Are Africa's most populous and economically dominant cities a force to reckon with in the twenty-first century? This book analyzes the economies of East and Southern Africa's 'apex' cities, probing how they have altered structurally over time and their current sources of economic vitality and...

There is much speculation today about how rapid economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa is transforming development prospects in the region. However, in terms of a broad, multi-dimensional, understanding of the term ‘development’, into which social justice must be factored, there are...

As the urban share of Africa's population increases, the importance of understanding how food supply is shaped by market institutions has grown. However, this topic has received little attention from policy makers and researchers despite the implications of market institutions and regulatory...

For the past 20 years, the population of Zambia has been gradually ruralising, or de-urbanising. For a country which was once seen as emblematic of the process of African urbanisation, and was very often cited (erroneously) as being among the first in sub-Saharan Africa to have reached the stage...

The evidence from censuses and satellite imagery is increasing that the rate at which many countries are becoming more urban in sub-Saharan Africa has slowed or is even stagnating. This has major policy implications. Many standard reviews of the region still, however, tend to maintain that...

Conceptualisations of the informal sector in terms of economic dualism have a long history, as have effective challenges to those conceptualisations. These are discussed in this paper, which then examines shifts in attitudes towards the role of the urban informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa...

In 2005, the Zimbabwean government demolished huge swathes of low-income housing throughout the country's urban centres. This was one of the most radical reshapings of any country's urban housing patterns in the world's recent history. Yet any attempt to understand this event in relation to the...

Since its inception in 1980 Zimbabwe's land resettlement programme has been marked by very varied performance and keen debate. There have been high hopes, deep disappointment, false starts (and stops), policy swings and controversy. In the 1990s analyses of the programme by both supporters and...