Posts tagged with 'Africa'
Hand-drawn in black marker and spanning an entire wall of Addis Ababa’s Anbessa company headquarters is a map depicting stops, timetables and fares for the city’s 73-year-old public bus system. Peeling icons and stickers tell a history of corrections and ...
Street lighting is important. It allows informal vendors and traders to operate for longer hours and improves road and public safety. It also makes streets feel safer and more secure, especially for women. But street lighting is sorely lacking in many of sub-Saharan Africa’s ...
African cities have an imbalance. Around half of the population walks, bicycles or takes public transport to get around, usually under unsafe and difficult conditions. But despite this unusually high level of non-motorized mobility, street space is disproportionately allocated to ...
The inaugural WRI Ross Prize for Cities, a $250,000 award celebrating and spotlighting urban transformation, was awarded to SARSAI on Wednesday for its incisive, easily replicable and highly impactful approach to creating safer journeys to school for children in Dar es Salaam ...
Warwick Junction is a finalist for the WRI Ross Prize for Cities. Warwick Junction’s maze of stalls, arches and bridges can elicit wonder in any first-time visitor to South Africa’s largest marketplace. The area’s nine distinct markets are wedged between ...
Cities in the global south today face a complex challenge: like all cities, they need to reduce carbon emissions, but they also need to expand access to energy. Around the world, 1.1 billion people currently lack access to electric cooling ...
Electrification is a key step to creating low-carbon cities. Replacing fossil fuel-powered vehicles, stoves, furnaces with electric alternatives reduces emissions and creates a host of other benefits. But not all cities are equally suitable for electrification. In some cases, electrification is ...
When Transforming Transportation (TT) started 16 years ago, the transport landscape looked very different. Ride-hailing services were unheard of. Shared bike systems were exclusive to just a few cities. Smartphones were still years away. No one had heard of Facebook ...
More than 300 new bike-share services were launched worldwide last year. Ride-hailing services such as Uber and Didi Chuxing together provide more than 45 million rides a day. Electric scooters are accounting for more short trips in the places where they’re available and drones and autonomous ...
While most cities around the world struggle with inequality, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the challenge is compounded by the legacy of apartheid. In the apartheid era, black populations were relocated to the poorly serviced areas far away from job opportunities. ...
Urbanization is changing the face of the planet – for better and for worse. City populations, GDP and investment are increasing exponentially. At the same time, carbon emissions are rising, more and more people are living in slums, and air pollution ...
Sustainable economic development in sub-Saharan Africa will only be possible if towns and cities across the region thrive. This column highlights the critical role that national governments need to play in guiding the urban transition. National Urban Policies can help ...
Dadalas, donfos, matatus, trotros, car rapides, minibus-taxis – whatever you call the on-demand minivan services that are so ubiquitous in many African cities, you can’t argue with their dominance. Such paratransit systems, as they are known in the transport world, ...
For decades, Kampala has raced to keep up with its own rapid growth. Set alongside Lake Victoria, the Ugandan capital more than quadrupled in physical footprint between 1991 and 2012 as population doubled to 1.5 million people. One of Kampala’s ...
Bold action on climate change could deliver $26 trillion in cumulative economic benefits by 2030, according to a new report by the New Climate Economy (NCE). Without immediate action to cut emissions, the costs of “runaway” climate change will be severe: ...
