Circular Economy in Africa’s Informal Cities: A Review of Residents’ Value Retention Practices and Their Implications for Participatory Urban Planning

Abstract

Spatial informal urbanism practices towards value retention and circularity have received little attention in extant literature. Yet, informal settlements in African cities have played out as built spaces for necessity-driven value retention of materials, goods, and services, which potentiate the circularity of waste resources. This chapter highlights informal settlement practices that contribute to value retention and circularity of waste materials in selected African cities. This perspective departs from and contests dominant but empirically misleading notions of informal settlements as the “habitus of environmentally deteriorating practices” in northern scholarship. Data for the chapter is derived from secondary sources such as journal articles and grey literature. The findings of the chapter reveal that spatial informal urbanism practices oriented towards meeting everyday basic socioeconomic needs in the form of sorting out waste for recycling, reuse, and repurposing support circular principles and are critical to realizing circular goals in Africa’s informal cities. The chapter invites scholars and practitioners to recognize and support informal urbanism practices that contribute to the circular cities agenda while addressing any trade-offs and disservices that negatively affect the capacity of informal settlement dwellers to advance circular initiatives from below.