Mainstreaming nature-based solutions within urban planning

African cities are urbanising at a rapid rate. Recent statistics show that there will be an estimated 68% of people living in cities by the year 2050 compared to 55% of people living in cities today. In Africa 43% of the population live in urban areas while the rest reside mostly in rural areas. However, Africa’s urban population will exceed its rural population, rising to 60% by 2050. The demands of rapid urbanisation warrant a sustainable approach to ensure communities’ needs are met without depleting available resources. This presents an opportunity to plan and design cities integrating sustainability principles.

Currently, African cities in the context of rapid urbanisation feature rising socio-economic challenges faced by urban residents, especially the most vulnerable. Additionally, inadequate planning frameworks, weak legislation and lack of enforcement and development control in many African cities have contributed to negative impacts on natural systems. This can be seen in the state of degradation owing to human activities such as encroachment, unplanned urban development and other harmful practices such as deforestation. The encroachment of urban development into natural systems, oftentimes leads to the destruction of these natural systems, hindering the realisation of nature’s contribution to people, including mitigating the impacts of climate change. Thus, it is important to chart a way forward in urban development that recognises the value of nature in cities, ensuring that cities maximise ecosystem services to promote clean air, ecosystem connectivity, and protect and allocate land for publicly accessible open spaces. Better urban planning is one approach that could harness the potential of rapid urbanisation to enable urban resilience. This article explores the role of urban planning in addressing the aforementioned issues, showcasing trends, challenges, and strategies to mainstream nature into sustainable urban development.

Role of urban planning in mainstreaming nature

Urban planning is the process of shaping cities. It considers social, environmental and infrastructure aspects to ensure that land is allocated and serviced appropriately to meet the needs of current and future urban populations. These services include making provision for residential, commercial, recreation, social services and mobility land uses, while protecting and maintaining natural systems. Urban planning that is contextually relevant relies on granular data to unpack urban trends to guide development strategies such as the demarcation of land use zones for the preservation and conservation of nature while demarcating zones for current urban development. Efficient urban planning additionally considers the use of structuring elements of a city such as natural features to determine development patterns and the allocation of bulk infrastructure to support service delivery.

Additionally, urban planning determines how to distribute relevant development rights at a city wide scale to foster continuous development that is compatible to the context and to other surrounding land uses. Effective planning reduces scenarios whereby there are gaps in infrastructure development and bulk service connection, addresses interferences caused by irregular zoning, and creates frameworks to mitigate against fragmentation and destruction of natural systems through encroachment and inappropriate or unplanned developments. By embedding nature into city frameworks, urban planning can mitigate environmental degradation, maintain ecosystem connectivity, and support urban resilience.

Current trends in urban planning and associated implications

The urban planning trends in African cities have shown sprawling cities with unplanned development resulting in negative impacts on people and nature. This has been caused by weak institutional arrangements, inadequate legislation and development control, as well as the use of outdated frameworks and the mismatch between plans and implementation.

The reality of urban development and urban change

As cities continue to grow there are many cases where the outlying urban-rural fringes continue to absorb the rising population. As a result, forests are encroached on, rivers and wetlands also become impacted at the cost of increased and sometimes uncontrolled urban development. Additionally, peri-urban areas undergo rapid land use change due to immense pressure owing to urban expansion to cater to the rising population. Peri-urban areas, which often feature agricultural land and other natural areas, form part of a city’s green infrastructure. The threat posed to these agricultural zones can impact food security in the urban-rural interface while risking the loss of other ecosystem services provided by urban agriculture, such as seasonal flood absorption.

Outdated and inefficient urban planning frameworks

Many cities in Africa rely on outdated master plans to guide urban development. Master plan development is time consuming and requires intensive financial resources. As a conventional planning mechanism, they then tend to always lag behind current urban trends, thus being ineffective in keeping up with rapid urban development taking place on ground. This means that, especially in the periphery of cities, natural systems are not considered at the forefront during urban planning activities, causing them to be vulnerable to encroachment. This impacts nature’s contribution to people, further exacerbating unsustainable urban patterns.

Weak institutional arrangements

The role of urban governance is important to mainstream nature based solutions in cities. In many cases environmental management is a mandate of the national government and oftentimes, with insufficient decentralisation to empower local governments. Often, there is a lack of supportive policies and insufficient financial and technical resources allocated to cities to undertake local level environmental management that aligns to the national targets. Therefore it is important to enable decentralisation of mandates as well as technical and financial resource flows to support local governments in undertaking environmental management at the local level.

The rise of secondary and intermediate cities

Secondary and intermediate cities are emerging at the forefront of Africa’s urban development. These cities will ultimately accommodate the future urban populations in the face of the rapidly increasing urban growth. Thus, it is crucial that proactive measures are taken to ensure that they are well planned to accommodate this unprecedented growth in order to prevent the replication of urban challenges faced in capital cities. In many cases, secondary and intermediate cities lack adequate planning frameworks placing them at risk of becoming more unplanned which further affects the provision of service delivery. This also leads to the continuous loss of ecosystem services due to negatively impacted urban natural assets. Structure plans present an effective and easier alternative planning framework for development in rapidly urbanising contexts. They enable an understanding of which areas should be protected for environmental conservation, also which areas would potentially be future urban expansion areas.

The Urban Natural Assets (UNA) programme and the urban planning lens

UNA is a decade-long programme that aims to transform the developmental trajectory in African cities by mainstreaming nature considerations in cities for improved resilience. The programme explores the synergies between these pillars of urban planning, governance and finance to mainstream NbS in cities within the framing of a rights-based approach. The latest phase, UNA Resilience and Restoration for Life, explores the various alternative and contextually relevant urban planning frameworks and practices that may be adopted in rapidly urbanising contexts to respond to the realities of the interaction between people, urban development and nature. Additionally, UNA Resilience aims to unpack the institutional arrangements that need to be addressed to enable sustainable development that mainstreams nature based solutions effectively across various levels of government as well as through collaboration between state and non-state actors. The current iteration of UNA also makes a case for the importance of biodiversity financing and explores practical tools such as concept notes that can enable cities to leverage funding for implementation of nature based solution projects. Ultimately, the core focus of this phase is on taking a rights-based approach. This includes advocacy in terms of dismantling power dynamics, and addressing cultural norms and practices that hinder equitable and meaningful participation. This is to ensure that the rights of vulnerable populations are upheld and advocated for by creating awareness of the responsibilities of rights-holders and duty-bearers in development processes. Additionally, it is important that marginalised people are included in decision-making processes by encouraging participatory and collaborative processes.

Improving urban planning for effective nature based solutions mainstreaming

To address the current urban trends in African cities, as described above, the following approaches are proposed to improve urban planning practices. These practices aim to mainstream NbS and enhance the resilience of both nature and people in urban environments.

a) Decentralised institutional structures
This could be achieved through establishing a well resourced city department that focuses on urban parks and other natural systems. Officials could take on the custodianship of environmental management and managing natural systems at the city level, to ensure that national targets are understood and local action supports their achievement. This enables local residents to leverage the benefits of ecosystem services.

b) Adopt alternative urban planning frameworks
In rapidly urbanising contexts, a structure plan is a spatial development framework that could give high level guidance as to which areas should be protected and conserved for environmental purposes. Structure plans primarily use natural systems as structuring elements of a city or town with the aim to maintain or create unfragmented, connected natural systems. This helps to ensure that natural systems are not impacted directly by urban development, while fostering ecosystem services. Thus, structure plans support in protecting areas from encroachment. Inclusion of the urban development zone as well as the urban expansion zone within the structure plan supports in forecasting potential directions of urban growth. This proactively puts measures in place before nature is impacted in a negative way by urban development.

c) Mainstreaming NbS through collaborative processes
NbS are measures and approaches that are used in managing the urban and natural environment in a way that addresses socio-economic aspects enhancing nature’s contribution to people. Fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors is important to mainstream the agenda of mainstreaming NbS in cities. A collaborative approach could include various state and non-state actors. This would entail engaging in joint mapping of initiatives, current and future projects in order to understand where gaps exist, noting the various scales of interventions and identification of areas that should not be developed and rather conserved for the protection of nature. A participatory planning process ensures a consensus on identifying the demarcated areas that should not be encroached on by urban development. The process also encourages improved implementation of frameworks such as master plans, structure plans or spatial development frameworks. It is thus important to include diverse stakeholders, who each play their unique roles in mainstreaming NbS.

Finding innovative ways of custodianship of natural assets is beneficial in protecting environmental systems and other urban natural assets. Through the management of sections of natural systems through a hybrid partnership between government, community groups and eco-groups, the government can collaborate with actors at the local level to ensure that these spaces enjoy local custodianship and that they are being managed in accordance with a memorandum of understanding (MoU). Working with civil society organizations (CSOs) and other community based organizations (CBOs) would enable community mobilisation, and contextual relevant public awareness to cultivate the notions of individual and collective action in environmental management. Additionally, involving the private sector in investing in environmentally based projects contributes to improving the physical environment and creating conducive microclimates that offer many benefits to their businesses while fast tracking implementation.

d) Prioritising the financing of NbS projects within urban planning frameworks
Financing of NbS projects can be prioritized by ensuring that they are incorporated within catalytic projects within the master plans, which are then considered in a capital investment plan (CIP). A CIP provides the financial framework to implement a master plan’s vision. A CIP may enable linkages between spatial and economic planning in a manner that could prioritise financing and implementation of NbS projects that aim to rehabilitate and restore natural systems. The CIP also identifies actors to be involved as well as allocate budgets and financing requirements to enhance efficient implementation of projects.

Conclusion

In addressing the impacts of rapid urbanisation on the environment, cities need to consider a transformative approach towards urban development that recognises the value of nature. Current urban planning frameworks, which are often outdated, have shown that they are unable to keep up with the scale of rapid urbanisation. This drives encroachment of urban development on natural systems, thus leading to a loss of ecosystem services. Considerations such as decentralised governance structures, which provide officials at various levels with clear mandates while allocating adequate resources may foster effective environmental management. While investments are mostly driven to capital cities, it is important not to overlook secondary cities which experience rapid urbanisation without having adequate planning frameworks. These secondary cities require innovative solutions such as structure plans to guide sustainable development in rapidly urbanising contexts while protecting natural assets.

Furthermore, it is important to foster collaborative processes which involve diverse stakeholders, including both the public and private sectors. Collaboration between state and non-state actors is crucial in mainstreaming NbS into urban planning. In enabling a long term view of sustainable development, it is important to consider linkages between the spatial and the economic planning mechanisms such as capital investment plans which can facilitate the implementation of NbS projects, integrating them within broader urban development proposals. By prioritising the protection and conservation of nature within urban planning frameworks, cities can ensure a more sustainable and resilient future where urban residents can benefit from ecosystem services.

Learn more about how the UNA Resilience project uses urban planning to mainstream NbS:

3 December 2024