban Planning Curriculum Framework, drafted in design sprints and curriculum hackathons and peer-reviewed by experts with help from the coalition's advisory board.
Pilot it and train faculty
New modules at the three partner universities, and training for the faculty who teach them.
Evaluate and share
An impact evaluation, revisions, and a forum to share the results across the continent.
Who's behind this
What comes next
UXP aims to start 15 new urban expansion initiatives in African cities over three years and to train more people to teach the method. It has teams in Kenya, Mozambique and the Horn of Africa. The third diploma cohort begins in November 2026, and the Lab plans to launch an MSc in Urban Development in 2027.
Kurtis Lockhart
Founder and Executive Director, Africa Urban Lab
Published by Center for Human Progress (US) Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization