Introduction

In Africa, it is estimated that one in two people will reside in cities by 2030. Africa's rapid urbanisation and continuing poverty challenges result in rising urban slum populations to unprecedented heights. For example, the urban slum population as a percentage of the total urban population is higher than 80 per cent in the following ten African countries: Chad (98.9 per cent), Sierra Leone (97 per cent), Rwanda (96 per cent), Ethiopia (95.5 per cent), Mali (94.2 per cent), Madagascar (93 per cent), Central African Republic (87.5 per cent), Angola (86.5 per cent), Niger (83.6 per cent) and Guinea-Bissau (83.1 per cent) (UNHabitat, 2018b). Yet, at the same time, there is sustained gross domestic product (GDP) growth in some African economies, for example, in Ghana (8.5 per cent), Ivory Coast (7.8 per cent) and Senegal (6.8 per cent) in 2017. In these countries, especially in the capital cities, the emergence of a prosperous middle class and a certain opulence is now changing the face of the urban economy. Stark inequalities in close proximity of one another lead to contested urban spaces in cities (Bayat, 2000; Bayat and Biekart, 2009; O’Connor, 2013). People are pulled into cities by economic opportunities, different lifestyles and improved well-being prospects for themselves and their relatives, whom they might leave (temporarily) behind in rural areas. The larger parts of what most African cities could be have not yet been built (World Bank, 2017), leading to the overpopulation of existing urban housing, high costs and self-building on marginal land plots. Simultaneously, urban development pushes existing groups of poor and marginalised people and their practised livelihoods out of city centres and towards its fringes, or towards the new fringes of an ever-expanding city. The lack of formal jobs, housing, building spaces, facilities and services implies newly lived experiences of urban deprivation for a growing urban population (Sassen, 2018). Many fall back on family and kinship support, social networks, informality, or illegality while creating their own living spaces and livelihoods. ‘The working age population of 15– 64 years is the group that typically migrates’, the majority of whom are young adults (UNCTAD, 2018: 17).