Participatory Futuring for Informal Settlements and Booming Towns - Learning from African Cases

Africa’s cities and towns are among the fastest-growing in the world. The growth in demand for adequate housing, basic services and safe neighbourhoods is most evident in informal settlements and “booming towns”. Yet residents of informal settlements, who make up the majority of the urban population, are often least able to shape the long-term decisions that affect their housing, services, safety and resilience. Planning and investment processes can be hard to access. Fragmented authority and uneven investment priorities add barriers. At the same time, informal settlements often demonstrate ingenuity in hybrid service delivery and low-cost solutions that can inform wider city practice. Drawing on applied learning from diverse African cases including Embu (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Cape Town (South Africa), this WUF Academy learning workshop introduces participatory futuring approaches that help residents, practitioners, and local governments co-produce visions for the future that they can align their efforts toward to build sustainable and resilient cities. These approaches also help translate these visions into sequenced, implementable, and accountable investment pathways. The focus is safer housing and neighbourhoods, resilient services, inclusive public space, and climate adaptation. The workshop draws on: (1) Kounkuey Design Initiative’s ASILI Futures approach in Embu/Dallas; (2) Tomorrow’s Cities and Ardhi University’s learning from Dar es Salaam; and (3) the African Centre for Cities’ work on creative futuring techniques, including insights from the African Urban Futures collaboration. Participants will work through a short, facilitated hypothetical exercise and compare a set of futuring approaches. The focus is on how to select an approach based on context and desired outcomes, and how to convert outputs into a simple vision-to-action guide that can be adapted for city or community processes. This session directly addresses Dialogue 2: Transforming informal settlements and slums. It supports adequate housing outcomes that extend beyond shelter to include services, infrastructure, affordability, secure tenure, and safety. It aligns community priorities and participation with formal planning and housing policy through a practical vision-to-action approach.