LECTURE ABSTRACT
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Seminar on Cities in Development: Spaces, Conflicts, and Agency
12 November 2013
"Next Generation Urban Infrastructure: the Kumasi Case"
R. Plunz
In recent years, global discrepancies between urban development modes have
contributed to frustration on all sides of the question. Our present wave of
urbanization has not behaved according to models associated with the previous
experience of the so-called "developed" world. Perhaps the most universal
frustration has been the unattainability of the Millennium Development Goals
(MDG's) that have been part and parcel of global development metrics as
envisioned by the United Nations since 2000. While global urbanization is
unprecedented in scale, comprehensive metrics capable of measuring its
progress are not easy to come by. Our basic dilemma is that urbanization
operations that have evolved in the "developed world" are substantially
estranged from those presently deployed within the "developing world," to the
extent that the former appear to be largely irrelevant.
It is futile to think that a city like Kumasi, that has grown five times over in as
many decades, can follow the same conventions of planning that prevail in cities
of 19th century origins and of roughly the same size, like Atlanta or Philadelphia.
Kumasi's economic circumstances are absolutely different, starting with an
"informal" sector growth in Kumasi that dominates all else, variously estimated at
over 75 percent of the local workforce. And sustaining micro-enterprise is
absolutely essential to the informal sector, without which seventy-five percent of
the Kumasi's economy becomes dysfunctional. This next generation urbanization
entails differing processes and metrics than the whole of our professional
knowledge has given us over the past two centuries. Yet these old models tend
to dominate our global "development" strategies, either directly or indirectly,
Urban design in all our worlds is inherently connected to indeterminacy as relates
to economic possibilities and to evolutionary strategies. Normative urban design
practice in the developed world, however, is largely dominated by formalist
ideologies and static implementations. Difficulties with transferring this practice to
the developing world is compounded by the lack of relevance of these
conventions, and more importantly, by the lack of alternative knowledge that can
be operational in developing economies, in spite of the enormous demand.
Development in Kumasi has outpaced top-down strategies and as such it has the
potential to "leap-frog" old top-down development models completely.
Interestingly, and in spite of the above, certain strategies must be shared with the
so-called developed world around the urban infrastructure challenges, as our
19th century conceptions begin to obsolesce. For example, New York City
shares certain water and liquid waste problems with Kumasi that point toward
similar solutions. Perhaps the most inclusive issue entailing all of the above and
more is the classic question of urban health. Health is mobility; food systems;
water and sanitation; and access to health services. This synthesis is well
illustrated by the potentials for interconnectedness within the infrastructure of the
future: rainwater is also cultivation is also health is also mobility is also livelihood
and vice versa and everywhere. As Kumasi leapfrogs past the conventions of the
1811 New York City gridiron plan to arrive at our present, we all have much to
learn. In this sense, we are becoming of one world.