The urbanization of Sub-Saharan Africa

Another day, another diagram. This time about urbanisation in sub-saharan countries. Since I visited Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania I am fascinated by urbanization processes in African countries. In most cases cities grow predominantly without any form of city planning and zoning regulation, the so called 'informal urbanization'. The dashed circle is the total population per country (the African countries with less than 9 million inhabitants are left out). The smaller circle inside is the urban population; people living in cities. The segment in red is the amount of people living in slums according to UN. Although statistics on urbanisation in Africa are generally rather unreliable it gives a good indication on how precarious these cities actually are. Keep in mind that the African cities are expected to mushroom over the next decades. Also important to realize is that the qualification 'slum' is somewhat relative.