ABSTRACT
Africa's growing cities face an opportunity to affect a sustainability transition. The multilevel perspective (MLP) is useful for understanding societal transitions toward sustainability, but requires adaptation to deal with the challenges of Africa's unique urbanization processes. This chapter considers African cities as spaces where challenges meet opportunities, and where innovative transitions could take place if an appropriate set of assumptions about the nature of urban development replace conventional paradigms. Following an introduction to the scale of African urbanization, the chapter also consider the impact of the 'resource curse' on African countries, and the need for structural transformation to break free of it. It then focuses on cities as the spaces in which structural transformation will need to take place, and proposes a combination of the MLP with urban metabolism measurements as a way to structure sustainable urban transitions. The chapter concludes with an overview of a new approach to resource-efficient cities that is of relevance to the African context.
