For much of the outside world, Africa is still imagined primarily as a rural rather than an urban continent. Its familiar visual language consists of savannahs, deserts, tropical forests, ocean shores, safaris and villages.
With a few exceptions – Cairo, Cape Town, perhaps Marrakesh – African cities have rarely become destinations or cultural symbols in their own right. Yet anyone trying to understand the continent’s future should look not only at its mines, farms and ports, but also at its construction sites, commuter routes and rapidly expanding suburbs.
The decisive process is urbanization. More than 700 million Africans already live in urban areas, and this number is expected to reach approximately 1.4 billion by 2050. Around 80% of the continent’s population growth over the coming decades will be absorbed by cities and towns. More than 60 African cities already have populations above one million; by the middle of the century, there may be around 159.
Big city life
These numbers may seem abstract until one imagines what they mean on an ordinary weekday morning. In Lagos, Nairobi, Abidjan or Dar es Salaam, urban growth is experienced as a queue for a minibus, a new row of shops beside a road, an apartment block rising behind a market, or another hour added to the daily commute.
A city expands first not in an architect’s drawing, but through millions of private decisions: a family moving closer to work, a trader renting a stall, a landowner dividing a plot, a developer adding three floors to a building originally designed for one.
For many urban residents, mobility remains a daily negotiation. Nairobi has its brightly painted matatus (minibuses); Abidjan its gbakas and shared taxis; Johannesburg its minibus networks; Lagos its motorcycles, ferries and trains.
These systems are often criticized as chaotic or unsafe. Yet they also demonstrate how quickly informal institutions emerge when formal infrastructure fails to keep pace. For many passengers, every day becomes a struggle: several forms of transport may be needed to travel between home and work, while congestion and the spatial legacies of colonial planning stretch journeys across entire metropolitan regions.
It is a restructuring of the economy. Migration from villages to cities usually involves a change in employment: agriculture ceases to be the only mass source of income, while work emerges in construction, trade, transport, services, manufacturing and public administration. Cities create consumer demand, concentrate education and healthcare, and support the formation of new professional and middle classes. Standards of housing, employment and leisure change with them.
African societies are still, in many respects, learning to live in cities of unprecedented scale. The urban culture associated with regular transport, predictable municipal services, codified land use and stable public space has not become universal.
The African city therefore often appears disordered to the outside observer. Roads turn into markets; garages become workshops; residential houses acquire shops, offices and additional floors; undeveloped land is occupied before officials complete a plan for it. But chaos is not necessarily the opposite of urban development. It may be one of its early forms.
“Announcement of the future” – or a dysfunctional community?
The architect Rem Koolhaas, who spent years studying Lagos, Nigeria, initially described it as “the ultimate dysfunctional city.” He later became interested in the initiatives that allowed it to function despite weak formal structures. At another point, he called Lagos not a backward city, but “an announcement of the future.”
Lagos often seems to anticipate problems that other global cities are only beginning to face: extreme density, informality, infrastructure operating above its intended capacity, and a constant overlap between trade, transport and public life. But there is also a danger in romanticizing improvisation.
What looks inventive to an architect visiting for a week may feel exhausting to a resident who spends four hours commuting or buys water from a tanker because the public network does not reach the neighborhood. The future African city cannot depend on improvisation alone.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, six African metropolitan areas are expected to have populations above ten million by 2035: Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa, Greater Johannesburg, Luanda and Dar es Salaam. Another 17 cities may exceed five million residents. Africa’s 100 leading cities are expected to account for more than 60% of the continent’s GDP by that year.
This means an extraordinary rise in demand for housing, roads, railways, offices, schools, hospitals, electricity, water and urban administration. It also means that municipal governments will increasingly resemble the governments of small countries.
Changing the scale
Lagos State illustrates the change in scale. Its proposed 2026 budget amounted to ₦4.237 trillion (around $3.06 billion). Such a figure no longer describes a municipal treasury in the traditional sense. A megacity must do more than collect waste, issue building permits and repair roads. It has to construct transport systems, manage land, organize the supply of energy and water, attract investment, create employment and respond to flooding, heat and coastal erosion.
The opening of the first phase of the Lagos Blue Line in September 2023 was therefore more than the launch of a railway. The 13-kilometre line connected Marina with Mile 2 and introduced electric urban rail to a city long dominated by roads and informal transport.
The project had been delayed for years, a reminder of the financial and administrative difficulty of building infrastructure in a rapidly changing metropolis. Yet its eventual opening also showed that African megacities are gradually acquiring the institutions needed to complete complex projects.
The physical appearance of the continent’s cities is changing alongside their systems of movement. Older images – informal settlements, unfinished buildings, rubbish dumps and overcrowded markets – have not disappeared. But beside them are new business districts, residential compounds, transport corridors, parks and administrative quarters. International firms including OMA, Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, UNStudio and SOM now treat Africa as a serious market for architecture and urban development.
What skyscrapers are for?
Skyscrapers occupy a special place in this transformation. At first glance, Africa does not need them. In many countries, land remains available, while the immediate urban problems are not a shortage of vertical space but insufficient electricity, water, sewage, transport, safety and waste management. A high-rise cannot exist apart from these systems and is therefore a test of the city beneath it.
For decades, the symbol of African high-rise construction was the Carlton Centre in Johannesburg, completed in the 1970s and rising to 223 meters. It reflected the corporate power of Johannesburg’s old central business district.
Later, South African leadership passed to The Leonardo in Sandton, which reaches 234 meters. The change was geographically revealing. Johannesburg’s business life had moved north from the historic center towards a district offering stronger private security, newer offices and more concentrated capital.
In the 2020s, the geography of African skyscrapers expanded dramatically. Egypt completed the Iconic Tower in its New Administrative Capital, reaching approximately 394 meters.
Morocco built the 250-metre Mohammed VI Tower near Rabat.
In Abidjan, the planned 421-meter Tour F is intended to become the tallest building on the continent. Addis Ababa has also produced proposals for headquarters towers exceeding 300 meters.
These projects form part of a continental competition for a new skyline. They express political confidence and the desire to place African capitals on the visual map of global modernity. Yet their meaning differs from that of many post-independence towers built during the second half of the twentieth century.
At that time, high-rises often functioned primarily as monuments to sovereignty. They declared that a newly independent state possessed ministries, banks, airlines and corporations worthy of monumental headquarters. Their economic role was sometimes secondary, and some remained partially vacant or poorly connected to the surrounding city.
Today, a skyscraper is more likely to be presented as an investment asset. It may combine offices, apartments, hotels, retail and conference facilities. It can help capitalize expensive land and meet demand from banks, telecommunications companies, energy firms and state holdings. Investment in office space can also support the formal economy: contracts, taxation, registered companies and stable employment.
But Africa’s architectural future cannot consist simply of importing the skylines of Dubai, Shanghai or New York. Glass towers designed without regard to climate can become enormously expensive machines for producing heat.
They require constant air conditioning, imported materials and uninterrupted electricity. Their façades may look modern in computer renderings but prove badly adapted to dust, humidity, intense sunlight or unreliable maintenance.
When African architects find local ways
A different approach can be seen in the work of Burkinabè architect Diebedo Francis Kere. His buildings use local materials, shade, natural ventilation and community participation not as decorative references to tradition, but as practical technologies. The Pritzker Prize jury praised his understanding that architecture is “not about the object but the objective” and emphasized the importance of buildings rooted in place and community.
Kere’s career began not with a tower, but with a school in his home village of Gando. The building used compressed earth blocks and a raised roof to create ventilation and protect classrooms from extreme heat. Villagers participated in its construction. Years later, reflecting on the project, he said: “I wanted to give something to my people, and that has given me an international career.” This may offer a more important model for African architecture than height alone. The innovation lies in combining modern engineering with local climate, labor and materials.
Climate is already becoming one of the defining problems of African urban design. Heatwaves, floods and coastal erosion are intensifying precisely as cities grow denser.
Freetown has responded through its “Freetown the Treetown” program, which pays residents to plant and maintain geotagged trees. The program treats vegetation not as beautification but as infrastructure: shade, slope stabilization, water retention and protection against urban heat.
Across the continent, reflective roofs, shaded streets, urban forests, green roofs and climate-resilient road materials are gradually entering municipal policy. The African city of the future may therefore look less like a forest of sealed glass towers and more like a layered system of courtyards, arcades, planted streets, mixed-use districts and buildings designed to function even when electricity is interrupted.
What African urbanization means for the world
The central dilemma of African urbanization is the balance between symbol and system. Architecture cannot compensate for the absence of urban governance. Without strategic planning, a city grows as a collection of fragments: a luxury tower beside an unpaved road, a gated district beyond the reach of public transport, a railway without sufficient feeder buses, a new administrative capital separated from the population it is intended to govern.
Africa in the twenty-first century is not only a continent of demography, resources and conflicts. It is a continent of future cities. It must still answer fundamental questions: what will form the center of the city beyond the port, market and government quarter; who will finance new infrastructure; who will maintain it; and how density, accessibility, climate and local identity can be combined.
These answers matter far beyond Africa; some of the world’s largest urban agglomerations of the coming century will grow here. Their architects and governments will be forced to experiment with forms of density, transport, housing and climate adaptation for which no established global model is entirely adequate.
African urbanization is thus becoming a laboratory of the future. The skyscraper is not its main invention. It is simply one of the most visible instruments by which the success – or failure – of that experiment will be measured.