Exploring the pivotal role of oil in the social and economic development of Iran between two World Wars, the era was marked by the establishment of a modern state aimed at ensuring territorial integrity and creating a homogeneous society within defined geographical borders. Such transformative efforts led to the collapse of the Qajar dynasty and the ascent of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s centralised and authoritative government. During this period, extensive social and economic development policies radically transformed the fabric of Iranian society, notably through the state’s substantial role in industrial investment, which significantly increased the number of industrial workers. Despite these broad changes, operations in the oil industry continued as initially established, resulting in dissatisfaction among both Iranian and Indian workers. This discontent gave rise to a series of labour strikes in the 1920s, underscoring the workers’ capacity to influence the shaping of civil society. Concurrently, the imperative for oil revenue coupled with the Iranian government’s insistence on employing local labour precipitated the cancellation of the D’Arcy Agreement and the signing of a new contract in 1933. A crucial term of this contract was the ‘Iranianisation’ of the workforce, which gradually increased the presence of skilled Iranian workers within the industry. This strategic shift not only redefined employment and living conditions but also facilitated the expansion of oil towns, where policies of ethnic and employment segregation were widely implemented, reflecting the broader national goals of integration and societal standardisation.

More than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas, many of them in low- and low-middle-income countries with limited ability to support urban growth. Urban areas are inherently fragile. Many cities are desperately overcrowded, with poor building construction, limited access, poor or absent waste disposal, limited or no access to clean water, irregular supplies of food, unreliable power supplies, inadequate emergency services, and problems with crime and violence. Healthcare is often poor or absent, with an increased risk of communicable disease outbreaks. Supply chains can easily be interrupted. Urban poverty and slums are proliferating with informal dwellings in areas vulnerable to natural disasters. The nature of urban areas can increase the impact of disasters, as was shown by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rapid and significant spatial transformation is altering the form of major cities in Africa. Slums and informal settlements are being replaced with high-rise buildings and skyscrapers, while luxury residential enclaves, termed ‘new cities’, are being developed on the urban fringe. Yet little is known about the foreign and domestic enablers of new cities, and the implications for reimagining urban planning. Who and what are the roles of foreign and domestic actors involved in development of new cities in Africa? What are the discourses and rationalities guiding the mobilisation and implementation of new cities? And how do new cities underpin or hinder the ‘right to the city’ of African urban residents? This chapter examines the emergence of new cities in Africa by addressing these questions. Using cases from African cities, the chapter argues that the ongoing spatial transformations are linked to broader changes in the global economy such as neo-liberalisation, capital mobility and ambitious city or state governments seeking to create world-class cities. Both domestic and foreign actors are involved in the development of new cities in Africa. These actors are motivated by profit with little or no regard for social inclusion and equity. The chapter argues that the ‘right to the city’ should be an important focal point for new cities and for reimagining urban planning in Africa.

This concluding chapter explores the future of urban planning in Africa, by identifying and analysing key theoretical insights and practical strategies in advancing sustainable, inclusive and functional urban spaces in African cities. Recognising the current urbanisation, climate change and sustainable development challenges, the chapter reflects on how the arguments presented in the book underscore the urgent need for reimagining urban planning in Africa. It also reviews some recent scholarship and stakeholder activities within the discussions of their potential implications for urban planning.

Informal settlements are projected to host future increases in Africa’s urban population growth. This has led to calls within African urban scholarship and practice for a capable and enabled urban planning response that promotes inclusive and sustainable principles in urban planning and management. Tracing the scholarship on Angola, this chapter reviews the literature on the consolidation of informal settlements in Luanda to shed insights into this intractable challenge of urban planning and its socio-political and historical dimensions to foreground the imperative to reimagine the urban planning regime. It highlights post-colonial planning ambivalence, a centralised, and project-oriented urban planning approach to the challenge of informal settlements. The chapter submits that reimagining urban planning in Luanda, and African cities in general, demands a forward-looking planning praxis that de-centres urban planning from state control and builds local institutional capacity to integrate social equity, local participation, empowerment and experimentation within a pro-poor urban planning framework.

Byron differs from his Romantic contemporaries in his treatment of animals in life and poetry – they are individual beings rather than poetic constructs. If horses are associated with the heroic sublime they are also re-wilded, while dogs are central to his ‘modernisation’ of the artistic attitude to animals in the long nineteenth century.

The EPRDF sought to delay urbanisation until it had delivered industrialisation as a means of preventing the political instability that it feared would accompany mass urban unemployment. However, faced with a growing urban population and urban political opposition in the early 2000s, the EPRDF brought urban areas to the centre of its development strategy. The ‘developmental state’ used control of finance and land to direct investment to industry, construction and infrastructure, much of which was located in urban centres. This chapter examines how the state’s efforts to accelerate structural transformation through urban development exacerbated the emerging distributive crisis resulting from the shortage of land and employment. Analysis focuses on case studies of Adama – one of the largest secondary cities – and the capital, Addis Ababa. State expropriation of peasants to make way for urban development exacerbated demographic factors that were already undermining land access. Urbanisation constituted a highly visible expression of the inequality of the ‘developmental state’, which, when overlaid on historically embedded ethnic divisions in Addis Ababa, proved an explosive combination.

Chapter 1 considers the historical links between physical and social mobility among Kenyans, arguing that becoming ‘someone’ has long been entangled with migrating ‘somewhere’. In doing so, it underscores the shifting centrality of kinship ties to individual and collective well-being against the backdrop of historical and ideational change. It examines the role played by education, which itself is closely entangled with Christian missions, in shaping people’s imagination about what their futures might hold. To understand why families began to look beyond Kenya to secure their futures, it also considers the political, economic, and social uncertainty of the 1990s and early 2000s and the ensuing crisis of social reproduction.

This chapter focuses on the development of Kakabona, a series of peri-urban settlements just outside Honiara, the national capital. Drawing on a series of disputes that came before chiefs and courts during the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to rapid urbanisation, it demonstrates that the juridical construction and regulation of property prompts the delineation of boundaries between people and on the ground, often in palpably exclusionary ways. Thus rather than ‘securing’ people’s rights and reducing conflict, legal recognition has generated increased social fragmentation and stratification. In Kakabona as elsewhere in Solomon Islands, these processes are now strongly tied to the idea of masculine ‘chiefs’; however, they are also informed by culturally specific meanings attached to land. The chapter demonstrates that paying attention to the emotional or affective dimensions of land disputes, in particular the multifaceted danger they pose, casts light on the emergence of land disputes as crucial sites for the performance of idealised models of masculinity. Moreover, these processes simultaneously reproduce peri-urban areas as sites of insecurity and the state as a masculine domain.

In his bestselling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes: ‘We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.’1 This statement captures a fundamental truth about the Neolithic Revolution, sometimes also called the Agricultural Revolution, which began about 10,000 BCE. This was a period in history when humans transitioned from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement.

For most of our history, humans have lived nomadic lives. We would cluster into small bands of between 30 and 150 people – and roam the countryside looking for animals to hunt, and seeds, berries and fruits to gather. We know something about this lifestyle of our nomadic ancestors by observing the few groups of people that still live in this way. In southern Africa we are most familiar with the San, although most San people today have now switched to a sedentary lifestyle.

Urban sprawl has consumed large areas of countryside in Britain, and continues apace in conjunction with associated transport infrastructure. Statutory protection measures aimed at restricting the impacts of urbanisation are in place but are frequently overruled by development decisions. Important wildlife sites with rare species have been lost despite nominal protection. New roads have fragmented wildlife populations and large numbers of some animal species fall victim to traffic death. In some cases, local extinctions have been the result of road deaths. Another consequence of increased urbanisation is a rise in pollution levels, manifest on land, in the air and in the water. Plants, wild animals and humans have all suffered from increased pollution. Air pollutants kill many people annually, and the amount of plastic in marine environments has reached unparalleled proportions. All of these factors clearly relate to the numbers of people living in the UK.

The pace of urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa over the last 60 years is without precedence. In 1950, most African countries were agrarian societies and just over a quarter of the population lived in cities. By 2020, the continent had 74 cities with a population of more than one million people, equivalent to the US and Europe combined. Today almost half of sub-Saharan Africans are urban dwellers and by 2050 that number is projected to reach 60 per cent. That means two- thirds of the continent’s projected population growth over the next three decades – an additional 950 million people – will be absorbed by the region’s humming, thriving, bustling megacities. And, as the OECD notes, ‘this transition is profoundly transforming the social, economic and political geography of the continent.’ Lagos, with a population of more than 20 million and economy bigger than that of Kenya is a vast, energetic and flourishing metropolis, a centre of opportunity that is enabling young Nigerians to be wealthier, more open-minded and more cosmopolitan than any before it.

The pace of urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa over the last 60 years is without precedence. In 1950, most African countries were agrarian societies and just over a quarter of the population lived in cities. By 2020, the continent had 74 cities with a population of more than one million people, equivalent to the US and Europe combined. Today almost half of sub-Saharan Africans are urban dwellers and by 2050 that number is projected to reach 60 per cent. That means two- thirds of the continent’s projected population growth over the next three decades – an additional 950 million people – will be absorbed by the region’s humming, thriving, bustling megacities. And, as the OECD notes, ‘this transition is profoundly transforming the social, economic and political geography of the continent.’ Lagos, with a population of more than 20 million and economy bigger than that of Kenya is a vast, energetic and flourishing metropolis, a centre of opportunity that is enabling young Nigerians to be wealthier, more open-minded and more cosmopolitan than any before it.

The world’s people are getting old. According to the United Nations Population Fund, in 2018, for the first time in history, people aged 65 or above outnumbered children under five. Europe has the greatest percentage of people over 60 (25 per cent) but rapid ageing is occurring everywhere: by 2050 most regions of the globe will have a quarter or more of their populations older than 60. But there is one area that is bucking this trend: all of the world’s 20 youngest countries by population are situated in Africa. By 2050, Africa will be home to one billion young people and by 2100 almost half of the world’s youth are expected to be from Africa. The UN’s World Population Prospects says: ‘In all plausible scenarios of future trends, Africa will play a central role in shaping the size and distribution of the world’s population over the next few decades.’ Only by listening to their voices, documenting the lives and dreams of the people who will lead, inspire, solve the problems and build our mutual future, can we begin to understand what it means to be young in an otherwise ageing world.

The conclusion returns to the general questions raised in the first two chapters of the book. Reiterating and summarising the argument about counter-revolution from above, below and without, the chapter turns to the transformation in revolutions that occurred after 1975 – initially towards political revolutions and transitions towards liberal democracy, and then towards mass, urban-based uprisings frustrated by counter-revolutions. Drawing on the work of Mark Beissinger, the chapter shows that, far from being regionally unique, the Arab uprisings were the beginning of a decade of increasing mass protest that did not bring forth profound social – or in many cases, political – transformation. Nonetheless, as the example of the return of the slogans and tactics of 2011 with new forms of learning in uprisings in the region before the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate, the success of counter-revolution cannot be assumed.

Young Nigerians feel the world is progressing towards a better future. New and transformational forces – including access to technology and growing urbanisation – are reshaping lifestyles, life choices, economic opportunities, values and culture. For the Soro Soke generation, leveraging the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not about copying traditional approaches from the West but conceiving, creating and delivering entirely new, pan-African opportunities. Entrepreneurial at heart, this generation is focused on turning problems into business opportunities and does so with a sense of social justice. This cohort evidences a real sense of community. It has a ‘we’re in this together’ mentality that encompasses everything from improving wealth and opportunity, to accessing power and even breaking down gender stereotypes. Young Nigerians recognise the need for change and social media is empowering them to speak out and realise that change. In the search for equality, security and more opportunity, they are using social media to disrupt the status quo and fight for better governance. This generation stands at the brink of materialising a demographic dividend that is set to change not only the quality of their opportunities but also to reposition the continent’s place in global affairs.

The world’s people are getting old. According to the United Nations Population Fund, in 2018, for the first time in history, people aged 65 or above outnumbered children under five. Europe has the greatest percentage of people over 60 (25 per cent) but rapid ageing is occurring everywhere: by 2050 most regions of the globe will have a quarter or more of their populations older than 60. But there is one area that is bucking this trend: all of the world’s 20 youngest countries by population are situated in Africa. By 2050, Africa will be home to one billion young people and by 2100 almost half of the world’s youth are expected to be from Africa. The UN’s World Population Prospects says: ‘In all plausible scenarios of future trends, Africa will play a central role in shaping the size and distribution of the world’s population over the next few decades.’ Only by listening to their voices, documenting the lives and dreams of the people who will lead, inspire, solve the problems and build our mutual future, can we begin to understand what it means to be young in an otherwise ageing world.