Green Infrastructure for Sustainable Urban Development in Africa

Green infrastructure is physical infrastructure which balances the needs of societies, economies and the natural environment. Africa’s fast-growing towns and cities have the opportunity to build green infrastructure because to a large extent they do not have existing sunken investments in unsustainable infrastructure, as Western towns and cities do.

This book shows for the first time how green infrastructure can work in an African urban context, using Ethiopian experiences which align infrastructure development with African society and culture. Indigenous African solutions can mediate the use of natural resources including land, energy and water to provide economic growth with social equity.

This book shows for the first time how green infrastructure can work in an African urban context. On one level it provides a major rethinking of the role of infrastructure in urban society since the creation of networked infrastructure in the early twentieth century. On another, it explores the changing paradigms of urban development through the fundamental question of how decisions are made.

With a focus on Africa''s fast-growing secondary towns, where 70 per cent of the urban population live, the book explains how urban infrastructure provides the key to the relationship between economic development and social equity, through the mediation of natural resources. Adopting this view enables investment to be channelled more effectively to provide the engine for economic growth, while providing equitable services for all residents. At the same time, the mediation of resource flows integrates the metabolism of the city into the wider ecosystem. This vision leads to a new way of thinking about infrastructure, giving clear definition to the concept of green infrastructure.

On the basis of research gathered throughout an extensive career, John Abbott draws in particular from his experience in Ethiopia to demonstrate the ways in which infrastructure needs to respond to the economies, societies and natural environments of twenty-first century urban Africa.