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Urbanization has traditionally been understood as a byproduct of economic development, but this explanatory framework fails to account for the phenomenon of "urbanization without growth" observed in sub‐Saharan Africa throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In light of this apparent anomaly, I argue that urbanization is better understood as a global historical process driven by population dynamics associated with technological and institutional innovations that have substantially improved disease control and food security in urban settlements across the globe. These innovations first emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were subsequently diffused through colonialism, trade, and international development assistance. A range of qualitative and quantitative evidence is presented to demonstrate that this historically grounded theory of urbanization offers a more convincing explanation for the stylized facts of Africa's urban transition—and hence the process of world urbanization more broadly—than the traditional economic account.

Urbanization has long been seen by scholars and policymakers as a disruptive process that can contribute to social and political unrest. But there has been very little systematic quantitative research on the topic. We set out to address this gap in the empirical literature by investigating the relationship between "urbanization" and the frequency of protests in African countries. Our paper makes two key methodological contributions. First, we empirically disaggregated the phenomenon of "urbanization" in our modeling strategy. We did this by incorporating variables capturing scale effects (i.e., absolute number of people in cities), ratio effects (i.e., relative share of a population living in cities), rate of change effects (i.e., how fast urban populations are changing), and population distribution effects. No previous study has investigated all these dynamics simultaneously. This allowed us to capture relationships in the data that have been overlooked. Second, we used a multilevel model (or random effects model) that allowed analysis of effects at two levels--within a country over time, and between countries. This modeling strategy differs from the fixed-effects approach that dominates research in this field by political scientists and economists. Both innovations yielded novel insight. We found that levels of urbanization within and between countries to be negatively associated the frequency of protests. But we also found the absolute size of a country's urban populations to be positively correlated with protest frequency between countries. These results provide a nuanced picture of the links between spatial-demographic change and protests that challenges conventional wisdom.

We are living through a global urban transition, but the timing of this transition has varied significantly across countries and regions. This geographic variation in timing matters, both theoretically and substantively. Yet contemporary debates around urbanism hinge primarily on questions of universalism versus particularism, at the expense of attention to how history and geography collide to shape urban processes. Specifically, they neglect the critical fact that urbanization in many countries today is late within the context of the global urban transition. We argue that trajectories of contemporary urbanization must be understood in relation to a suite of conditions unique to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and partly shaped by early urbanization, including historically unprecedented demographic intensity, hyperglobalization, centripetal state politics and the spectre of environmental catastrophe in the late Anthropocene. These factors condition the range of possibilities for late urbanizers in ways that did not apply to early urbanizers yet can also produce diverse outcomes depending on local circumstances. We draw on a comparison between countries in sub-Saharan Africa and China to illustrate why the conditions of late urbanization matter, but also why they have produced highly variable outcomes and are not deterministic of urban futures.

An increasing number of cities around the world are engaging with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). How and why? We provide a critical reflection on SDG 'localization' derived from an action research project in the city of Bristol, UK. Through a research partnership with local government and non-governmental stakeholders we supported integration of the SDGs into local policy and urban monitoring efforts. Embedding the Goals in local policy making was largely a process of 'translation', which was achieved through a form of 'embedded advocacy' supported by a university-city partnership. We found that the Goals have local convening power, serve as a mechanism for building international city networks, and are instrumentalised by cities to signal global ambitions and progressive identities by embracing an internationally sanctioned policy agenda. New methods and frameworks for monitoring the SDGs are needed to fully realize the emerging 'subnational turn' in global policy.

We argue that Frey's proposals are utopian and impractical, focusing on four key issues: the complexity of decision-making; politicians' and technocrats' importance in decision making processes; reconciling the geography of political rights in a globalising world; and recognizing how power frames political discourse and outcomes.

Urbanisation has long been seen by scholars and policymakers as a disruptive process that can contribute to social and political unrest, yet there is little cross-national quantitative empirical research on the topic. In this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the links between urban geography and the incidence of protests (i.e. demonstrations, riots and strikes) in African countries since 1990. In contrast to previous studies, we are careful to distinguish between urban population scale effects, urban population ratio effects, population rate-of-change effects and urban population distribution effects. We also provide an explicit test of the long-standing hypothesis that 'over-urbanization' increases the risk of civil unrest. Employing multilevel negative binomial models that control for key political and economic variables we find that urban population size and the number of large cities in a country are both positively and significantly associated protest incidence. By contrast, we find that a country's level of urbanization is negatively associated with protest incidence and reject the over-urbanization hypothesis: higher levels of urbanization are associated with less frequent protests at all income levels. We find no evidence that the pace of urban population growth or urban primacy significantly influence protest mobilization. In sum, our results provide a nuanced picture of the relationship between urban geography and protest incidence that challenges conventional wisdom and contemporary hyperbole about the dangers of 'rapid urbanization' in Africa in particular, and developing countries more generally.

The process of urbanisation has historically been associated with both socioeconomic development and social strain. Although there is little evidence that urbanisation per se increases the likelihood of conflict or violence in a country, in recent decades Africa has experienced exceptional rates of urban population growth in a context of economic stagnation and poor governance, producing conditions conducive to social unrest and violence. In order to improve urban security in the years ahead, the underlying risk factors must be addressed, including urban poverty, inequality, and fragile political institutions. This, in turn, requires improving urban governance in the region by strengthening the capacity of local government institutions, addressing the complex political dynamics that impede effective urban planning and management, and cultivating integrated development strategies that involve cooperation between various tiers and spheres of government and civil society.

Why are some countries more prone to social violence than others? Despite the fact that annual deaths due to homicides worldwide outnumber those due to organized armed conflict by a factor of roughly 3 to 1, this question has received very little attention from conflict and development specialists in recent years. As a modest first step in addressing this gap in the literature we draw together insights from the conflict and criminology literatures to develop a model of social violence that accounts for both political-institutional and socio-economic factors. While there is an extensive literature on the socio-economic determinants of social violence, there are only a handful of studies that consider the significance of political-institutional arrangements. Using cross-country estimates of homicides produced by the World Health Organization as an indicator of social violence, we test our model using OLS regression analysis for a sample of more than 120 countries. We find that countries with 'hybrid' political orders experience higher rates of social violence than those with strong autocratic or strong democratic regimes, and that weakly institutionalized democracies are particularly violent. We also find robust associations between indicators of poverty, inequality and ethnic diversity and social violence. These results indicate that social and political violence share some common underlying causes. We conclude by suggesting that the apparent global decline in organized armed conflict and the concomitant rise in social violence in recent decades may be linked to world urbanization and the 'third wave' of democratization in the global South, although further research is required to confirm this hypothesis.