Infrastructure and Metropolitanization : Understanding and Comparing the Relationship in Cities in Africa and India

Access to urban infrastructure, in cities of the developing world is deficient in both coverage and access. Despite the efforts of numerous international, national, provincial and urban agents, these deficiencies persist. In response, recent international and national strategies seek to use comprehensive reform of policy and governance to alter the paradigm of municipal infrastructure development and provision. Metropolitan reforms are a recent reform initiative that seeks to improve infrastructure provision in urban agglomerations. We understand metropolitan reforms, in this paper, to have three drivers – infrastructure, politics and society. This paper will evaluate the dominance of these three drivers for metropolitan reforms. Focusing on select cities of Africa and India, we seek to compare and evaluate these new infrastructure reform and governance arrangements. Africa and India make an appropriate comparison because of broadly similar patterns of infrastructure deficiencies, comparable rates of urban growth, and similar macrolevel approaches to infrastructure reform. At the same time, they have very different political legacies that have produced very different political outcomes in cities. These different political legacies provide an opportunity to understand the extent to which national and urban political differences explain infrastructure outcomes in different cities of the developing world