Leo Johnson: Watch the new cities empower their citizens

There’s a pan-African trend emerging: to replace the old metropolis with “smart model” cities of the future
21 October 2013
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What’s next for Nairobi? What happens after the Westgate terrorist attack to the engine of Eastern and Central African growth? Nairobi’s Migaa City, under construction, comes with its own 18-hole golf course, “zero-commute” shopping, private hospital and 12km-long security wall. Didn’t snap up a place in Migaa in time? A cohort of other “cities of the future” are springing up around the Kenyan capital, from Tatu City, backed by Moscow-based Renaissance Partners, to Thika Greens and the Konza technopolis.

Kenya is not alone. From South Africa’s planned 800,000-strong WesCape in Cape Town to Ghana’s trio of Appolonia, King City and Hope City, to Lagos’s Eko Atlantic City and Kinshasa’s La Cité du Fleuve, there’s a pan-African trend emerging: to replace the old metropolis with “smart model” cities of the future.

But how smart are these new cities? There’s a compelling logic. From African smart cities to Asian versions such as Cyberjaya in Malaysia, CyberCity in Mauritius and Chengdu in China, the new city brings construction contracts, housing and efficient services vital for business.

There are two potential problems. The first is the growing urban demand for jobs. Some 200,000 people a day move from the country to the city. That’s where the jobs are. So move business to a new city down the road and that’s where migrants will come looking. You haven’t solved the problem but relocated it. By 2030, on current projections, there will be 4.9 billion people living in Asian and African cities alone. Some three billion of them will be slum-dwelling.

If the first problem is more people wanting jobs, the second could be fewer jobs. The smart city defines itself by the increasing complexity of its systems. The risk is it becomes an import city, closed to local skills and supply, with little capacity to develop local expertise. This is the iPad city, locally unfixable and built less for resilience than for obsolescence.

Done right, the smart city has the potential to provide jobs, affordable housing and help incubate a next generation of new businesses. Done wrong, as escapist urbanism, the smart city has the potential to leave us with swamped mega-cities, part-filled and part-functioning new cities, and a depleted countryside.

So here’s another scenario. At the iHub, one of Nairobi’s 16 new innovation spaces, an alternative approach is forming. M-Kopa is one example. It takes the d.Light mobile solar light, and puts a mobile chip in it. Instead of having to buy the light outright, at a cost out of their range, Kenya’s poor can lease it for 50 cents a day, less than they would spend on kerosene or firewood. And via the chip they get micro-insurance, buy fertiliser and make micropayments for productive equipment.

As we confront urbanisation, we can deploy technology with different intentions. One is isolating ourselves in gated smart cities. The other, M-Kopa’s approach, harnesses technology not to build smart cities but to empower smart citizens, with the goal of making both rural and urban work. What’s the decision for cities of the future?

Leo Johnson is the co-author of Turnaround Challenge: Business and the City of the Future (OUP £20), turnaroundchallenge.org

Twitter: @Mr_LeoJ

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