The Future of Urban Development in Afghanistan

On December 10, 2021, the Oxford Urbanists hosted a panel event on contemporary urban-development dynamics in Afghanistan. Shahrukh Wani, an Economist with the International Growth Centre at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, moderated the discussion. In conversation were Sana Safi, a journalist with the BBC World Service, Srinivasa Popuri of UN-Habitat, and Erol Yayboke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The conversation was recorded and is available to watch in full below.

A Changing Urban Landscape

Afghan cities have changed tremendously over the last 40 years, notes BBC journalist and panelist Sana Safi. War is a big reason for that. Safi recalled how many Afghan families have hybrid lifestyles where families split time between cities and rural areas for both seasonal preferences and food-security concerns. Big cities’ populations and economies have suffered enormously when rockets rained down on city streets during the Soviet and U.S. invasions alike, and political instabilities have upset systems of grassroots resilience spanning urban and rural geographies.

Afghanistan’s demographic landscape is an increasingly urban one. The Taliban’s takeover in August 2021 came with Kabul being the fifth-fastest growing city in the world, with secondary cities like Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif all growing quickly as well. UN-Habitat’s Srinivasa Popuri notes that the “rapid influx of people to cities” in Afghanistan has meant high economic growth, density, and global connectedness, but also skyrocketing prices and new challenges to service delivery, especially education and healthcare. Now, the openness of Afghan urban society is under threat, said Popuri, and fear is an emotion that pervades many city dwellers’ everyday lives. In a recent article, Safi notes that “Afghan society has been transformed over the past twenty years,” but in ways that are “uneven” and nonlinear. Today the country’s cities face an “impending humanitarian catastrophe.”

“People come to Afghan cities like Kabul looking for a ‘modern life,’” argues CSIS’ Erol Yayboke. This means newcomers to Kabul might aspire toward having a salaried job, a car, and formal housing. But what happens more often is that migrants to Afghan cities instead live in informal settlements in vast and growing peripheries, or live with friends and relatives. Indeed, basic population statistics for Afghan cities are imprecise and estimates of the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the country and beyond range significantly. In some cases, there remains uncertainty about where jurisdictional lines begin and end, which complicates responsibilities for public-service provision.

“That Afghanistan’s government struggled to provide basic public goods and services to their citizens, rural and urban, was certainly not the only reason in why the Talban took over so quickly,” said Yayboke. “But it contributed.”

Kabul. Source: Creative Commons

“That Afghanistan’s government struggled to provide basic public goods and services to their citizens, rural and urban, was certainly not the only reason in why the Talban took over so quickly,” said Yayboke. “But it contributed.”

As in many countries around the world, the role of the central government in urban development in Afghanistan is quite limited. Indeed, Afghanistan is a country that governs locally despite structures and imperatives of centralisation. Popuri notes that there are debates and struggles over proper degrees of centralisation and administration through informal government networks, complemented by Yayboke’s point about the role that quasi-criminal cartels play in urban governance, including by controlling the flows of illicit goods in and through urban areas. Despite these challenges, the country has seen successful policy innovations that lie at the intersection of physical/spatial policies and socioeconomic ones. Popuri highlighted the “Cities for All” land tenure and occupancy scheme, and new approaches to collecting taxes and saving government data through biometric scans, as recent urban policy successes. The Ministry of Rural Development’s rural-area cash transfers, funded through the World Bank’s National Solidarity Program, have also made a “massive difference in peoples’ lives.”

Beyond public services, however, urban leaders’ very legitimacy was questioned by many Afghan city residents. Safi noted that Kabul’s mayor was “anointed by the Presidency” in a process that circumvented the will of the people. Such processes meant that residents never earned the respect of local governing officials over time, especially as basic services like paved roads, piped water, and sanitation continued to lag amidst large infusions of foreign aid dollars.

Humanitarian, economic, and financial crises

Afghanistan’s looming humanitarian crisis is of significant concern for all of the event’s panelists and raises issues that are both acute and short-term, and long-term and structural. Noted Yayboke: “The idea of conflict [in urban settings] is normal. But what takes conflict to violence is the concern.” Elections and functional institutions are ways to mitigate conflict, but Afghanistan also faces humanitarian needs of catastrophic proportions: it is winter and nearly half of the country is presently at risk of famine.

A central challenge now is finding the right balance between addressing urgent humanitarian issues and building a more sustainable economy less dependent on foreign aid, all within the context of an uncertain domestic political settlement. Yayboke and Popuri both agreed that while “aid fatigue is real,” using existing systems to get support to people in Afghan cities now is critical. Popuri touted the benefits of direct cash transfers through neighbourhood-specific institutions, and advanced that in the long-term, resilience must be built from the grassroots. Yayboke noted that humanitarian leaders will have to think critically about the end recipients of aid in Afghanistan to determine what “credible local leadership” looks like. It may vary by local context, and could include strategic collaborations with the Taliban, mullahs, and other informal local leaders. “We know that when women are involved in the distribution of humanitarian aid it gets much more to the people who need it,” Yayboke said. However, in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, end recipients of aid might be “significantly less female.”

In the longer term, though, Safi cautioned that Afghanistan’s economy must not become fully dependent on external aid. She drew on wisdom from her grandmother, who once told Safi: “Afghanistan was always poor but we always found a solution, and we did it ourselves. The world did not bring us food or aid.” Long-term solutions must be based on “partnership, respect, and equality,” Safi said, and must recognise the importance of mixing embedded foreign responsibility with community self-sufficiency.

Afghanistan from the Pamir highway. Source: @EJWilson on Upsplash.

Long-term solutions must be based on “partnership, respect, and equality,” Safi said, and must recognise the importance of mixing embedded foreign responsibility with community self-sufficiency.

On Urban Futures

Thinking beyond the urgent, proximate concerns around food insecurity, IDPs, and government stability, Afghan cities face long-term challenges. One such challenge, as posed by an audience member, is mitigating climate-change risks. Yayboke notes that Afghanistan’s droughts are expected to become more frequent and longer-lasting, along with harsher winters. Climate change-induced droughts have already reduced Afghanistan’s agricultural output by around 40% this year. “Climate change is an important factor,” notes Safi. “Entire villages have emptied out because of drought. Residents are moving to Herat and living in makeshift camps because of [climate change].”

Climate change is just one of many urgent urban crises that Afghan cities face in the near future. Poverty and hunger, war, violence, displacement, and the pandemic are presenting compounding challenges in these urban spaces. The panelists agreed that cities could be a space of optimism amidst these difficulties, charting a course for new Afghan futures as hubs for economic growth. Or they could be brewing grounds for the next waves of violent conflict within uncertain governance arrangements.

During the past 40 years, Safi said, “cities were both the places of opportunity as well as the places to escape from.” Moving forward, responsible urban management and innovative service provision will be critical to ensure both short-term security and long-run prosperity in Afghanistan.

Stefan Norgaard is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia University.

Panelists

Sana Safi is a journalist with the BBC World Service.

Srinivasa Popuri is the Senior Human Settlements Officer at the UN-Habitat Asia-Pacific Regional Office.

Erol Yayboke is a Senior Fellow with the International Security Program and Director of the Project on Fragility and Mobility at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Shahrukh Wani is an urban economist at the International Growth Centre at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.