There is no doubt that African cities are trying be urbanized but urbanization is a gradual process. A city is not just a physical reality, it’s an area made up millions of urban experience and people that live there. Home space is used to indicate the physical space within a naturally built environment and the way people live in this space. Home space program serves as a knowledge exchange from the residents to the policy makers of the state. Paul Jenkins dives deeper into the tradition of African urban research and has a strong urban physical focus on the following: environmental planning, housing and architecture with social studies emphasis. He focuses on African cities. Sub- Saharan Africa is seen as the last global macro-region to go through the urbanization. The author, Paul Jenkins uses home space as a concept because vast majority of the Sub-Saharan African cities are made of home spaces. Jenkins wants to use home spaces to understand how Africa is developing and guide to develop better ways. There are two gaps highlighted in the approaches to urban development in Africa: the gap between defined need and actual provision in formal system and the gap between actual demand and supply. Urban development comes with necessary urban infrastructure needs and the capacity to fund these needs. Jenkins is mainly concerned with the gap between actual demand and supply which is seen as a successful alignment between defined needs and provision. Jenkins wants to use what is going on in practice, therefore tries to revise his approach between the two gaps in supply or provision. He also states that vast majority of writings on urban areas in Africa end with recipes for what must be done but we need to focus on what is being done and what is actually wanted by majority of the of the poor urban residents and citizens. Physical urban development is not only about planning and housing but taking into consideration that in creating cities of yesterday and today we should see that future. Jenkins approach between the two gaps: provision or supply creates a pattern that is supposed to guide urban development. Many African cities are not able to understand that the two gaps; provision or supply are necessary for urban development. An ineffective government cannot provide a workable infrastructure and service that a good city needs. Therefore, the urban poor then stuck out on their own, improvising and stitching together the kinds of network connection and linkages that they need in order to survive thereby creating slums, hence the argue that African city is created primarily by everyday activities. What is termed urban or rural? Jenkins makes us understand what is seen as urban, he argues that the essential qualities of urban are physical (density and nature of land use), social (non-family relations), economic (dominance of monetary economics) and cultural. The residents of the peri-urban areas have no doubt they are urban dwellers but what they see as urban maybe urban in the making. Jenkins argues that the current rapid urbanization in Sub-Sahara Africa region may be producing new forms of “urbanism as a way of life”. “African urban areas are work in progress rather than failed urbanism”.(Murray and Myers) From the Jenkins, we can say that urbanity and urbanism is created by a specific set of urbanization drivers. Jenkins’s focus is reflected in his sub-title which gives an insight of what he is trying to explain. Home spaces and house cultures emphasizing on “space and culture”. Home space study surveyed the physical consolidation of the land and housing as well as the socio-economic circumstances of the households. From this survey: they found out that some areas were officially planned, others were upgraded, some were unplanned areas and they had unofficially planned areas from life stories of some residents. Urbanity is how city dwellers perceive themselves. Urbanism is a way of life that is produce as everyday acts of dwelling that are tied up with their social reproduction and often economic production and uses different books from researches about urbanity in Africa to explain this. Also note that, what is classified as urban varies from country to country. Home spaces play a vital role in urban development and land access but the question is: Are all home spaces planned? Not all home spaces are planned because if they were they would be no slums in urban areas. Planning is a vital role in home spaces and houses and also in urban development. Space is an area which is not occupied and culture is a way of life of a society or a group of people. Culture brings people and people create space and space influences the character of people. Culture embodies the soul of a city, it is what makes a city attractive and also serves as a heritage (pillar) of sustainable and economic development. Culture is a way of life and urbanism is also a way of life what does this mean? Does this mean that we can call urbanism, culture or there is a relationship between the two? In urban culture: urbanism is the way of life. Urbanism is culture. When home spaces are planned, dwellers have a sense of security. Residents of a city are the makers of the city and the development of a city’s space and form is not only how people access their land but how they design and build their homes. Jenkins’s approach is interesting and gives deeper meaning that space and culture plays an important role for development in Africa. Jenkins’s book is interesting and contributes a lot to making African urbanization a debate through African studies and researches that have already been conducted. He makes us understand that the way people imagine and create their spaces play a vital role in urban development and the emerging urbanism. References Javier Monclus and Manuel Guardia (2006), Culture, Urbanism and Planning: Ashgate Publishing Limited Martin J. Murray and Garth A. Myers (2006), Cities in Contemporary Africa: Palgrave Macmillan Ivan Silal and L’ubica Vitkova (2017) Public spaces as the reflection of society and its culture.

Urbanization, Urbanism, and Urbanity in an Africa city was published by Paul Jenkins in 2014. The book draws on many years of research on urban experiences and empirical research in Mozambique. Jenkins’ background in human geography and African studies is felt throughout the book. The book aims to fill a void in scholarly work on African urbanism: while recent years have been characterized by an increase in interest in studies on African urbanism. However, many data points are still missing. The book is divided into contextual and empirical material. The first part of the book is entitled « Contextual Material » and analyzes contexts within the macro-, meso- and finally micro-level. The first chapter of the book examines the rapid urbanisation of Mozambique’s capital and its growing significance within Sub-Saharan Africa. The second chapter, which focuses more on the meso- or medium level, reviews the history of the Mozambicain urban system, going from the first century CE to more contemporary times which is provided in the macro-level contextualization chapter. The first Empirical Material chapter provides a sociological and anthropological lens to the reader, but recounting life stories obtained through a survey. Chapter 5 integrates the key findings from the survey by synthesizing the key findings in 5 areas. These are: 1. The impact of urbanization and the perceived nature of what is “urban:” 2. The dominant points of reference for peri-urban residents; 3. Sociocultural factors that condition home spaces and are conditioned by them in turn; 4. How these values are translated into physical space and form; 5. Home space aspirations and decision making; Given the former, chapter 6 goes through the key issues in urban development in Mozambique. Finally, the book concludes with the key findings of the research with a hint to recommendations. The book’s style was pleasant. The introductions at the beginning of each chapter helped situation oneself and fully appreciate the challenges described. The methodology of the book also helps the reader socio-cultural realities in Mozambique. Ultimately, Jenkins exposes the inability pf states to adequately provide basic infrastructure. He demonstrates that state-led urban development has not been effective and there is a clear need to understand African urbanism processes more. In my view, this book provided much food for thought for aspiring urbanists eager to transform urbanism or create new form of urbanity in Africa.

The book by Professor Jenkins shows the process and characteristics of urban development in Sub-Saharan region of Africa, its historical roots, its comparison with other orbs from the continent, the influence of economic and social factors, as well as ethnographic and cultural, focusing on the study of Mozambique's capital city Maputo and its growth displaying distinctive spaces and forms due to particularly political, economic, social, and the cultural contexts. Despite common misunderstanding to the contrary, the urbanization process in Sub-Saharan Africa has historical roots. However, this process has accel­erated enormously during the past half-century of the post-colonial period, creating quite distinctive urban spaces and forms. Paul Jenkins, therefore, presents in his book “Urbanization, Urbanism and Urbanity in an African City: home spaces and house cultures” a framework for a better understanding of urbanization, urbanism and urbanity in Africa and of how residents build cities from below. Based on the case-study of Maputo, Mozambique, he starts by overcoming some common misunderstanding: urbanization is an old process in Africa, and hence applying the tools, policies and practices from the global North to the Global South is questionable as the context is everything but similar. Jenkins retakes a realistic approach: contrary to the Global North where urban development was state-led due to favourable conjuncture, states from the Global South have limited capacities and capabilities in terms of human and financial capital. Furthermore, while engaging with urban development, the state took mostly into account the “formal areas”, excluding informal and slums areas. This led the residents of these fast-growing urban areas to take the initiative regarding the urban development, making the city every day, with limited participation of state and formal private sector. The urban development in Africa involves a plurality of actors and both bottom-up and top-down approaches/initiatives. Therefore it is argued that (i) the state should reinvent its role, (ii) focus its efforts on specific areas of urban development, and (iii) complement residents’ efforts to guide towards better urban development. Although the propositions are more than relevant, a critic could be raised as urban development initiated by the residents might exclude vulnerable people, and hence be non-inclusive. The state has still a regulator role to play, but this regulation should be flexible enough to allow and favour residents’ initiatives. Further research regarding the part of the residents is therefore needed. To conclude this review, I would like to re-emphasize the innovation and relevance of such study, which provides an in-depth understanding of urbanization, urbanism and urbanity in Africa. There are thus significant political as well as economic constraints to pro­vision of such essential urban physical needs in infrastructure and built form, which represent the "structure" within which residents agency operates. This outcome of rapid urbanization is not new, in that such manifestations of urban needs were explicitly identified in the nineteenth-century period of rapid urban growth in the global North. It was here in the fact that these were formally defined, and provision of such urban infrastructure and built form then eventually planned for, and delivered to a significant extent, through both public investment (redistributing wealth to a certain extent in the process) and increas­ing private supply to fee-paying customers. This experience was then repeated worldwide at the time, albeit mainly for urban minorities in the global South, many being colonial settler populations. The approach of the author and his framework are of prime interest, and his findings should be taken into account by both all the actors involved in urban development – and this is where the challenges are mainly present: how to integrate the understanding and these recommendations into concrete policies? Further research about urbanization in Africa should be led following Jenkins’ framework and follow a bottom-up approach due to contextual reasons. There is indeed a need to know more about the dynamism and complexity of urban development in peri-urban areas. The lack of public (central and local government) and "formal" private sector supply of what is seen as necessary urban infrastructure (in terms of water supply, sanitation, paved access, public illumination, electrical and other forms of domestic fuel, and also waste collection and drainage/ erosion control) as well as adequate built form (in terms of quantity, size, quality, and density of housing, health, education, and recre­ation facilities) does not only relate to issues of capacity to fund this directly by users. It is also associated with the will to engage (whether by the state or private sector) with broader but generally very low-income communities. It reflects the lack of such political will in elite-dom­inated governance regimes.

The book by Professor Jenkins shows the process and characteristics of urban development in Sub-Saharan region of Africa, its historical roots, its comparison with other orbs from the continent, the influence of economic and social factors, as well as ethnographic and cultural, focusing on the study of Mozambique's capital city Maputo and its growth displaying distinctive spaces and forms due to particularly political, economic, social, and the cultural contexts. The findings of this study reflex not only about the weakness of state capacity in the region in urban intervention, but also the continued basis for urban development activity by residents, in social and economic terms as well as the Importance of culturally constructed identities and social relations. There is a general belief that urbanization progresses across Africa seems so rampant precisely an urban myth. The data provided by the agency of the United Nations Human Settlements (UN Habitat, headed by the former mayor of Barcelona Joan Clos) indicate that the rate of increase in the proportion of the population living in the city is only from 1 % every ten years. In fact, recent reports from UN Habitat indicate that there has been a reduction of urbanizations in 11 countries in Africa, among which are Mozambique, Mauritania, Tanzania, Uganda and Senegal. In Kenya, for example, the percentage of the population living in urban areas fell from 34% in 2001 to 22% in 2010. These data have important political consequences, especially in relation to the risks involved in the marginalization of rural areas. However, urbanization in the region of sub-Saharan Africa is much slower than is usually explained does not mean that the population in the cities is not increased; only means that no increases more than it does on the field. Indeed, the population living in many african cities increases rapidly because of the natural growth of the population, becoming increasingly obvious deficiencies that exist in most countries of the continent in the field of urban planning. According what Jenkins mentions in his book, everyone can see a general and descriptive analysis on urban infrastructure and development in recent years, such as the number of residential buildings and shopping centers under construction. This situation occurs in Maputo and in other cities like Luanda or Dar es Salaam. The first question that arises is to what extent there is a development plan governing the development of the city; for example, some of the cities on the coast of West Africa lack of a master plan. But even when a development plan is launched, whether old or new - in many cities the current plan is still established by colonial powers - the most important question is whether planning laws responsive to the needs of the poor and vulnerable or, on the contrary, favor the interests of the political and economic elites. According to my analysis of the reading, the reform, development and implementation of planning laws are not a mere technicality; they are deeply political issues. Therefore, civil society and international NGOs have to work to influence decisions and practices in this area by the rulers; must work to ensure that planning laws produce more inclusive and sustainable cities, where efforts to improve the safety of all citizens and promote access to housing and education and health services by the poor take precedence over infrastructure development designed to meet the interests of minority elites. Actually, nearly two-thirds of the population living in african cities does in slums without minimally acceptable conditions of life. As cities become more inaccessible, informal settlements are expanding rapidly around urban centers; therefore, it can be deduced that in the current african cities the poor are forced to live outside the law to survive. Another important issue is the culture of impunity that allows the violation of existing laws by the elites seeking their own interests to the detriment of the public interest. For elites, sometimes the best way to deal with the poor and vulnerable is promoting his forced countryside escape. For reference, I mention one of the paradigmatic cases that occurred in 2005 in Harare, Zimbabwe, when the government decided to homeless 700,000 poor people through Operation Murambatsvina, the government upheld a 1976 law (Town and Country Planning Act). My overall impression of the message of the book is that the effort of organizations working in Africa for development and urban planning is not paying attention to some crucial aspects such as address the critical infrastructure deficits in energy, connective infrastructure (roads, rail , ports, airports, ICT) and the treatment toilet; economic Infrastructures can catalyze a larger processes of economic development that will raise land values and the asset basis of local authorities, which investment can be recovered later -through taxation, which Along with national transfers, can be used to address the massive problems associated with slum urbanism; However, this development scheme depends on adequate regulatory reform that includes, among other things, the decentralization of functions of the built environment and fiscal powers to cities, which makes the cost of doing business to attract more foreign direct investment and properly insurance and social network for residential and business classes that will drive these new investments and businesses. The resulting income derived from the creation of this "enabling environment" for economic development can be deployed to finance and gradually expanding a program to improve sensible slums, which promotes the connection between promoting aggregate economic growth and raising the living standards of all by providing access to essential services in the most disconnected areas of the city. All this should make the land laws are designed and implemented so as to contribute to the reduction of inequality and poverty. Bibliography 1) Ref.: Operation Murambatsvina; International Amnesty. http://www.amnesty.org/es/library/asset/AFR46/022/2009/es/5cfcb0c7-4f6d-437e-9108-3cca78a4a958/afr460222009es.html 2) Ministerio De Asuntos Exteriores y De Cooperación de España. Plan África 2006-2008. http://www.cucid.ulpgc.es/documentos/planafrica_2006-2008.pdf 3) Urban Planning and Public Health in Africa: Historical, Theoretical and Ambe J. Njoh.,ed. (2012), Practical Dimensions of a Continent's Water and Sanitation Problematic.

Sub-Saharan Africa is seen as the last global macro-region to go through the urbanization process, whereby a majority of the popu­lation end up living in cities and towns, through migration or birth, as has happened in other world macro-regions. Despite common misunderstanding to the contrary, the urbanization process in Sub-Saharan Africa has historic roots, although this process has accel­erated enormously during the past half century of the postcolonial period, creating quite distinctive urban spaces and forms. This demographic trend is projected to accelerate even more in future, with natural growth of urban populations becoming as impor­tant as in-migration from rural areas, and rapid growth also tak­ing place now in secondary and tertiary urban areas.5 Continuing rural-urban migration together with continuing high-demographic growth rates of existing urban populations underpin the projections for a massive increase in urban population for coming decades in the macro-region. Part of the reason for this is that, while urbanization historically has led to changing social and cultural practices (such as lower birth rates), this takes considerable time to take effect, and in the interim urban populations grow rapidly. This has often led to the so-called demographic "bulge" of an urban population, which stabilizes in time. In the global South this is usually expressed by a rapid differential increase in the urban poor, especially in Africa, as there are limited economic engagement and wealth-creation opportunities in rural areas, and urban areas generally offer more (economic and social) opportunity, however, the growth of urban populations far outstrips the capacity for employment expansion and social redistribution is weak, both due to multiple political and economic factors. Such rapid urbanization and growth of urban poor populations usually means that the capacity to provide what has come to be seen as necessary urban infrastructure lags behind (usually state-defined) minimum "needs." This is due to limited public taxation (itself a factor influenced by widespread poverty) and hence limited public funding for public works and infrastructure, as well as limited capac­ity to pay sufficiently high prices for similar provision by regulated/ taxed (and hence "formal") private sector actors. The lack of public (central and local government) and "formal" private sector supply of what is seen as necessary urban infrastructure (in terms of water supply, sanitation, paved access, public illumination, electrical and other forms of domestic fuel, and also waste collection and drainage/ erosion control) as well as adequate built form (in terms of quantity, size, quality, and density of housing, health, education, and recre­ation facilities) does not only relate to issues of capacity to fund this directly by users. It is also related to the will to engage (whether by the state or private sector) with wider but generally very low-income communities, and reflects the lack of such political will in elite-dom­inated governance regimes. As such, governments and the private sector often predominantly attend to the demands of more organized and vocal middle classes and elites in their investment policies. There are thus significant political as well as economic constraints to pro­vision of such essential urban physical needs in infrastructure and built form, which represent the "structure" within which residents agency operates. This outcome of rapid urbanization is not new, in that such manifestations of urban needs were specifically identified in the nineteenth-century period of rapid urban growth in the global North. It was here in fact that these were formally defined, and provision of such urban infrastructure and built form then eventually planned for, and delivered to a significant extent, through both public investment (redistributing wealth to a certain extent in the process) and increas­ing private supply to fee-paying customers. This experience was then repeated worldwide at the time, albeit mainly for urban minorities in the global South, many being colonial settler populations. The extent to which this was possible was arguably partly due to widening politi­cal forms of governance in the North, but also continued economic exploitation of the majority in the South. As such, the capacity to implement the state-sponsored and/or regulated provision of urban physical infrastructure and built form in similar ways outside of the North, with its economic dominance, remained limited in the South even after the end of colonialism. This is partly due to the continued elite-dominated nature of political governance in most of the South, as well as continued global economic subordination. In time, how­ever, political and economic change has led to a range of nation-states in the South applying "needs-based" redistributive measures and encouraging/regulating private sector investment to begin to "catch up" with what arc seen as urban physical needs, a recent example being Brazil. But, this is not (at least as yet) the case in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, as argued in more detail below. What is important to extract from the above discussion is that the definition of what is "proper" and "adequate" in urban infrastruc­ture was largely determined from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards, first in the North and then almost immediately transferred worldwide. The areas that did not have these attributes became labeled as "slums," with various techniques being developed for their elimination or "improvement" (a much-beloved Victorian term). The core activity here was public sanitary reform, which underpinned the early emergence of urban "planning" as a process, although in reality this was as much to do with capturing added value in urban property as in public health provision.6 Public health needs, however, were not solved only by better water supply, sanita­tion, etc., but by social and cultural changes—a fact that tends to be overlooked in the historiography. For instance, inculcating urban residents' understanding of the need for, and implementation of, cer­tain basic aspects of hygiene were/are arguably as important as the supply of clean water and adequate treatment of human wastes.

Paul Jenkins is an architect, planner and social researcher, who has been living and working extensively in Central and Southern Africa with a variety of aspects related to urbanization such as architecture, planning and urban studies. He therefore collaborated with a wide range of stakeholder during his career, ranging from the private sector, non-governmental, local & central government, international aid and community-based organization to academic institutions. This allowed him to build a solid theoretical and practical knowledge about urban development in Africa. Drawing on decades of involvement in African urban issues, Jenkins therefore presents in his book “Urbanization, Urbanism and Urbanity in an African City: home spaces and house cultures” a framework for a better understanding of urbanization, urbanism and urbanity in Africa and of how residents actually build cities from below. Based on the case-study of Maputo, Mozambique, he starts by overcoming some common misunderstanding: urbanization is an old process in Africa, and hence applying the tools, policies and practices from the global North to the Global South is questionable as the context is everything but similar. Concepts of the good ‘urban’ are indeed deeply influenced by this historically and geographically distinct experience. Thus instead of thinking about how African cities should be, policy makers should rather focus on how they can be. Regarding the urbanization process, four main differences are pointed out when comparing Africa to the Global North: • Tremendous demographic pressure on cities which won’t be accompanied by general growth economy which would absorb labor • Government fragility and low capacities affect negatively the redistribution of wealth • Urban development benefits mostly to the middle and high-social classes • Urban planning has a very low priority for most government As a result, weak states and high levels of urban poverty (and therefore limited private sector engagement) lead to the vast majority of such fast expanding urban areas being developed, not according to pre-defined developmentalist approaches which are overwhelmed by the reality, but by (mostly poor) urban residents, according to their socio-cultural agency, albeit constrained by political economic structures. This has led to a prevalent negative view of such emerging urbanism, labelling this as ruralisation, or defective/pathological forms of urbanity. Jenkins hence emphasizes the need to define what is urban in Africa, and argues that “where daily homemaking is predominantly the domain of urban residents, with limited engagement from the state and regulated private sector, it is essential to understand the dynamics of these processes to, in turn, understand how cities in Africa is developing, and can perhaps be encouraged or guided to develop in better ways”. His book adopts a pluridisciplinary approach, which encompasses four important dimensions of urbanism: physical; social, economic and cultural. In parrallel, his book includes the macro-, meso- and micro context and how they relate together through a longitudinal study which allows him to portrait a dynamic evolution of Maputo to capture the whole complexity of urban development in African cities. This makes his study a very complex but also a very holistic and a complete one. That is why I would like to make a first point about his approach. Jenkins presents a framework which captures quite well the dynamism and the complexity of urbanism, and which reflects an image very close to reality by adopting an empirical and bottom-up approach. He hence manages to demonstrate how important it is to take into account cultural and social practices, which are too often overlooked. This can be showed through the way informality is perceived: whereas from a Global North perspective, it is a problem that should be erased / eradicated, Jenkins sees an opportunity to learn about urban development and to work on it to make it better. There are nevertheless few limits to his approach. Gathering such knowledge and data is resource-consuming both in terms of time and money, and as urban planning studies are about taking pictures of the here and now (which hence demand fast and cost-efficient methods), this method which takes into account social and cultural practice could be very difficult to adapt in the practice for policy makers or the state. Furthermore, although his framework helps understanding urbanism in Maputo, one could question the possibility of generalization of such study, while acknowledging the possibilities of using this framework in other context. The second point regards then the content and the definition of what urban is in Africa. By including the four dimensions of urbanism mentioned above, Jenkins manages to capture the meaning of what is urban in Maputo. He therefore includes the peri-urban and informal areas as a form of urbanization besides the traditional urban area. As the author acknowledges, there might be different types of informal areas, and different levels of informality, making these areas far from being uniform though they all differ from rural areas. If recognizing these peri-urban areas as part of the urbanism is relevant, it would be interesting to see (i) if this definition could be generalizable in Africa and (ii) to give a particular set of both quantitative and qualitative indicators which could be used by the governments to facilitate their actions and make them efficient and relevant for the wider population. The third and final point that shall be highlighted regards the role of the state. Jenkins takes a realistic approach again: contrary to the Global North where urban development was state-led due to favorable conjuncture, states from the Global South have limited capacities and capabilities in terms of human and financial capital. Furthermore, while engaging with urban development, the state took mostly into account the “formal areas”, excluding informal and slums areas. This led the residents of these fast growing urban areas to take initiative regarding the urban development, making the city every day, with a limited participation of state and formal private sector. The urban development in Africa involves a plurality of actors and both bottom up and top-down approaches / initiatives. Therefore it is argued that (i) the state should reinvent its role, (ii) focus its efforts on specific areas of urban development, and (iii) complement residents’ efforts to guide towards a better urban development. Although, the propositions are more than relevant, a critic could be raised as urban development initiated by the residents might exclude vulnerable people, and hence be non-inclusive. The state has still a regulator role to play, but this regulation should be flexible enough to allow and favor residents’ initiatives. Further research regarding the role of the residents is therefore needed. To conclude this review, I would like to re-emphasize the innovation and relevance of such study, which provides an in-depth understanding of urbanization, urbanism and urbanity in Africa. The approach of the author and his framework are of prime interest and his findings should be taken into account by both all the actors involved in urban development – and this is where the challenges are mainly present: how to integrate the understanding and these recommendations into concrete policies? There is therefore a gap to be filled. Further research about urbanization in Africa should be led following Jenkins’ framework and follow a bottom-up approach due to contextual reasons. There is indeed a need to know more about the dynamism and complexity of urban development in peri-urban areas.