African Cities and the Water-Food-Climate-Energy Nexus: an Agenda for Sustainability and Resilience at a Local Level

This article seeks to identify, map and explain the major factors (and perhaps myths) that postulate the present situation in African cities regarding the reluctance and inaction towards embracing the notion of the water-food-climate-energy nexus towards finding options for setting the necessary agenda that assists in building sustainable regions and cities. It argues for a systems approach as well as considering cities, not as isolated entities but networked systems of defined regions within a country. In doing so, the article brings again, the core-periphery syntax of urban and regional debate that was the major rallying point of regional planning philosophy of the 1960s and 1980s. The article makes use of four case studies of African cities—Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Cape Town (South Africa), Dar es-Salam (Tanzania) and Cairo (Egypt) to demonstrate the issues and factors for considering in the agenda towards incorporating the water-food-climate-energy nexus in the sustainability and resilience agenda for cities. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.