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Welcome to the September Edition of the Best Practices monthly feature. In this read, we focus on how to design effective and appropriate urban legislation using a practical guide Reforming Urban Laws in Africa. The Guide was developed to provide practical advice to officials working on urban legal reform on how to improve the legal frameworks.

Each month, we feature one of the Best Practices winners from the 11th Cycle of the Dubai International Award endorsed by UN-Habitat and Dubai Municipality. We hope that these best practices will inform and inspire you on initiatives that are making effective interventions to improve the lives of urban residents around the globe. The 11th cycle comprised of the following categories:

Name of organization: African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town

Country: South Africa

WINNER of the University Research Award on legislation, rules, regulations and governance systems

This award category aims to recognize outstanding research on legislation and governance systems. The research provided significant information, perspectives and analysis on the areas of national and local government/s that have adopted and implemented laws and regulatory mechanisms to support the process of well-planned urbanization, including transparent legal frameworks and enforcement mechanisms.

REFORMING URBAN LAWS IN AFRICA

The African Centre for Cities (ACC), at the University of Cape Town, identified the need to develop a platform for urban planning law reform in the region in 2009. The reason for this initiative was to focus on the practical question of how to achieve effective and appropriate urban legislation.

With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation the ACC worked closely with the Association of African Planning Schools, to develop case materials on urban planning law reform as well as a model curriculum for teaching planning law in an African university. This was taken further, with the idea of developing a Practical Guide on Reforming Urban Laws in Africa.

The extraordinary projected rate and scale of urban growth in Africa between now and 2030 underscores the need to urgently develop urban laws and regulations that will create and shape cities that work more efficiently and treat people more fairly. New urban infrastructure has to be provided, new areas for urban growth developed, and new systems of governing and managing cities put in place. The rate at which African cities are growing and the scale of problems in urban governance and management demand immediate action to reverse entrenched, ineffective governance practices. The future of African cities must be one shaped by laws that address the lived experience of households and firms. These laws must have:

  1. Greater accountability and the rule of law
  2. Stronger forms of supervision and responsibility at different levels
  3. Consideration of capacities for implementation
  4. More effective legal instruments
  5. Better regulations related to the creation and protection of public spaces
  6. Better mechanisms for municipal income generation
  7. Better regulations to protect the 'commons'
  8. Better urban governance mechanisms and Human Rights
  9. Better rules and regulation for environmental sustainability
  10. Increased stability and security

1. Greater accountability and the rule of law

The Guide is centrally driven by the importance of establishing the rule of law in the ways that towns and cities in the region are governed, planned and managed. However, the Guide does not suggest that the challenge in African cities is that there is need of laws to be enforced more strictly. There are often sound and objective reasons as to why urban laws cannot be effectively implemented and why their compliance is not possible. In this context, pushing the need for enforcement leads to harsh and perverse outcomes, which only undermines respect for the rule of law. That is why the Guide refocuses its attention on the law-making process, to ensure that:

  • Participatory engagement of local communities is conducted
  • There is a clear sense of the problem to be addressed (which can only be done through a transparent public consultation)
  • A realistic sense of what law can and cannot do in the particular context of a particular country or town or city is examined
  • A credible evaluation of legislative options has been considered before final drafts of the law are submitted to the legislature.

2. Stronger forms of supervision and responsibility at different levels

Across Africa, the decision making process is centralized at the national level, which is a legacy of colonial legislation. As countries urbanize, political forces also realign and this has led to a renewed interest among national governments in centralization of decision-making, notwithstanding the urge from international community to decentralize. The Guide highlights this issue, using the examples of both Nigeria and South Africa to show how difficult it is to achieve decentralized decision-making in practice, even where the legislative framework allows for it. The Guide encourages the drivers of urban legal reform to comply with each country's constitutional framework and to ensure that any proposed new law is implementable, especially by local government.

3. Consideration of capacities for implementation

The Guide proposes that new legislation must be designed with implementation in mind. The region is scarred by numerous examples where countries, frustrated by the persistence of informal settlements due to non-compliance with building standards, have invoked the law to demolish homes and evict families with no other accommodation options.

The Guide strongly argues for laws that are designed from the starting point of what is possible for the state to implement within its current resources and what are the compliance standards that the majority of citizens and firms can meet in their day to day life. This approach is one that will build the respect for enforcement agencies in identifying what is needed. This is a prerequisite for economic dynamism, social inclusion and environmental sustainability.

4. More effective legal instruments

African cities have largely failed to reap the economic and social benefits of urbanization that other regions have achieved. Inappropriate and outdated legal frameworks are a part of that problem. Urban legal reform is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to promote urbanization that encourages investment and ensures the adequate provision of infrastructure and housing for everyone.

The Guide emphasizes on the need to reconsider what is meant by 'effective'. Truly effective urban laws are those that work. Effective urban laws are those that are written clearly, without using legal jargon that is only understood by lawyers, so that everyone can understand the laws that govern their lives in the towns and cities where they reside and work.

5. Better regulations related to the creation and protection of public spaces

The Guide covers 'urban law', which relates to the laws that regulate urban planning, urban governance, urban management and urban finance. While the Guide itself does not enter into specific details about public spaces, it does make very clear that one of the central challenges that has to be addressed in urban legal reform, especially in African countries, is balancing the rights and interests of individuals against the powers of the state. This comes to the forefront of managing development rights and regulating the allocation of space between public and private uses.

6. Better mechanisms for municipal income generation

The contested and uncertain nature of urban land and property rights in many African countries directly undermines the efforts by national and local governments to introduce ideas like land value capture and sharing. It also makes it very difficult to establish a basis on which to value land and property for the purposes of municipal income generation through property taxes. Land value capture and municipal property-based revenues are key to the success of Africa's cities, but when new laws are introduced to promote these objectives they fail, because the underlying legal infrastructure of property rights and land administration is so weak.

7. Better regulations to protect the 'commons'

In the introduction, the Guide highlights the problems that urban legal reform needs to address by outlining the shared characteristics of most African cities. These characteristics include the extractive nature of most elite groups' relationships with the cities in which they live. This manifests in land grabs, including of public parks and forests, as well as in the growing withdrawal of wealthy residents into gated communities. This fosters social fragmentation and drives environmentally unsustainable practices. Ultimately this trend leads to towns and cities that are neither socially nor environmentally sustainable.

8. Better urban governance mechanisms and Human Rights

The Guide strongly advocates public participation in law-making processes. Participation in the law-making process by citizens is not only to ensure that citizens' voices are heard and acknowledged but, as importantly, to inform the urban law-makers which issues need to be considered when designing a regulatory framework. A defining feature of many inherited colonial-era legislation in African countries is the absence of any meaningful stakeholder engagement. This has fueled law-making practices where the expert view is seen to be superior to that of the ordinary person. This failure to consider what is required to make a new urban legal order work in practical terms has presented African cities with a huge problem to overcome.

9. Better rules and regulation for environmental sustainability

A prominent flaw in urban legislation, especially legislation that is borrowed from other countries without careful thought, is that it tries to regulate too much. This scatter-gun approach, worsened by weak implementation capacity, means that there is inadequate attention paid to regulating the activities that really do impact on the environment, both the natural and the human environment. Selective, often corrupt, application of urban law not only breeds contempt for the rule of law but also erodes environmental sustainability (and weakens cities' capacity to respond to climate change).

10. Increased stability and security

As African cities grow rapidly, seldom accompanied by meaningful growth in jobs or economic opportunities, the risks of social instability become very high. Inappropriate and ineffective laws governing such sensitive issues as city governance and the regulation of land and property only fuel this risk of instability. The faster the cities grow, the greater the frequency of social crises will be. Urban legal reform is thus an essential challenge that must be met by African countries; and therefore the Guide has been written.

In case you missed the August edition of our Best Practice Monthly Feature, we highlighted the winning initiative for the Private Sector Award for Contribution to Territorial Planning Urban Planning and Design category. Learn more about how Emergent Vernacular Architecture (EVA Studio) have built three public spaces in order to respond to the scarcity of communal urban spaces in Haiti, which suffered extensive damage following the 2010 earthquake. The project shows how public space is used to enhance community resilience by improving quality of life, providing access to services, ameliorating social cohesion among the youth and community at large.

Photos: UN-Habitat; Shutterstock

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