How Africans Are Building The Cities Of The Future
Wonder Cabinet
Wonder Cabinet Productions
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2021
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Africans are moving into cities in unprecedented numbers. Lagos, Nigeria, is growing by 77 people an hour — it's on track to become a city of 100 million. In 30 years, the continent is projected to have 14 mega-cities of more than 10 million people. It's perhaps the largest urban migration in history.
These cities are not like Dubai, or Singapore, or Los Angeles. They’re uniquely African cities, and they’re forcing all of us to reconsider what makes a city modern. And how and why cities thrive.
To find out what's going on, we go to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to talk with entrepreneurs, writers, scholars and artists. In this hour, produced in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) — a global consortium of 270 humanities centers and institutes — we learn how the continent where the human species was born is building the cities of the future.
Original Air Date: December 14, 2019
Guests:
Dagmawi Woubshet — Julie Mehretu — Emily Callaci — James Ogude — Ato Qyayson — Teju Cole — Meskerem Assegued
Interviews In This Hour:
Rediscovering the Indigenous City of Addis Ababa — 'People As Infrastructure' — A Tour Of The Networked City — 'I Am Because We Are': The African Philosophy of Ubuntu — How Pan-African Dreams Turned Dystopic — Decoding Global Capitalism on One African Street — Life in the Diaspora: How Teju Cole Pivots Between Cultures — Can Artists Create the City of the Future?
Further Reading:
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Anne Strain Champs, and this hour I want to take you to Africa. |
| 0:09.0 | Urban Africa to the youngest, fastest growing cities on the planet. |
| 0:14.0 | Places like Addis Ababa, Daras Salam, Legos, Akra, the biggest of these are growing by 50, 60, 70 people an hour. They will be among the |
| 0:25.1 | biggest cities on the planet. And they're challenging and upending all kinds of conventional |
| 0:30.5 | notions of how and why cities thrive. Stay with us and we'll find out more. Wisconsin Public Radio. |
| 0:48.2 | It's to the best of our knowledge. |
| 0:49.8 | I'm Anstrain Champs. |
| 0:51.4 | And today we're going someplace special |
| 0:53.4 | with someone special, my husband. |
| 0:56.6 | That's me, Steve Paulson. |
| 1:03.5 | This is the sound of Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. |
| 1:08.7 | It's after midnight, and we're wide awake. It's our first night here and we're |
| 1:13.2 | standing on our hotel balcony. We can smell eucalyptus smoke in the air and something sweet and |
| 1:23.9 | kind of musty, which turns out to be frankincense. |
| 1:32.9 | And then we remembered it's January 6th in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. |
| 1:34.1 | That's Christmas Eve. |
| 1:40.1 | Ethiopians practice one of the world's oldest forms of Christianity. |
| 1:42.6 | It goes all the way back to the 4th century. |
| 1:46.2 | So these songs and chants are ancient. |
| 1:58.6 | A couple days later, we're driving around downtown Addis. |
| 2:02.6 | There is major construction going on everywhere. We're driving around downtown Addis. There is major construction going on everywhere. |
| 2:06.4 | We're actually in the financial districts right now. |
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