Today we will talk about African cities, from urbanisation to the city, the forms of urbanisation to the forms of cities. Why African cities? You will notice that the lesson is called African cities and not African city, simply because there is not only one type of city, or one city that we would find from the Maghreb to South Africa, but multiple ones. What is interesting is to see the common points between the cities which could represent a category, the category of African cities. So let's study these African cities and some geographical features. First, two thirds of them are coastal cities. So they are close to the sea. Therefore, we will mainly study port cities. Then, three spatial groups. The first one is the North African cities, the Arab-Muslim cities, from Casablanca to Cairo. They are quite ancient cities as most of them have existed since Antiquity. So not colonial cities, even though they all have a colonial past, but they are cities that were built before the colonial time. The second spatial group is what can be called the cities of the Gulf of Guinea, in a broad sense, they are the cities from Dakar to maybe Cameroon or even to Congo. However it is a group and it is probably the most inhabited in Africa. The third big group, which is of Dutch or English origin is the South African cities, namely at the southern point of Africa. Today, some big cities are growing. Some count on this front here where there would be a new configuration with new cities growing. But for now, we will consider only the three major groups we just named. Another feature is the emptiness of the continent. Beyond the big cities we just saw, there is more or less a continent relatively free and it is fine because we get into the Sahara, the Sahel, the Kalahari or Namib deserts. However we realise that the structure itself of the cities is coastal and not continental. This stems also from the historical heritage which is the colonial conquest that implemented in priority port cities with railway going further into the lands in order to bring the raw materials to Europe via the ports. So, except a handful of cities which have become capital cities, the cities with no access to the sea and the secluded areas, if we want to characterise, we can say that the continent is completely empty while the cities break down all around the shoreline. Initially, there are some forms of urbanisation growing into cities or starting from the city to the form of urbanisation. Today, we can say in short, even though there are always exceptions and some regional subtleties, but, roughly, either we have isolated cities or mega-regions, or lanes, or city-regions. Meaning that apart from the isolated city, the other cities are not isolated, but included in a network with other cities or regions to shape a huge region, a city-region. Or as in some parts, like South Africa or Nigeria, we find lanes, which are a sort of succesion of cities spread across the channels of communication, sometimes the railway, but generally the road, being the main means of transport or mobility between the cities. The question concerns the driving forces of urbanisation. What are the forces allowing this urbanisation and ultimately our African cities to develop? There are several forces. First, we have what we call the "inputs". What are the inputs? The inputs are materials, work force, transports, services, water and power facilities. It is everything coming into the city. One of the driving forces is the concentration of inputs. Simultaneously, it is the market. This means that cities gather people who are consumers, so there is a concentration of consumers in cities which enables their development and therefore represents urbanisation driving forces. Next, between inputs and market, we have service proximity, by default compared to the countryside, where business and administrative activities are much larger. Then, the possibilities are also much larger, we call them "network" or "networks" in this case as they are numerous, and they can be social or commercial, but we have at the same time a proximity of the services and a possibility of networking, the inputs as well as the market to sell the inputs. There is a sort of symetry between producers and consumers, between sellers and buyers, but all this is happening within the city and all this enables, unlike the countryside, the development of urban areas. Now, let's see some of the features. We covered the stakes and the challenges regarding urbanisation, and can be true beyond the African borders. Today, we will see the features of these African cities. Even if they are many, we can assume that there is an entity or an identity of the African city and we will study some of its features. These are non-exhaustively, migration issues, the labour forces of the cities, the informality issue, the actors, the same ones we find almost everywhere; we also have the feature of urban macrocephaly, which is a geographical criterion
