Mapping Africa’s Megacities
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Africa is urbanising at break-neck speed. So how do people keep track of where city amenities are, or indeed which areas are at risk of flooding? It's a job for the cartographers, armed with drones.
Katie Prescott reports from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's most populous city. Its population is growing at more than 4% a year, often with little planning. The slums of Kigogo district for example are regularly inundated by the neighbouring rivers, as community leader Osiligi Losai explains.
The first step to solving the problem is to map it. Katie speaks to Hawa Adinani of the Dar Ramani Huria project which aims to chart the city's drains, and Edward Anderson of the World Bank, who is using drones to locate key infrastructure for urban planning and disaster reduction. Plus urban political scientist Robert Muggah discusses what makes cities fragile.
(Picture: Dar es salaam aerial cityscape; Credit: Moiz Husein/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What happens when cities grow too quickly? |
| 0:04.8 | Some evacuate because their house full of water. |
| 0:08.6 | You can find up to the head. |
| 0:10.8 | It's mostly flooded area. |
| 0:12.8 | So it's awful. |
| 0:13.9 | Some people have also lost their lives here. |
| 0:20.1 | In today's Business Daily with me, Katie Prescott, I'm in Dara Salam, Tanzania's rapidly urbanising |
| 0:26.6 | commercial hub. |
| 0:29.2 | We'll be exploring pioneering community mapping projects. |
| 0:33.2 | This is hyper-local community knowledge. |
| 0:36.1 | Everybody living in a informal neighbourhood will know the condition of their road |
| 0:40.0 | and we'll know where the waste is being dumped and if it's blocking the drain or not. |
| 0:43.9 | But how do you get that picture at the city scale? |
| 0:49.1 | And why data is so crucial in a rapidly urbanising Africa. |
| 0:53.2 | This is really a do-or-die scenario. |
| 0:55.8 | The vast majority of the world's cities right now are coastal. |
| 0:58.3 | So this is really an existential issue. |
| 1:00.6 | It's not just an add-on. |
| 1:04.9 | Business Daily in Dara Salam here on the BBC World Service. |
| 1:14.6 | Hello. Hi, everybody. Alam here on the BBC World Service. This is Kigogo, one of the poorest areas of Dara Salam. |
| 1:20.5 | Here, a population of 70,000 people have settled from all over Tanzania in two and a half |
| 1:26.4 | kilometres square. |
... |
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