Konza and the fad of greenfield cities

A friend shared this article about the unfortunate consequences of smart city developments in Africa. The article uses the 13-year history of Kenya's pioneering Konza greenfield smart city and Konza Technopolis Development Authority (KoTDA) to highlight how ill-founded and self-serving advise by consultants like McKinsey have led to large and wasteful misallocation of acutely scarce resources. 

Konza was the forerunner to other African smart city experiments - Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria, HOPE City in Ghana, an Ethiopian city styled as the “real Wakanda” after the film Black Panther, Kigali Innovation City in Rwanda, and Senegal’s Akon City. 

Sample this about Konza,

Hundreds of multinational tech companies would have outposts in Konza, and a world-class fiber-optic network would run through its commercial center and financial district. There would be 37,000 homes in well-planned residential estates, large-scale shopping malls, and Kenyan and foreign university hubs. A new highway and railway line would link the city to Nairobi, 60 kilometers away, and light manufacturing industries were being courted to set up factories. The city would revolve around data. Roads, buildings, and other parts of the urban environment would be equipped with sensors to gather information about traffic, weather, water, and energy consumption. This data would then be made available to residents and used to improve public services.

From the start, Konza was intended to be globally oriented. Its desired partners were big Western and Asian technology firms. The idea was that the Kenyan government would provide the basic urban infrastructure — roads, electricity, commuter railway lines, water and sewage facilities — and step aside. Private investors would then take over and build the rest. In return, they’d get generous tax exemptions and tax holidays, hitch their fortunes to a regional IT hub, and be exempted from a law stipulating that Kenya-based companies have to have locals make up at least 20 percent of their shareholders. (As an added bonus, expatriates working in the city would not have to pay income or withholding tax.) By Ndemo’s count, around 150 companies took an early interest in the project. Among them were the Kenyan telecommunications company Safaricom, the University of Nairobi, the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, India’s Shapoorji Pallonji Group, Samsung, Research In Motion, Google, Craft Silicon, and the Telemax Technology Corporation.

Much the same could be written about countless other similar attempts across developing countries, with all having the same failed fates.  

If the history of global experiments with greenfield city developments is any evidence, it's abundantly clear that, unless you are China, one should eschew such endeavours. The idea is that government would provide the basic infrastructure and a new set of legacy-free rules and then step aside to allow the private sector and markets to play their magic to create world-class townships/cities and economic growth centres.

These endeavours are motivated by a bad confluence of convergent desires. Political leaders entertain notions of leapfrogging and creating cities which are comparable to those in developed countries. The rich and well-off see these as enclaves to escape from the messiness and poverty of their current habitations. The large corporates see them as areas where they can escape from the general difficulties of running a business elsewhere in the country. Investors see it as a legacy-free and new-rules based opportunity to make good returns. Suppliers and contractors see huge business opportunities from the contracts awarded in the construction of the city. Arm chair commentators and academic researchers find the neatness of logic, especially in a world of urban failings, and its simplicity irresistible. And, as mentioned earlier, consultants see them as easy money opportunities by peddling irrelevant advice. In short, it's in everybody's interest to prop up such concepts like smart cities. 

Instead the objective should be to facilitate the development and growth of existing small towns. Create the conditions, by using levers of urban planning and investing in basic urban infrastructure, to facilitate planned development of these towns. As I have blogged here and here, this demands no rocket science and the services of consultants. 

Unlike a greenfield development, which offers vast opportunities for consultants and suppliers to peddle grand theories and fleece governments, brownfield development and growth is about getting the simple areas of urban planning, good governance, and infrastructure creation right. This is painstaking work of doing the basics right and does not require much involvement and advice from consultants. 

This, alongside several other examples, raises the question of whether consultancies like those mentioned in the article do more harm than good with their self-imposed "thought leadership" on many areas in development! In a rational world, influential commentators and opinion makers should come forward and stigmatise the idea of grandiose nonsense like vision documents, which "outsources the task of dreaming about the future" to expensive and smooth-talking consultants. 

In a fair world, if these consultants are held to account for the value for money from their such advice to governments, then it will most likely figure among the greatest value destruction ideas in the history of development. In this deeply imperfect world, killing off bad ideas is often more valuable than adopting good ideas!