In 2023, LDE Global brought researchers together in The Hague to discuss urban transitions in the Global South. That conversation has become a book. At its launch at the International Institute of Social Studies on 28 October, speakers and audience kept returning to one question: not whether Africa has opportunities, but how it claims them, and who gets a seat at the table when it does.
The first image of the afternoon had been on the screen for a while before anyone explained it. A river tumbling over rocks, homes crowding a slope, a cloudy sky. Then Professor Shuaib Lwasa pointed to the horizon. Those are not hills, he told the room. They are mounds of waste that have been piling up for years at Dandora in Nairobi, one of the largest dumpsites on the continent. Opportunity and complexity in one frame. The question the afternoon kept circling was who gets to decide what happens to either.
The setting in Aula B of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague was simple: two low armchairs and a small table with microphones. Lwasa, Professor of Urban Resilience and Global Development at ISS, took one chair. The other belonged to his co-editor, Dr Mandipa Bongiwe Ndlovu of the African Studies Centre Leiden, who would soon switch from author to host.
Where the conversation started
The book began at another table. On 11 May 2023, LDE Global, part of the strategic alliance of Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam, organised a panel discussion on urban transitions in the Global South at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It was co-hosted by ISS, the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), the International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI) and Kenya's Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research. Lwasa and Ndlovu were both on the panel. Later that same day, Lwasa gave his inaugural lecture at ISS.
That panel, Lwasa recalled, made one thing clear. There was a real opportunity to build a narrative about Africa's urbanisation that speaks to the continent's own realities, for Africa and by Africans. Owning the story was the first claim. Three years on, it has become Urban Transitions in Africa: Opportunities and Complexities, published by Springer, with nine contributing authors from across the continent and its diaspora. The launch was organised by ISS and LDE Global together with ICFI, and brought the book home to the institute where Lwasa holds his chair.
Opportunities exist. The terms do not.
Lwasa was frank about what is new in the book. Much of what it describes is already known. What has changed is the urgency: rapid urbanisation, shifting geopolitics and a global energy transition in which a continent rich in critical minerals could take the lead. The editors set out the conditions for a good transition in what they call a triadic synthesis: responsive governance, equitable financing and the smart use of critical resources.
Leading, Lwasa stressed, does not mean being in front. It means turning resources into value for a market of 1.3 billion people. Not dependence, but interdependence with room for autonomy. That only works if African cities and states set the terms themselves. Right now, they often do not. In Harare, he noted, around two thirds of economic activity is informal, yet the reflex of many governments is to clear it away. 'So how do you criminalise 67% of the economy of the city?'
Playing field or player
Then Ndlovu took over as host, and two contributing authors joined online: Victoria Manya of the African Studies Centre Leiden and Dr Paul Mukwaya of Makerere University in Uganda.
Manya set the tone. Africa is neither simply dependent nor simply in charge. Undersea cables and telecom networks are often owned or financed by foreign companies, yet Kenya built M-Pesa into a globally influential platform. The more useful question, she argued, is under what conditions countries can turn their position into bargaining power. More suitors do not guarantee better deals. Zambia's debt default showed that competition between lenders can just as easily deepen debt. 'The danger is not that China or the West invests in Africa,' she said. The real risk is that Africa becomes the playing field rather than the player.
Mukwaya showed what happens when the terms are set poorly. Across the continent, local governments have been handed responsibilities without the money to carry them out. They sit at the table without the means to act. As donor funding shrinks, he argued, cities will need to mobilise their own resources.
How to take a seat
The audience pushed the conversation from diagnosis to strategy. An ISS student asked how Africa could lead in solar energy without owning the technology, and warned that diaspora investment often chases quick returns in luxury housing. Another participant described how Ghana's drive to attract its diaspora has pushed up prices for local residents. And someone asked whether new EU rules on supply chain due diligence could help African countries take more ownership.
The answers added up to a playbook for sitting down at the table. Manya argued that every country should know what it brings that a partner cannot easily find elsewhere, and should write technology transfer into investment agreements as a condition. She described research for the African Development Bank in Nigeria, where foreign firms registered as local companies, after which the transfer requirements no longer applied to them. Start where Africa already has an advantage, she said, in solar installation, maintenance and assembly. 'You cannot climb the ladder from the top.' And negotiate together through the African Continental Free Trade Area, not country by country.
Lwasa added that it matters what you bring yourself. Arriving with your own capital and a proposal that makes business sense for both sides changes the conversation. He called for a shift from saviourism to transactional relationships, in which Africa produces and trades rather than asks. Ndlovu named the underlying shift: leaving behind psychological dependency as well as economic dependency, so that Africans come to the table as 'not beggars, but bargainers.' Staying away is no alternative, she added. 'You can only win a fight if you're in the ring.'
Who else belongs at the table
The final segment asked who is still missing. Beatrice Hati of the Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research, who had also spoken at the 2023 panel, took Ndlovu's seat. Her PhD research on fires in Nairobi's informal settlements showed how much formal systems overlook. Firefighters arrive with a technical explanation, such as an electrical fault. Residents may believe the ancestors are taking revenge for land that was sold, and stay away. Grassroots organisations understand both readings, but the formal system, still shaped by its colonial origins, rarely gives them a chair.
Loss, too, means something different from what outsiders see. 'Nobody will say that my house was burnt down,' Hati said. 'Often they say my life was burnt down.' A small iron-sheet home holds a web of relationships, such as the neighbour who looks after your child until you get home from work. Insurance can replace belongings. It cannot rebuild a network. Mukwaya's earlier point fits here: technology and policy should recognise that 'informality is the primary infrastructure.' Home, Hati concluded, is more than a shack of iron sheets. It is a whole system, Lwasa added, where research and culture meet.
Reclaiming our home
From there the conversation moved upstairs to the Butterfly Bar, where the photo exhibition Reclaiming Our Home gave these ideas a face. Lwasa's images of the Merkato market in Addis Ababa hung alongside scenes from Lagos and Nairobi: women trading from canoes in Makoko, a former quarry turned into a community park, an electric cooking demonstration from the Pika na Power initiative contributed by Nuvoni. And there was the opening image again: the waterfall where the Dandora dumpsite meets the Nairobi River.
Reclaiming a home happens at every scale, from the negotiating table where mineral deals are struck to the neighbourhood where people rebuild after a fire. Lwasa does not expect the whole continent to move at once. A trusted system, he argued, does not need every African state on board. A few states or champions can start building it together, with transparency and participation, so that it works beyond any single leader. Once the example exists, others can follow. It is a modest starting point for an ambitious agenda, and it mirrors how this book came about: a handful of people around a table in The Hague in 2023, brought together by LDE Global, whose conversation never stopped. The table, as the afternoon made clear, is still being set.
Explore Reclaiming Our Home’s compact exhibition online
Couldn’t attend the exhibition in person? An extended digital version of Reclaiming Our Home is now available to explore in a virtual space, offering a closer look at the images and stories behind Africa’s urban transitions.
How to explore: Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move through the virtual gallery, much like navigating a video game. Click on the photographs to view them up close and read their accompanying captions, which reveal more about the images and the stories behind them.
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