In Smartmonkey TV, Russel Southwood writes:
Africa’s Creative Cities – Putting creativity and innovation together to change the city itself
As a regular visitor to tech hubs across the continent, I can’t help being struck by the intense energy going into innovation and the often threadbare nature of the African cities it takes place in. Take the tech innovation district in Lagos, Yaba. It’s a snarling mess of traffic and decaying buildings.A tipping point for the continent's major urban centers? And a challenge.
The tech innovators sometimes have nice spaces but they’re behind closed walls. There are very few attractive public spaces to meet, bump into people and have chance encounters. You get the sense that even if you could wave a magic wand and every start-up was a winner, the rotting city and the way people lived in it would remain the same.
So how might this change? Africa needs to take its cities – where innovation and creativity are happening – and use some of this energy to change the city itself. Creative cities are often places that start with a critical mass of creative activity. Internationally, you can say quite easily that places like New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris are powerhouses for the production of content that is sold all over the world.
The African cities that have a critical mass of creative production and tech innovation are currently small in number but would include: Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town and Johannesburg. With the exception of Cape Town, none of these places are attractive to work in or hang out in. Traffic dominates life in every single one and there are few transport alternatives that might change this. There are few public spaces that articulate what the city is for. Without inside knowledge, they are often a closed book.More here