ABSTRACT
West Africa was one of the last areas of the world to begin the urban transition. If the rapid growth rate for the total urban population in West Africa is staggering, the pace of urban concentration in the region’s largest cities is truly mind-boggling. These huge cities are multifunctional. With a single exception, the most populated city in each West African nation is the capital. For most of the cities of West Africa, comprehensive information on inequality and poverty is conspicuously absent. Generic overurbanization arguments have been widely criticized from a variety of perspectives. Nevertheless, the effects that the speed and patterning of city growth have on the attainment of national development goals deserve careful consideration by policymakers. In the late 1970s, sociologist Bruce London observed, “A new generation of comparative urbanists is creating a more ‘political’ comparative urban sociology. The international world-system affects internal development indirectly by generating an infrastructure of dependency.
