[URBAN NOTE] "In push to modernize, Rwandan capital struggles to house its population"

[rfmcdonald]

Jonathan W. Rosen at Al Jazeera America looks at the various contentious, costly, and often mutually contradictory plans to modernize Rwanda's capital of Kigali.

At the edge of the Rwandan capital, on a hillside formerly packed with small houses made of compressed earth, Wang Zenkhun pours over a map of what will soon be the East African country’s largest residential development.

Wang, an employee of the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, serves as site manager for the project. He oversees approximately 100 Chinese and 2,500 Rwandan workers, who toil in the sun on the 80-acre site outside his office. Known as Vision City and financed by the Rwanda Social Security Board, or RSSB, the country’s pension body, the project will begin with an initial phase of 504 units, due to be completed next year. It will eventually scale up to 4,500 homes. In line with Kigali’s ambitious master plan, which seeks to transform the city of 1.3 million into a “center of urban excellence,” the site’s developers promise a community “tempered with a tinge of elegance and subtle nobility” that will be a “reference point for contemporary Rwandan living.” In addition to the houses, there will be restaurants, hotels, offices, schools, a sports complex and a Wi-Fi-connected town center. It’s all part of a citywide mixed-use strategy meant to decentralize key business and recreational activities and minimize road congestion.

For Kigali residents, who, like most urban Africans, face a dire shortage of quality housing, it all sounds great. There’s just one nagging detail. According to RSSB, the most affordable Phase 1 Vision City units, two-bedroom apartments, will cost 124 million Rwandan francs ($172,000), more than 100 times the city’s median annual household income. The most expensive — five-bedroom luxury villas with exteriors of marble and granite — will run close to 320 million francs.

[. . .]

Vision City is only one of several forthcoming Kigali housing developments, some of which, officials say, will deliver more affordable units. But the project is emblematic of a conundrum facing cities across sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s most rapidly urbanizing region. Buoyed by a decade-and-a-half of robust economic growth, Africa’s cities are home today to unprecedented concentrations of wealth. They’re also seeing endless streams of impoverished rural migrants, typically young people in search of jobs who see no viable future in the small-scale farming of their parents’ generation. These dual phenomena have led to striking degrees of inequality. According to the United Nations Human Settlements Program, U.N. Habitat, Africa’s urban areas are now collectively the most unequal in the world, having surpassed the cities of Latin America sometime in the century’s first decade.

Nowhere is this widening gap more visible than in Africa’s radically divergent standards of housing. While upscale developments, which are more attractive to investors, have sprouted on all corners of the continent, governments across the region have largely failed to spur development of modern formal housing that’s accessible to ordinary urban residents. Today, according to U.N. figures, 62 percent of Africa’s urban population lives in slums. These are typically tightly packed, haphazardly planned settlements that do not adhere to basic building standards nor allow for proper sanitation. Cities with a high prevalence of informal, single-story houses generally face extensive public-health challenges and lack the population density needed to become cost-effective hubs of manufacturing, therefore hindering job creation. Although housing policies seldom top government or donor agendas, economists say they’ll play an increasingly critical role as Africa moves toward becoming an urban-majority continent, which the U.N. projects will occur by 2040. Paul Collier, the development economist and director of Oxford University’s Center for the Study of African Economies, has even called housing the “single most important factor in Africa’s economic development.”