In Africa, smaller cities grow faster

But whatever the reason, the pattern is unmistakable. 

"For the foreseeable future," the UN report says, growth in "the smaller cities will predominate."

This doesn't have to be a bad thing. Urbanization can make it easier for governments to provide schooling and healthcare for its citizens, the report points out, and sound city planning can help reduce a country's overall environmental degradation. While many smaller cities struggle with scant financial resources, they also tend to have greater flexibility in planning, space, and decisionmaking.

Take Gaborone. A drive around this orderly capital shows some of the challenges of a smaller city turning into a boomtown, but also how some government policies – such as providing land for impoverished newcomers rather than trying to send them back to the countryside – can help ease the transition.

It's not just city neighborhoods like Block 8 that are exploding in size here – the sprawl extends beyond Gaborone's original borders. Along the road toward the airport, for instance, a series of developments sits on what was once rich agricultural land. To the south, near the Mokolodi Game Reserve, new upscale housing perches along brown ridge lines, with sweeping views toward the Kalahari.

For years now, Botswana has been considered one of Africa's success stories: a democratic country with regular positive marks from anticorruption organizations, high literacy rates, and a steady income from diamond-mining that gets funneled back to citizens through various government programs.

When the first president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, took office in 1966, he supported a law that made all of his country's developments mixed income, vowing to avoid slums of the kind found in neighboring South Africa, says Aloysius Mosha, a professor of architecture and town planning at the University of Botswana. Since then, the government has solidified a welfare and subsidy-based land system where, for the same property, wealthy residents pay a top price and poorer citizens pay a nominal amount. This means – in theory, at least – that all residents have access to land, with minimal segregation between income groups.

The government also cracks down on people who try to set up shacks without permission – an effort to discourage slums, Mr. Mosha says.

While the government acknowledges that its subsidy system is not sustainable forever, and that it can't stop all impoverished settlements, it continues to create city master plans – something that few other small cities in the region do. And these plans, Mosha says, include designation of significant swaths of land for planned, low-income housing. 

"There are push and pull factors," says Mosha, "They know if they go to the urban areas somebody will take care of them. The population here has been so small, the country has money, and the subsidies have encouraged people to move into urban areas."

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