The number of people living in African cities is set to explode over the next two decades, presenting governments and planners across the continent with a major challenge about how best to accommodate the influx of millions.
In a new book that tries to assess the consequences of what is becoming known as the world's second great wave of urbanisation, South African author Edgar Pieterse raises his concern that policy makers and governments are simply not prepared for the scale of the "profound transformation" currently under way.
In the book, entitled City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development, Pieterse cites a recent United Nations report that gives a sense of how rapidly people are leaving the rural areas and making for the cities.
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The first wave of urbanisation took place between 1750 and 1950 and saw the number of people living in cities rise from 15-million people to 423-million.
Most of these expanding cities were in the developed world and most of the new arrivals were absorbed by the rapidly industrialising economies of these big nations.
But the second wave of urbanisation is something quite different.
This time, the numbers are much bigger and most of the urbanisation will take place in the cities of the south, including in Africa.
In the second wave, the numbers of people arriving in cities is expected to increase from just under half a billion to almost four billion people by 2030. The countries of the south, which will bear the brunt of this exodus, will move from being only partially urbanised to being mainly nations of city dwellers.
This has enormous implications for governments, policy planners, scholars and of course for those people themselves, according to Pieterse, who is the director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.
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