This paper examines African urban infrastructure and service delivery as an entry point for connecting African aspirations with the harsh developmental imperatives of urban management, creating a dialogue between scholarly knowledge and sustainable development policy aspirations. We note a shift to multi-nodal urban governance and highlight the significance of the synthesis of social, economic and ecological values in a normative vision of what an African metropolis might aspire to by 2030. The sustainable development vision provides a useful stimulus for Africa’s urban poly-crisis, demanding fresh interdisciplinary and normatively explicit thinking, grounded in a practical and realistic understanding of Africa’s infrastructure and governance challenges.

Food access, stability and utilisation are key dimensions of food security at an urban scale. When the majority resided in rural areas, and lived predominantly agrarian lifestyles, it made sense for the state to govern food security through national agricultural ministries, focusing predominantly on the availability dimension of food security. With the transition to a majority urban world, coupled with the food security challenges currently experienced in urban areas, specifically in Africa, these historical policy and governance structures are increasingly inadequate in responding to essential food and nutrition needs. Problematically, urban areas, and specifically urban managers, cite unfunded mandates, and absent authority, as the reasons for not engaging food and nutrition governance responses. This paper argues that this is a false position. Drawing on recent data from household food security and poverty surveys, the paper calls for new and expanded planning and design approaches at the urban scale. The paper argues that spatial planning and urban design principles and actions provide an immediate and effective means through which to engage urban food system questions. Importantly these actions are essential to the transition from the current piecemeal project responses to urban food system inadequacies. Food sensitive planning and urban design is offered as a specific approach that could assist in programming food system–related challenges at the urban scale, responding to conceptual, analytical, organisational and design related dimensions of planning, and in so doing offering a longer term, systematic response to urban food insecurity.

Urban dwellers’ food and nutritional wellbeing are both dependent on infrastructure and can be indicative of wider wellbeing in urban contexts and societal health. This paper focuses on the multiple relationships that exist between food and infrastructure to provide a thorough theoretical and empirical grounding to urgent work on urban food security and nutrition in the context of rapid urban and nutrition transitions in the South. We argue that urban systems and food systems thinking have not been well aligned, but that such alignment is not only timely and overdue but also fruitful for both thematic areas of research and policy. We draw in particular on work within wider urban political economy and political ecology that can be classified as part of the ‘infrastructural turn’ that is influential with urban studies but little acknowledged within food studies. Drawing on these literatures helps us to better understand the interrelationships between people, things and ideas that make up both infrastructure and food systems. Policy, planning and research relating to both food and urban systems cannot afford to ignore such interlinkages, though much policy still operates on the neat assumptions of progressive connectivity to ‘the grid’ and formal food retail. Instead we argue how in many urban governance systems, a variety of hybrid mechanisms—on and off the grid, public and private formal and informal—better represent how urban residents, particularly the most marginalised, meet their everyday food and infrastructural needs along a continuum of gridded and off-grid access.

Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such wicked problems is contingent of these differences being brought to the fore, being part of the conversation, as devices through which common positions can be discovered, where spaces are created for the realisation of new perspectives, but also, where difference is celebrated as opposed to censored.