Infrahub.Africa is the product of a collaboration between the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, the Urban Futures Studio (UFS) at Utrecht University and the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at the University of Stellenbosch, exploring the use of sustainable infrastructure examples from Africa as an entry point for imagining more sustainable, equitable cities. This project sits within a larger concern about alternative futures for African cities. In December 2024, the research partners spent three days to reflect on what the theoretical, political, pedagogic and policy implications of this work might be. Lee Middleton joined the workshop and distilled a useful account of the discussions.
By: Lee Middleton
Introduction: Redefining the terms of Africa’s development
“There is an urgent need for African perspectives and stories to redefine the terms of our development,” said Cameroonian community engagement strategist and researcher, Chrispo Balila Dingha.
With colleagues from the CST, ACC and UFS, Dingha joined a diverse group—from engineers and economists to futurists and social scientists—at a year-end workshop in South Africa, to start articulating what an agenda for more sustainable and just urban infrastructure for the continent could look like.
With the world’s fastest urbanising population, the continent’s infrastructural development requirements are estimated at about $US150 billion a year, for which an annual financing gap of some 100 billion looms.[1] From a historic foundation of exclusive colonial grids never intended to accommodate populations expected to exceed 2 billion by 2050,[2] Africa’s cities today are a pastiche of “makeshift” responses to gaps in formal infrastructure systems, from housing to electricity and water.
Additionally facing the onslaughts of climate change, shrinking natural resource bases, and radical inequality, Africa’s urban infrastructure challenge in many ways acts as a prism—refracting the dynamic interplay of humanity’s most wicked problems as we stumble into the second quarter of the 21st century.
Acknowledging this context, ACC Director Edgar Pieterse opened the workshop by highlighting the “systemic knot”—institutional inertia, path dependency, and limited resources—constraining the possibility of finding not just a way forward, but a path to a destination that remains unknown.
“We looked at the figures and said if we don’t change the way in which we urbanise, the resource requirement for African infrastructure in itself is enough to blow the fuses of the planet. It’s so massive,” noted Maarten Hajer, UFS Director, of the resource/infrastructure requirement calculations published in The Weight of Cities report for which he and several colleagues present were lead authors.
In other words, if Africa follows the global North’s fossil fuel-dependent urbanisation path, “we are toast”, as Mark Swilling, CST’s outgoing-co-Director, put it, referring not just to those on the continent. And while Western models of urbanisation continue to define people’s conception of what constitutes a city, the reality is that the global South’s conditions of urbanisation are almost an inverse when it comes to the fundamentals of labour and capital.[3]
“The binding constraint is the limited imaginary about what an alternative could look, feel and smell like,” Pieterse asserted, wrangling the conversation back to the workshop’s theme of new urban imaginaries. “Without that alternative as something we can grasp, it is almost impossible to think about viable pathways to get there.”
Infrahub imaginaries & spaces of elasticity
On the screen, images of black soldier fly larvae transforming food waste into animal feed depict the Nambu Insect Protein Project: a “viable and profitable” waste management concept from South Africa’s Eastern Cape. A triple-win of circular waste management, decarbonisation (the process is less carbon-intensive than composting), and sustainability (the resulting feed is environmentally superior to fishmeal/soy), the labour-intensive, low-tech project is one of 50 “caselets”—not quite case studies—populating the Infrahub.Africa database. [4]
Launched by the ACC and UFS in 2023 and supported with case study research from the CST, this online collection of real-life initiatives from across Africa often challenges traditional notions of what constitutes infrastructure.
Designed to surface “an African conception of sustainable infrastructure”, the Hub’s criteria for inclusion are social (meeting a basic service need, versus mega-projects aimed at general economic growth like airports); economic (creating decent jobs for locals, versus primarily employing foreign contractors); and ecological (minimising or reversing environmental harm).
Endeavouring to introduce new storylines to seed the ‘alternative imaginaries’ needed by the urbanising continent (and the global South more broadly), cases span 30 countries and over 80 infrastructure themes, and are available in five African languages.
“But is it working? Is there enough profit to be self-sustaining?” someone asks of the Nambu Insect Project.
The answer remains “unclear”, thus surfacing a fundamental tension around the Infrahub cases, and by extension, the larger project of sustainable infrastructure imaginaries.
Given the size and stakes of the infrastructure gap in Africa, questions of scale and replicability are far from academic. And while many of the Infrahub examples are relatively small in scale, as the site grows, it raises the issue of how to string “emergent” examples together in a way that adds up to the need on the ground. This tension was recently explored by CST researchers who visited urban innovations across Benin, Kenya, Ethiopia and Rwanda with the aim to contextually locate future and existing Infrahub examples.
“There is no agreement, even among like-minded scholars, if small-scale projects are sufficient to transform economies and effect the change needed,” observed ACC governance and finance researcher Liza Rose Cirolia, who said that part of the appeal of small-scale infrastructure is the daunting complexity of the financial, material, historical, and political factors underpinning large-scale infrastructure.
Core to the ‘big-small’ debate is the question of who will pay, which loops back to the dominance of global North development models and financial systems underwriting them. But as with the need for new approaches to the infrastructures themselves, a new way of conceptualising the problem of finance—and therefore its solution—is perhaps demanded.
“Money forces you to create the capabilities to spend it,” said Swilling, who sits on South Africa’s National Planning Commission, and, until September 2023, was on the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) board. “I want to completely reverse this.”
That is, instead of developing a national infrastructure framework plan, to which a national budget-aligned costing is “tacked on”, governments should start with the total investment calculation required to achieve national infrastructure goals and the SDGs; then use that figure as the basis of a public-private dialogue to mobilise capital.
While Swilling allowed that blended finance and public-private-partnerships will undoubtedly be involved, he stressed that these buzzy concepts are not adequate to the financial task ahead. Instead he offered the concept of “a balance sheet reconfiguration”, inspired by a critical macro-finance school of thought.[5]
“If everyone’s asset is someone else’s liability, we can empirically map the web of interlocking balance sheets [and] identify elasticity spaces…to unlock new flows of capital,” Swilling asserted, explaining that such an approach could offer a glimmer of light at the end of what is admittedly a long, dark tunnel.
Grounding the conversation for the non-economists in the room by highlighting how much capital is on the African continent (answer: far more than is typically assumed), the deep inequality of its distribution, and how much leaves without being invested, Swilling estimated that various multiple balance reconfigurations could possibly unlock as much as ZAR5 trillion through to 2050 for South Africa’s infrastructure requirement.
But these so-called “elasticity spaces” must be identified both with financial investors and public sector commitments to creating a pipeline of projects that can redirect said capital into the real economy.
And here we arrive at the chicken and egg of needing a “pipeline of projects” to release finance, but also needing upfront finance to codevelop viable projects and capacitate institutions to deliver them at scale.
“You don’t fix institutions to wait for the money,” said Swilling of this conundrum. “Talent comes when the real game is on.”
In search of an adaptive infrastructure pipeline (aka, the real game)
“This project is looking to visualise complexity. Thinking back to the interconnected web of [financial] balance sheets, [this shows the] interconnected web of resource sectors,” said Garth Malan, an engineer and PhD candidate at the CST.
On the screen behind him, bright lines representing Cape Town’s shifting water, energy, and food requirements pulse around Table Mountain, a dazzling representation of the “material flows analysis” (MFA) tool he developed to quantitatively analyse a city’s resource flows (aka, urban metabolism) in real time.
Powerfully visualising “how resources are interacting as they move through the city”, this tool could allow decision makers to see how material resources interact with and impact one another, assisting municipalities to move away from the siloed sectoral…
