- A Tale of two African Cities: Hyper Growth, Sprawl and Compact City Development. Towards the Development of a Sustainable Future City    650 kb by    Adebayo, Ambrose A. | adebayo@ambroafrique.co.za    Short Outline The paper will discuss the hyper growth, sprawl and compact city development in two African cities, Durban and Nairobi. The paper presents the positive and negative aspects of a compact city built environment and proposes a remedy towards a sustainable city. Abstract Cities that have been dominating urbanization and urban growth in Africa were established during the colonial period for administrative or natural resource exploitation purposes. The demise of colonialism at the turn of the 20th century which coincided with economic globalization witnessed hyper urbanization and urban growth biased towards few a primate African cities. This was, by and large, because of the intensification of rural-urban migration due to the increasing role of African cities as centers of global production and consumption. Accompanying the phenomenon has been increasing carbon footprint and transportation problems because of the radial expansion of traditional African primate cities due to leap-frog development and urban sprawl. As a way of dealing with low density unsustainable sprawl, the concept of compact city development was introduced to promote high density mixed land use within cities. However, this concept has unfolded at the expense of the carrying capacity of primary infrastructure to support increasing formal and informal land use densities in inner-city areas. This paper makes a critical comparative analysis of the chronological hyper-urbanization and urban growth vis-à-vis urban compaction trends and interventions using the cities of Nairobi in Kenya and Durban in South Africa as case studies. Based on time series analyses of urban growth and strategic compact city concept, including the built environment policy of transformation and intervention, the paper presents the positive and negative aspects of compact city built environment and proposes a remedy towards a sustainable city. Keywords African cities, urbanisation, urban sprawl, carrying capacity, built environment, sustainable city Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper