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Farther on down the Road: Transport Costs, Trade and Urban Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
This article investigates the role of intercity transport costs in determining the income of sub-Saharan African cities. In particular, focusing on fifteen countries whose largest city is a port, I find that an oil price increase of the magnitude experienced between 2002 and 2008 induces the income of cities near that port to increase by 7% relative to otherwise identical cities 500 km farther away. Combined with external estimates, this implies an elasticity of city economic activity with respect to transport costs of –0.28 at 500 km from the port. Moreover, the effect differs by the surface of roads between cities. Cities connected to the port by paved roads are chiefly affected by transport costs to the port, while cities connected to the port by unpaved roads are more affected by connections to secondary centres.
Journal Article
Urban-Rural Gaps in the Developing World
This article provides an overview of the growing literature on urban-rural gaps in the developing world. I begin with recent evidence on the size of the gaps as measured by consumption, income, and wages, and argue that the gaps are real rather than just nominal. I then discuss the role of sorting more able workers into urban areas and review an array of recent evidence on outcomes from rural-urban migration. Overall, migrants do experience substantial gains on average, though smaller than suggested by the cross-sectional gaps. I conclude that future work should help further explore the frictions—in particular, information, financial, and in land markets—that hold back rural-urban migration and may help explain the persistence of urban-rural gaps.
Journal Article
The world-class city comes by tramway
Although framed as projects targeting the improvement of public transport, the reduction of traffic congestion and the integration of urban peripheries, tramways are often inscribed to political ambitions of modernisation and urban renewal. As such, Morocco’s tramway projects constitute a distinct feature of national urban worlding ambitions promoting ‘world-class’ cities. Likewise, Casablanca’s tramway is closely entangled with political discourses on the urban integration of politically marginalised working-class neighbourhoods. However, this article sees the tramway as a symbol and driving force of a new distinction of the urban peripheries of Casablanca – separating it into ‘old’ and ‘new’, desired and undesired population groups. On the one hand, the tramway has fostered the incorporation of the traditional working-class neighbourhoods – the old peripheries – into Casablanca’s urban ‘world-class’ project. On the other hand, the tramway is the flagship of urban renaissance policies that have pushed stigmatised street vendors and shantytown dwellers from the working-class neighbourhoods to isolated new towns – the emerging ‘new’ peripheries. Here they are kept – spatially and discursively – outside the ‘world-class’ city, largely dependent on inadequate, costly and insecure urban public transport. These dynamics not only conflict with the tramway’s objectives to decrease traffic congestion and to promote sociospatial integration, they also show the power of urban worlding projects to reframe urban marginality and to define who does (and who does not) have access to the ‘world-class’ city.
尽管电车轨道被设计成旨在改善公共交通、减少交通拥堵和城市周边一体化的项目，但 它往往被赋予现代化和城市更新的政治抱负。因此，摩洛哥的电车项目构成了一道独特 的风景线，它促进打造“世界级”城市的城市国际化国家雄心。同样，卡萨布兰卡的电 车轨道也与政治上被边缘化的工人阶级社区融入城市的政治讨论紧密相连。然而，本文 认为电车是卡萨布兰卡城市边缘新的割裂的象征和驱动力，因为电车把城市边缘分成 “旧的”和“新的”，想要的和不想要的人口群体。一方面，电车促进了传统的工人阶 级社区（旧的周边地区）融入卡萨布兰卡的打造“世界级”城市项目。另一方面，电车 轨道是城市复兴政策的旗舰，这些政策将被污名化的街头小贩和棚户区居民从工人阶级 聚居区推向孤立的新城镇一新出现的“新”边缘。在这里，它们在空间上被间接地保留 在“世界级”城市之外，主要依赖于不充分、昂贵和不安全的城市公共交通。这些动态 不仅与电车轨道减少交通拥堵和促进社会空间整合的目标相冲突，还显示了打造世界级 城市的项目具有一种力量，能重塑城市边缘，并决定谁可以(谁不可以)进入“世界级” 城市。
Journal Article
Urban land conflict in the Global South
In cities of the Global South, access to land is a pressing concern. Typically neither states nor markets provide suitable land for all users, especially low-income households. In the context of urban growth and inequality, acute competition for land and the regulatory failures of states often result in conflict, which is sometimes violent, affecting urban authorities and residents. Conflicts are often mentioned in analyses of urban land, but rarely examined in depth. This paper develops a framework for land conflict analysis, drawing on relevant literature and the papers in this special issue. In order to explore the drivers, dynamics and outcomes of urban land conflicts, diverse disciplinary perspectives are discussed, including environmental security, political ecology, legal anthropology, land governance, conflict analysis and management, and urban conflict and violence. The papers focus on conflicts in the peri-urban areas of Xalapa, Mexico, and Juba, South Sudan, and during informal settlement upgrading in eThekwini (Durban), South Africa, and Nairobi. A second paper on South Africa examines how current tenure law reflects the characteristics and outcomes of previous conflicts. We suggest that an analytical framework needs, first, to consider definitional categories, including the material and emotional dimensions of access to land, conflict and violence, and tenure. Second, it needs to identify and examine the interests and behaviour of the many actors involved in urban land conflicts. And third, it needs to analyse the interactions and relationships between those involved at different levels, from the individual/household, through the local to the citywide, national and international.
Journal Article
INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY IN AFRICA
We examine intergenerational mobility (IM) in educational attainment in Africa since independence using census data. First, we map IM across 27 countries and more than 2800 regions, documenting wide cross-country and especially within-country heterogeneity. Inertia looms large as differences in the literacy of the old generation explain about half of the observed spatial disparities in IM. The rural-urban divide is substantial. Though conspicuous in some countries, there is no evidence of systematic gender gaps in IM. Second, we characterize the geography of IM, finding that colonial investments in railroads and Christian missions, as well as proximity to capitals and the coastline are the strongest correlates. Third, we ask whether the regional differences in mobility reflect spatial sorting or their independent role. To isolate the two, we focus on children whose families moved when they were young. Comparing siblings, looking at moves triggered by displacement shocks, and using historical migrations to predict moving-families’ destinations, we establish that, while selection is considerable, regional exposure effects are at play. An extra year spent in a high-mobility region before the age of 12 (and after 5) significantly raises the likelihood for children of uneducated parents to complete primary school. Overall, the evidence suggests that geographic and historical factors laid the seeds for spatial disparities in IM that are cemented by sorting and the independent impact of regions.
Journal Article
THE PERMANENT EFFECTS OF TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTIONS IN POOR COUNTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM AFRICA
We exploit the construction and eventual demise of the colonial railroads in Ghana, and most of the rest of Africa, to study the impact of transportation investments in poor countries. Using new data on railroads and cities spanning over one century, we find that railroads had large effects on the distribution of economic activity during the colonial period and these effects have persisted to date, although railroads collapsed and road networks expanded considerably after independence. Initial transportation investments may thus have large effects in poor countries. As countries develop, increasing returns solidify their spatial distribution, and subsequent investments may have smaller effects.
Journal Article
Building the City
We model the building of a city, estimate parameters of the model, and calculate welfare losses from institutional frictions encountered in changing land-use.We distinguish formal and slum construction technologies; in contrast to slums, formal structures can be built tall, are durable, and non-malleable. As the city grows areas are initially developed informally, then formally, and then redeveloped periodically. Slums are modelled as a technology choice; however, institutional frictions in land markets may hinder their conversion to formal usage that requires secure property rights. Using unique data on Nairobi for 2003 and 2015, we develop a novel set of facts that support assumptions of the model, estimate all parameters of the model, and calculate welfare losses of conversion frictions.We track the dynamic evolution of the city and compare it with model predictions. In the core city formal sector, about a third of buildings were torn down over 12 years and replaced by buildings on average three times higher. For slums in older areas near the centre, even after buying out slumlords, overcoming institutional frictionswould yield gains amounting to about $18,000 per slum household, thirty times typical annual slum rent payments.
Journal Article
Enclaving
While detachment and separation continue to be central to urban development across the globe, in several sub-Saharan African cities they have acquired a particular form of acute social and political efficacy. In many European and American cities, the making of fortified enclosures is considered to be an effect of an endemic fear of societal dissolution, and a growing number of sub-Saharan African cities are, seemingly, affected by a similar socio-political and economic dynamic. However, in sub-Saharan Africa the spatial lines of separation that isolate the affluent few from surrounding urban spaces follow both a much wider and less coordinated meshwork of social divisions and political fissures, and draw on a deeper socio-cultural, economic and historical repertoire. In this article, we trace the contours of enclaving as a critical urban driver, which is rapidly changing the social and physical fabric of cities across the sub-Saharan continent. Rather than considering enclaving simply as a physical manifestation of dominance and privilege, however, we consider it as an ‘aesthetics of imagination’ that migrates through the cities and thereby weaves together otherwise dissimilar and distinct social practices and spaces, political desires and economic aspirations.
虽然分离和隔离仍然是全球城市发展的核心，但在几个撒哈拉以南非洲城市，它们获得了一种特殊形式的突出的社会和政治功效。在许多欧洲和美国城市，建造加固围栏被认为是对社会解体的地方性恐惧的结果，越来越多的撒哈拉以南非洲城市似乎受到类似的社会政治和经济动态的影响。然而，在撒哈拉以南非洲，将少数富人与周围城市空间隔离开来的空间分界线，既遵循更广泛、更不协调的社会分工和政治裂缝网络，也依托更深层的社会文化、经济和历史因素。在本文中，我们追踪了作为一个关键的城市驱动因素的城市封闭的轮廓，它正在迅速改变整个撒哈拉以南非洲大陆城市的社会和物质结构。然而，我们认为封闭不仅仅是一种支配地位和特权的物理表现，还是一种“想象美学”，它在城市中流动，从而将不同的和独特的社会实践和空间、政治渴求和经济愿望交织在一起。
Journal Article