Paper short abstract:

Property developers have recently embarked on a strategy designed to reshape the existing spatial configuration of cities in Africa. What makes these efforts different is that they involve constructing new cities out of whole cloth rather than rehabilitating the existing built environment.

Paper long abstract:

Large-scale property developers have recently embarked on a far-reaching strategy designed to reshape the existing spatial configuration of many cities in Africa. If these strategies are successfully implemented, major metropolitan areas in Africa will be fundamentally restructured to more explicitly serve the interests of property-holding elites and satisfy the desires of the leisure-consuming classes. What makes these recent city-building efforts different from previous attempts is that they involve constructing entirely new cities out of whole cloth rather than rehabilitating the existing built environment. Unwilling to take up the challenge of refurbishing existing large metropolises, private real estate developers have begun to construct entirely new cities that are built entirely from scratch. In the fantasy-projection of city builders, these privatized urban spaces are "city doubles," that is, they are the mirror opposites of existing cities in Africa. While many of these urban redevelopment schemes amount to no more than the fantasy-projections of over-enthusiastic property speculators, a number of large-scale real estate companies have already launched prototype mixed-use mega-projects on the outskirts of existing cities in Africa. Exemplars of the re-urbanizing trend in urban Africa include the Tatu City mixed-use development outside Nairobi; Malabo II in Equatorial Guinea; the massive shoreline reclamation project called Eko-Atlantic in Lagos; Luanda Sul in Angola; New Cairo City outside Cairo; La Cité du Fleuve, an exclusive mixed-use development situated on two islands reclaimed from sandbanks and swamp in the Congo River, adjacent to Kinshasa; and Waterfall City, a self-contained satellite city situated between Johannesburg and Pretoria.