Informality in Globalizing African Cities: Hybridity Toward Southern Decoloniality

Abstract

The quintessential African urban question of the twenty-first century is deciphering the place of informality in globalizing cities. In this article, we critique the normative reading and operationalization of Saskia Sassen's original theorization of the Global City and argue that the quest for globality by African cities could be strengthened with a focus on informality. Drawing on a Southern decolonial lens, we contend that the ongoing Sustainable, Smart, and New City developments reflect neocolonial city-making ideals that regard informality as an aberration and a nuisance. Instead, we suggest the adoption of a hybridized and heterogeneous approach to urban development that is more attuned to the local and cultural realities of African cities.

Introduction

Over the past half a century, urban informality in the global South has emerged as a buzzword and topical issue in urban studies, human geography, and political science. From critical commentaries to empirical studies, scholars have provided rich fodder on the informal–formal dialectic and further challenged the simplistic binary viewpoint or dualistic school of thought espoused in both theory and empirical analysis. For example, a quick survey of articles published in Dialogues in Human Geography and Journal of Planning Literature alone in the last two years shows several thought-provoking studies (e.g., Azunre 2024; Cobbinah 2025; Finn 2023, 2024; Nchito 2023; Olajide 2023; Potts 2023; Prasad, Alizadeh and Dowling 2023) providing critical framings on informality's historical, racial, and colonial underpinnings in Africa.

The heightened interest in informality has coincided with the sociodemographic and economic projections of African urbanization. For instance, by 2050, Africa's urban population is projected to triple, accounting for a quarter of the world's urban population (i.e., 21%) (UN-DESA, 2014). Nigeria will be a major driver of this growth. Yet, emerging neocolonial ¹ urban development agendas (e.g., Sustainable, Smart, and New Cities [SSNC]) on the continent, touted as sustainable development initiatives, continue to regard informality as an aberration and nuisance, contributing to increased poverty and widening inequalities (Cobbinah 2025; Korah 2020). Meanwhile, informality defines the economic, social, housing, and governance identities of African cities (Cobbinah 2025; Kamete 2013), as well as climate change management (Cobbinah and Finn, 2023). As a consequence, calls by scholars are growing to position informality at the heart of the continent's quest for sustainable city development (Finn 2024). While neocolonialism is a quintessential concern in African urbanism analysis (e.g., Harrison and Croese 2023; Korah 2020), the constitutive capacity of informality has received less attention. Extant research on urban informality remains somewhat vulnerable to critiques of formality and modernity in a generally obvious fashion (Kamete 2013). How, then, do we hold together growing African cities with informality as the bedrock of the continent's urbanism and way of life?

In this article, we address this question via the global city lens. We argue that the quest to globalize African cities should be done with informality as it is “an embodiment of African culture” (Cobbinah 2025, p. 81). It is true that many city authorities across the continent still employ neocolonial violent policies to create an institutionalized siege on informality (Azunre and Boateng 2023). Amoako (2016) describes this situation as a brutal presence when city authorities exercise a heavy-handed approach to informality and a convenient absence when electoral support for informality is solicited. The long-standing disdain toward informality is established in colonial racialized developmental ideologies and rhetoric. Such ideals view informality as antithetical to global and world-class city ambitions and are then reflected in ongoing neocolonial urban governance and development practices. For example, many governments are engaging in Western-inspired SSNC developments frequently tagged as solutions to Africa's urban development problems. Yet, despite their relatively recent nature, Korah (2020) finds that SSNCs are compounding inequalities and poverty in African cities such as Accra (Ghana) due to their lack of focus on informality. This situation demonstrates, first, that colonial development practices and legacies are replicated and exacerbated in SSNCs by restricting physical access, brutal policing, and militarization, among others. Second, such neocolonial practices show the urgency for a Southern turn in decolonizing development in African cities (Finn and Cobbinah 2025), which we argue should commence with hybridization. Here, hybridization refers to the process of acknowledging informality and integrating it with formal development (e.g., SSNC) in a coexistence manner to address urban development problems and create a sustainable and resilient future.

Drawing on a Southern decolonial lens while invoking Saskia Sassen's original theorization of the global city, we problematize the “normative” reading of the concept and its implications for African cities. We acknowledge that this has, in part, caused several cities to engage in an unhealthy competitive race to attract advanced producer services and investments in the postcolonial era to be “on the map” (Robinson 2002). Thus, we argue for a decolonial approach to urban development and practice by first acknowledging the contributions of informality and how it can progressively coexist with emerging urban development narratives on the continent (Azunre et al. 2021, 2022). In this paper, we explain decoloniality as restorative justice through cultural, psychological, and economic freedom that challenges and alters Western superiority or external influence (O'Dowd and Heckenberg 2020). Inspired by Mignolo and Walsh (2018), “decolonial” or “decoloniality” is positioned as an emancipatory praxis of “undoing” and “redoing.” That is, “delinking” from Western and European knowledge structures and then “relinking” or “reconstituting” nonmodern ways of thinking and living.

While we concur with Fosu (2024) in calling for a provocative decolonial agenda situated in the “everyday realities of ordinary Africans in [the] post-independence world” (p. 11), we further establish that blame should not solely be placed on (neo)colonialism but attention be shifted to focus on today's urban development realities (e.g., African elites) that aggravate inequalities and undermine informality. This shift will ensure that the quest for globality is not mutually exclusive with informality and that the two can coexist productively in African cities. The aim should be to hybridize urban development, providing space to address the inadequacies of informality while maintaining its strengths. That is, envisioning African cities as sites of “heterogeneous infrastructure configurations” (Lawhon et al. 2018). As Tonkiss (2013, p. 112) describes, “the relationship of formality to informality in cities is not an either/or, but a question of how to handle the mix.” This dovetails well with Arturo Escobar's concept of a “pluriverse,” which maintains multiple realities of globality as a space where many worlds can coexist. Rosen and Gribat's (2025) recent book on hybrid urbanisms in secondary cities offers rich empirical insights into how this can be practicalized in various sectors such as transportation, land development, and planning law.

On the Normative Reading of the Global City Concept and the False Narrative on Informality

Saskia Sassen developed the global city concept in the 1990s against the backdrop of the world city concept. When Saskia Sassen proposed the concept, her main goal was to present it as a “description” of the globalization process and to locate the role that cities play in such a system (Sassen 1991). However, her proposals were taken in a “normative” way. This normative reading resulted in a plethora of studies that quantitatively analyzed and ranked cities based on the presence of advanced producer services (Knox and Taylor 1995; Taylor 2001). This hierarchization became a closed-off analysis where cities without such advanced producer services were overlooked and deemed not integral to the world system.

The fundamental problem, however, with this normative reading and categorization was that some cities (i.e., cities viewed as not global), particularly those in the Global South, believed that their pathways to growth and development were to become a “global city.” This could only happen by emulating the “ways of doing development” in global cities that do not acknowledge informality. Global cities thus became a paradigm: a model, a site where all the required ingredients for economic success could be found, an inspiration for postcolonial African cities. Ong (2011) notes that this situation has led to master-planned projects that instantiate some vision of the world in formation via two practices: First is modeling, which entails adopting certain elements and practices of Western cities or cities characterized as advanced (e.g., the Singapore model). The second is inter-referencing, which involves comparing and contrasting one's city to world-class cities, learning from them, and trying to emulate them, mostly by erasing informality. Moreover, Sassen documented the presence of informal (unskilled) immigrant workers, “global women” and laboring bodies (maids, nannies, sex workers, assembly line workers), in the so-called “global” cities. Despite their significant contributions, elites devalue these identities and cultures as “otherness.” A similar view is held in the pursuit of global or world-class status in many African cities.

Yet, several critical scholars (e.g., Watson 2009) argue that much can be learned by “seeing from the South,” dislocating and relocating theory production, and applying a “Southern sensibility” (Oldfield, 2014). This call has been amplified by many well-known decolonial and postcolonial ² scholars such as AbdouMaliq Simone, Marie Huchzermeyer, Edgar Pieterse, Susan Parnell, Garth Myers, Martin Murray, and Antonio Tomas. To foreground our critique against the normative adoption of the global city concept and the perpetuation of neocolonial urban development, we elect to draw on the classic theoretical works of Ananya Roy and Jennifer Robinson and a more recent empirical application by Finn and Cobbinah (2025). These studies show how decolonial arguments of reconstituting knowledge production transcend one specific geographical sphere.

Roy (2009, 2011) calls for new geographies of authoritative knowledge and theory: That is, theories should be produced in “place,” then appropriated, borrowed, and remapped. Consequently, instead of asking if urban theories are sufficient to explain the Global South, what is at stake is to ask if places in the Global South can generate urban theories (Roy 2016). To realize this, theorizations of the city ought to move beyond “trait geographies” to focus on “process geographies.” They should consider all circuits and networks on the world stage and not only look at those of large corporations and firms. Other important circuits of flows and scapes at the grassroots and informal levels will emerge through this analytical framework. For instance, Finn and Cobbinah (2025) demonstrate this understanding using Lubumbashi, a city in the Democratic Republic of Congo where, despite the city's global positioning in mineral (cobalt) supply and the decarbonization agenda, it remains “unrecognized” because of its informal nature and the entrenchment of (neo)colonialism. Overall, Ananya Roy's critical perspective and epistemological framework help reconfigure the world system's core and peripheries, in which informality is foundational.

Like Ananya Roy, Robinson (2002) argues that Global South cities are generally viewed as “off the map” and subsequently classified as structurally irrelevant. Even as they are characteristically unbounded, their capacity often transcends the city scale. These Global South cities interface with the global economy in diverse ways. With their current nature and legacies built from previous colonial global connections, scholars and urban practitioners have become more attentive to temporality, proposing the production of responsive urbanism (Finn and Cobbinah 2025). Following this, Jennifer Robinson asserts the need to view all cities as “ordinary cities.” The framework of “ordinariness” has been applied rather innovatively across the urban studies literature. A recent example is Beier (2022), who introduced the concept of “ordinary neighborhoods” to trouble the pejorative notion of “slums” and other euphemisms of “informal settlements” and “squatter settlements” that still maintain negative connotations.

Sustainable, Smart, and New City Projects: Informality Under Siege in African Cities

Recent estimates indicate that about half of sub-Saharan Africa's urban population lives in slums, with a high prevalence and expansion in Middle and West Africa (Büttner et al. 2025). Informal economic activities are also pervasive in sub-Saharan Africa, as estimates reveal that they have become a norm, providing livelihood for 89.2 percent of workers (ILO, 2020). Despite informality's pervasiveness and contributions, it is still under siege. Across many African city contexts, the deployment of draconian governance measures toward informality (e.g., evictions and demolitions) has assumed pace due to property speculation and the real estate market boom. There has been a craze to develop SSNCs across Africa, with these projects envisaging that cities attain world-class status. Addo (2024) discusses the recent emergence of airport cities as global capitalist spaces to attract foreign direct investments and spur development. Focusing on the Accra Airport City I project, Addo shows how such exclusionary enclaves have zero tolerance for informal activities. Similarly, Harrison and Croese (2023) have documented the resurgence of over 50 master-planned new and existing cities across Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. Many of these projects are elitist and regard informality as an aberration and nuisance. This was corroborated by Bandauko and Arku (2023) in their analysis of Zimbabwe's multibillion-dollar New Capital City project. They found that it aims to create exclusionary and privatized spaces that limit access and use, particularly to informal operators. Thus, the urban poor are being “planned out of the city.” Similar findings are reported in Lagos (Nigeria), Cape Town and Johannesburg (South Africa), and Kigali (Rwanda), among others (see Olajide and Lawanson 2022; van Noorloos and Kloosterboer 2018).

According to Watson (2014), many SSNCs have become “urban fantasies” that steadily worsen the marginalization and inequalities that have already beset African cities. These ambitious projects generally involve the eviction and dispossession of poor and marginalized communities and their informal livelihoods (van Noorloos and Kloosterboer 2018). This siege on informality can be framed as a politics of erasure and forgetting. Formal authorities who impose such policies have forgotten, or at least pretended to forget, the enormous contributions informal actors offered and continue to offer to the functionality of cities and the global economy. And just as these projects must transcend the recreation and reproduction of the urban present to erase informality, they fail to address the inadequacies at multiple scales—local, national, and continental. This clearly presents both theoretical and practical challenges to understanding the centrality of informality in African urbanism.

The leverage to be obtained from centering urban informality in African urbanism cannot be denied, although, as Finn (2024) acknowledges, the scope of such an undertaking would require a significant shift in the current urban theory hegemony. On critical minerals, for instance, mobile phones depend on tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, which are mainly found in African countries such as the DR Congo. Yet, these minerals are extracted through artisanal and small-scale mining methods that are informal in nature (Finn, Simon and Newell 2024). Thus, the overlooked actors are, in fact, very relevant due to informality, despite their cities (e.g., Lubumbashi) not being recognized as global cities (Finn and Cobbinah 2025). Additionally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, informal vendors were documented to have played an enormous role in improving food security. Other studies (e.g., Azunre et al. 2021, 2022) have shown how informal actors enhance the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of cities. Yet, many city authorities believe that informality is antithetical to their vision of modernity and global city-making. In a similar way, urban planning education across the continent continues to be based on Western theories and practices of planning, which have proved inadequate and ineffective.

It is within the foregoing context that we maintain that the idea of global city-making, introduced by Saskia Sassen in the 1990s, was misconstrued and has rolled over until today, particularly via (neo)colonial urban development agendas.

Conclusion: Globalizing and Hybridizing African Cities

In this paper, we emphasized the importance of utilizing a hybridized approach to address current challenges in urban development and management in Africa. By demonstrating the utility of the global city concept, we argue that its normative reading has contributed to several African cities obsessively engineering policies and projects that will place them closer to global and world-class status while erasing informality. We highlighted that informality remains the foundation of African urbanism, or what Dovey (2025) recently called the original or ur-form of urbanity. Thus, it needs to be recognized and integrated into ongoing urban development projects (i.e., SSNCs).

Our analysis shows that the global city allure and imaginary are underpinned by a flawed ideology that urban informality has no place in global cities. Some studies (Chiodelli et al. 2021; Devlin 2020) have reported various forms of urban informality (such as informal housing and informal work) across the Global North. This suggests that African governments should reconsider their attitude toward informality and embrace a hybridized pathway to globality that integrates and recognizes informality. Informality in Africa embodies the spontaneity and culture of its citizens. Developing cities by sidelining informality is counterproductive and goes against the soul of residents and the fabric of African urbanism. As many have argued, informality in and of itself is not a problem. The problem arises from the lack of urban planning to work with and harness it for resilient urban futures. One practical sector where a hybridized approach could be adopted is public transportation. Several African cities depend on informal paratransit and moto-taxis, such as Okadas, boda-bodas, Matatus, and Trotros. Rather than restricting their ability to function in place of government-run systems like the Global North, we suggest digitizing, investing in better fuels, and recapitalizing vehicles. Tom Courtright—a transportation consultant and Director at Africa E-mobility Alliance—succinctly captured this view in a recent Twitter (now X) post on October 8, 2024: “Believing a country cannot develop with bodas is a lack of political imagination, and because ‘development’ for so many means Europe.”

Our clarion call is reflected in supranational agendas such as Africa's Agenda 2063, the New Urban Agenda, and the Sustainable Development Goals (particularly Goal 11). It is, therefore, imperative to advance this hybridized agenda in urban theory and praxis to anchor a Southern sensibility, particularly in implementing sustainable, smart, new, and eco-city projects across the African continent. Urban practitioners, politicians, and policymakers should embrace this alternative approach of doing urban development in African cities, not wholesale formality or informality, but (at least) acknowledging the usefulness of both as a viable strategy.

This article has made the case for robust forms of urban development contextualism and for the exploration of sustainable urban development in Southern cities built on the pursuit of hybridization and heterogeneity. This hybridization agenda is enmeshed in positive connections and relations between formality and informality, and more robust practices of decolonial theorization, grounded in voice-finding and future-defining identity of Global South cities. While there is promise in this hybridization theorization in understanding global cities, there are perhaps no guarantees. Future empirical studies need to explore more grounded ways to put this into practice.