CONNECTING THE DOTS BETWEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION: A REFLECTION ON AFRICA’S URBAN FUTURE

There is a question about African urbanization that I think we need to ask more often:

Who is designing Africa's cities, and on what basis do we decide what a successful African city should look like?

This is not a question against international knowledge, foreign investment, or learning from other parts of the world. Cities have always learned from one another. The question is whether ideas developed in one context should automatically become the foundation for another.

Africa is entering one of the most important urban transitions in its history. According to Africa's Urbanisation Dynamics 2025, Africa's urban population is projected to reach approximately 1.4 billion people by 2050, adding around 700 million urban residents over the next three decades. Even more striking, 80% of the continent's demographic growth is expected to be absorbed by urban areas.

That means the cities we plan today will shape the lives of hundreds of millions of Africans tomorrow.

So, what kind of cities are we going to build?

Urban development is sometimes presented through highly visible indicators: skyscrapers reaching higher into the sky, multilane highways, large numbers of vehicles, expanding built-up areas, or rapidly increasing urban populations.

But do these things automatically mean that a city is successful? I do not think so.

A city can have impressive infrastructure and still struggle with inadequate housing, poor accessibility, environmental degradation, inequality, weak public services, and limited opportunities for its residents.

A successful city should ultimately be judged by how people live.

Can people reach schools, jobs and healthcare? Can households access adequate housing? Can children grow up in safe environments? Can older people and people with disabilities move independently? Can communities participate in decisions that affect their neighborhoods? Can the city accommodate economic growth without destroying the ecosystems that support it?

These questions tell us much more about urban welfare than the number of skyscrapers on a skyline.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we can make is treating "Africa" as though it were a single urban system. It is not!

From Accra to Kinshasa, Kigali to Abuja, Cairo to Cape Town, Dakar to Addis Ababa, the conditions shaping urban development are fundamentally different. Even within the same country, cities can have completely different demographic structures, economic functions, ecological conditions, governance arrangements, cultural identities and patterns of land ownership.

Africa's urban systems are diverse because African societies are diverse.

There is no single African model of urbanization, and there should not be a single African planning solution.

This does not mean that African cities should isolate themselves from international experience. Quite the opposite. There is tremendous value in learning from cities elsewhere.

But learning is different from copying.

A planning intervention that works in Copenhagen may require substantial adaptation before being applied in Kumasi. A transportation model successful in Singapore may not produce the same outcome in Ghana. A housing policy developed for a European metropolitan region may encounter entirely different realities in Nairobi or Yamoussoukro or Kigali.

This is not because one place is more capable than another. It is because planning is contextual.

Demography matters. Geography matters. Climate matters. Economy matters. Institutions matter. Culture matters. Land systems matter. History matters. 

 

A planning solution cannot be separated from the environment in which it is expected to function.

The Problem Is Not Foreign Ideas. It Is Uncritical Adoption.

There is an important distinction here.

The problem is not that African planners should reject ideas from Europe, Asia, North America, or anywhere else.

The problem begins when a successful model somewhere else is treated as a universal formula.

Urban planning should involve learning, adaptation, experimentation and local interpretation.

A city should be able to ask:

(i) Why did this work there?

(ii) Which conditions made it possible?

(iii) Do those conditions exist here?

(iv) What would need to change for it to work in our context?

 

These questions should come before implementation.

The strongest planning practices are not necessarily those that reproduce another city's appearance. They are those that understand the principles behind successful interventions and adapt them to local realities.

This brings us to participation.

One of the most important principles in planning is also one of the simplest: cities should be planned with people, not simply for them.

Jane Jacobs made this argument powerfully in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, challenging planning approaches that ignored the complexity of everyday urban life.

Her work reminds us that planners and policymakers do not experience cities in exactly the same way as the people who live in them.

A master plan may look perfect on paper and still fail on the ground because it misunderstands how people actually move, trade, socialize, work, or use public space.

This is especially important in African cities, where formal planning systems often coexist with informal economies, traditional land practices, community networks and locally developed settlement patterns.

Participation is therefore not merely a democratic ideal. It is also a source of planning knowledge.

People know their neighborhoods. They know where flooding occurs. They know which roads become dangerous after dark. They know where markets naturally develop. They know which public spaces are actually used.

Ignoring this knowledge can make even technically sophisticated plans ineffective.

Across Africa, communities have developed settlements and urban environments long before the arrival of contemporary planning institutions.

Some traditional settlements have endured for centuries because they responded to local climate, geography, social organization, available materials and cultural practices.

This should not romanticize the past or suggest that traditional systems were perfect. They were not.

But they demonstrate something important: Local knowledge has planning value.

There is much to learn from how communities historically responded to their environments.

The future of African urbanization should therefore not require abandoning existing identities in favor of imported urban aesthetics.

Modernization should not mean homogenization.

A contemporary African city can be technologically advanced without becoming culturally disconnected. It can have efficient transportation without being dominated by cars. It can build vertically without sacrificing public life. It can attract investment without excluding local communities.

 

The Planning Challenge Ahead

The scale of Africa's urban transition makes this discussion urgent.

The continent's urban population is projected to roughly double from around 700 million to 1.4 billion by 2050. Urban areas are expected to absorb 80% of Africa's demographic growth, while the physical footprint of cities is also projected to expand substantially.

This is not simply a housing challenge. Most importantly, it is a question of what kind of urban life we want future generations to inherit.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider how we talk about urban development.

A city's success should not be measured primarily by how many skyscrapers it has, how many vehicles occupy its roads, how wide its highways are, or how much concrete covers its landscape.

These can be indicators of investment and growth, but they are not sufficient measures of urban welfare.

A better question is: Does the city improve the lives of the people who live there?

If the answer is yes, then we are moving in the right direction. If the answer is no, then even the most impressive skyline deserves to be questioned.

I believe Africa needs to become more confident in defining its own urban future.

That does not mean rejecting international cooperation. It means entering that cooperation as contributors rather than simply consumers of planning ideas.

We can take successful principles, test them against our realities, adapt them, improve them and, perhaps, develop approaches that other parts of the world will eventually learn from.

Africa should not have to choose between tradition and innovation, or between development and identity.

We should be capable of building cities that are modern without losing their character, prosperous without becoming exclusionary, connected without becoming car-dependent, and sustainable without becoming disconnected from the communities they serve.

The next generation of African planners, architects, engineers, geographers, economists, environmental professionals, public administrators and policymakers need more than technical knowledge. They need the ability to question assumptions, interpret evidence, understand communities, work across disciplines and adapt ideas to local realities.

We should learn from the world without losing sight of where we come from.

 

 

GHANA: ON THE RISE, BUT TO WHERE?

Ghana has earned some room to breathe.

After several difficult years, the country's macroeconomic position has improved significantly. Growth recovered strongly in 2025. Inflation fell sharply. International reserves strengthened. The fiscal position improved, and debt declined following restructuring.

That progress matters. Stabilization was necessary.

But stabilization also creates an opportunity to ask a different question: what happens next?

Ghana still needs investment. It needs infrastructure, productive businesses, skills, jobs and stronger institutions. But poor outcomes do not always mean that another input is missing.

Sometimes the harder problem is converting capabilities and investments that already exist into the results they were supposed to produce.

That distinction should matter for how Ghana allocates scarce resources.

Is the capability missing, or is something preventing it from producing results?

Development policy naturally focuses on gaps.

If a community lacks reliable electricity, build generation and distribution capacity. If workers lack particular skills, invest in training. If businesses cannot reach markets because roads do not exist, infrastructure is genuinely missing.

These are capability deficits.

But there is another possibility.

A road may exist but deteriorate because maintenance is inadequate. Workers may be trained but unable to find jobs that use their skills. A public institution may have capable staff but operate within processes that prevent them from delivering effectively. Infrastructure may be built without the complementary systems needed to generate the expected economic return.

In those cases, adding more capability may not solve the underlying problem.

The constraint lies somewhere between what exists and what it becomes.

This is not a new theory of development. Economists have long studied productivity, complementarities, institutional quality, implementation failures and binding constraints.

The distinction is useful because it imposes a discipline on the next policy decision:

Before adding another input, determine whether the required capability is genuinely absent or whether existing capability is failing to convert into results.

Ghana's infrastructure challenge illustrates the distinction

Transport is a good example.

The World Bank's 2026 Ghana Economic Update identifies transport constraints as a significant barrier to productivity, trade and employment. Ghana clearly needs further infrastructure investment.

But the diagnosis does not end with how many additional roads should be built.

The World Bank also points to chronic under-maintenance, fragmented governance, weak multimodal integration and limited climate resilience.

Those are different problems.

A missing road may require construction. A deteriorating road requires maintenance. Poor connections between transport modes may require coordination. Weak project selection may require better appraisal.

Treating all four as an infrastructure shortage risks prescribing the same solution for different constraints.

That matters in a country where every additional cedi committed in one place is unavailable somewhere else.

The gold sector offers another warning

Ghana's recent experience with gold shows why outcomes need to be examined beyond the activity itself.

The Domestic Gold Purchase Programme helped formalize artisanal gold exports, rebuild international reserves and support foreign-exchange stabilization. The IMF reports that artisanal gold exports reached US$10.9 billion in 2025, while gross reserves rose to US$11.9 billion by the end of that year.

Those are significant achievements.

But according to the IMF, the programme also generated losses exceeding US$1.7 billion, largely associated with the Gold-for-Reserves component. Some losses reflected valuation effects, but the experience still raised questions about costs, transparency and the appropriate design of future interventions.

The lesson is not that Ghana should not have acted.

It is that an intervention can achieve one important objective while creating costs elsewhere. Assessing whether it worked therefore requires more than pointing to the activity completed or the immediate outcome achieved.

We have to ask what the intervention ultimately converted resources into, at what cost, and whether the same result could be produced more effectively.

Ghana also shows that conversion can work

This is not an argument that Ghana is incapable of implementation.

There are counterexamples.

Digital public services have reduced processing times for services such as company registration and birth certificates. Records have been digitized, services moved online and previously separate administrative steps connected more effectively.

That matters analytically.

If Ghana were simply suffering from a generalized lack of state capability, successful conversion in one part of government would be harder to explain.

The more useful question is why some systems turn capability into results more effectively than others.

What is different about their incentives, accountability, processes, leadership, technology or institutional arrangements? And can any of those lessons travel?

Put the diagnosis before the next cedi

This distinction has practical consequences for resource allocation.

Where the necessary capability genuinely does not exist, build it.

Where an existing asset or institution is underperforming, fix it.

Where capable parts of a system are failing because the handoffs between them do not work, connect them.

And where an intervention repeatedly consumes scarce resources without producing sufficient value, redesign it or stop.

These are not interchangeable responses.

The danger is that building something new is often easier to see than repairing the system around something that already exists. A new road, programme, institution or fund is tangible. Maintenance, coordination, institutional reform and better management are less visible.

Yet development can stall in precisely those less visible spaces.

Political economy matters too. Some arrangements persist not because nobody knows they are inefficient, but because people or institutions with influence benefit from keeping them as they are. Better diagnosis does not automatically remove those incentives.

It does, however, make the trade-off harder to hide.

Recovery creates a choice

Ghana's stabilization is important, but it should not become the destination.

The World Bank's latest assessment makes the challenge clear. Ghana's economy grew strongly in 2025, but growth has not yet generated enough quality jobs for its expanding working-age population.

That is the development test.

The next phase will require new investment. There are genuine capability deficits that Ghana still needs to close.

But the country should also become more demanding about what happens after resources are committed.

Did the infrastructure increase productive activity?

Did the training translate into better work?

Did the programme solve the problem that justified it?

Did the institution become more capable?

Did the investment create enough public value to justify its cost?

The distinction between a capability deficit and a conversion constraint will not answer every development question. It can help us ask a better question before prescribing another solution.

Ghana has spent decades building institutions, infrastructure, human capital and productive capacity. More will be needed.

But development is ultimately measured not by the capabilities a country accumulates, nor by the number of programmes it launches.

It is measured by what those capabilities become.

The question after a major investment should therefore not be only: What did we build? It should also be: What did it become?

 

RETHINKING GREY INFRASTRUCTURE: INVESTING IN ECOLOGICALLY INTELLIGENT URBAN DEVELOPMENT

If Ghana’s secondary cities are to guide urbanization in ways that strengthen rather than weaken ecological resilience, they will need more than engineering standards, zoning regulations, and infrastructure plans.

 

They will also need a deeper understanding of how urbanization is interacting with the ecological systems that support urban life.

They will need urban ecological intelligence.

Urban ecological intelligence therefore becomes much more than a collection of maps or environmental reports. It becomes an institutional capability for continually observing, interpreting, and learning from the interaction between urbanization and ecological systems so that future planning and investment decisions strengthen, rather than diminish, long-term urban resilience. Recognizing the importance of urban ecological intelligence naturally raises another question.

How do we build it?

One of the encouraging developments in Ghana’s urban sector over the past decade has been the growing recognition that municipalities require stronger institutional capacity. Through initiatives such as the Ghana Secondary Cities Support Program, significant investments are already being made in strengthening urban governance, improving planning systems, financing infrastructure, and supporting municipalities as they take on greater responsibility for guiding urban development.

 

These investments are both necessary and timely. Yet as municipalities continue to evolve, there is an opportunity to broaden how we think about municipal capacity.

 

Preparing municipalities for the future is not only about equipping them to plan, finance, and deliver infrastructure. It is also about equipping them to understand the rapidly changing landscapes they are being asked to manage.

Roads, drainage systems, markets, public spaces, water networks, and other forms of grey infrastructure all require careful planning and significant financial investment. Increasingly, there is also growing recognition that ecological infrastructure—including wetlands, riparian corridors, urban forests, green spaces, and other natural systems—must become an integral part of resilient urban development.

 

But building and managing ecological infrastructure requires something equally important. It requires investing in urban ecological intelligence.

 

This means investing in the people, systems, partnerships, and institutional capabilities that enable municipalities to continually improve their understanding of how urbanization is reshaping ecological systems—and how those ecological systems, in turn, influence the resilience of urban development.

 

It means investing in watershed mapping, ecological monitoring, GIS analysis, field observation, hydrological studies, environmental data management, partnerships with universities, citizen science, and the translation of technical knowledge into practical planning and policy decisions.

 

These investments may not be as visible as a new road, drainage system, or public facility. Yet they may prove to be just as important.

 

In many respects, urban ecological intelligence is enabling infrastructure. It provides the knowledge foundation that allows municipalities to identify, protect, restore, connect, and manage ecological infrastructure more effectively. Every future investment in ecological infrastructure—and indeed much of our grey infrastructure—will ultimately depend on the quality of the understanding that informs it.

 

Perhaps the future of resilient urbanization will depend not only on the infrastructure we build, but on how well we understand the landscapes we are transforming.

THE STARK REALITIES OF MOUNTED BILLBOARDS IN KUMASI: IGNORANCE OR NEGLIGENCE?

 

Kumasi has long been admired—not only as a vibrant custodian of history and rich cultural traditions, but also for its environmental heritage and ongoing urban renewal initiatives. Yet, an emerging concern threatens this identity: the rapid and often indiscriminate proliferation of mounted billboards across the city.

 

In recent years, outdoor advertising has evolved into a thriving commercial venture in Kumasi. While this growth reflects economic dynamism, it has also led to the increasing congestion of road infrastructure with oversized billboards. What was once a carefully structured urban landscape is gradually being compromised by poorly managed and inadequately maintained advertising structures, many of which appear carelessly positioned along major roads and highways.

 

Even ceremonial routes—spaces traditionally preserved for their symbolic and aesthetic significance—have not been spared. This trend has significantly undermined the visual appeal and overall beautification of the city.

 

Although the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) is legally mandated to regulate outdoor advertising and collect the associated levies, enforcement efforts appear disproportionately focused on revenue mobilisation, with limited attention given to environmental aesthetics and public safety. The consequence is a surge in unauthorised and haphazardly erected signposts that obstruct visibility for motorists and pedestrians alike.

 

Areas particularly affected include the Aboabo–Airport Roundabout–Suame corridor (N10), Anloga Junction, Santasi Roundabout, and Ahodwo Roundabout—locations where excessive signage contributes to congestion and safety risks.

 

Regulatory frameworks exist to address this challenge. The Ghana Standards Authority prescribes that no more than three signs should be placed laterally on the same side of a road, with a minimum vertical clearance of 2.5 metres. Furthermore, the Road Traffic Regulations, 2012 (L.I. 2180) stipulates that outdoor advertising signs must not obscure or interfere with traffic signals or devices in ways that endanger motorists or pedestrians. Violations attract penalties ranging from fines to possible imprisonment.

 

Despite these provisions aimed at enhancing road safety and maintaining order, enforcement remains inconsistent. The continued tolerance of unauthorised billboards raises critical questions about regulatory compliance and institutional responsibility. The cumulative effect is an increasingly unsafe road environment for both drivers and pedestrians.

 

It is important to emphasise that outdoor advertising is a regulated professional practice. Individuals and firms engaged in mounting billboards are expected to possess the requisite technical expertise in signage placement and spatial planning. When this responsibility is neglected, the consequences extend beyond visual clutter—they pose tangible risks to public safety and urban integrity.

 

The pressing question therefore remains: are these persistent challenges the result of ignorance or negligence of coordinated urban governance?