Briefing Paper No.1: Reimagining African Urban Contexts with Water: From China’s Sponge Cities to Dutch Rivers to Australian Design
Urban regions are reimagining their relationship with water, moving from concrete defenses to ecological partnership. From China’s Sponge Cities to the Netherlands’ Room for the River and Australia’s Water Sensitive Urban Design, a new paradigm has emerged: water-responsive urbanism that deploys Nature-based Solutions (NbS) alongside green-grey infrastructure specifically for water management. This shift, from flood defence to hydrological coexistence, from single purpose engineering to multi-benefit systems, delivers resilience, biodiversity, cooling and livelihoods. While NbS address diverse urban challenges from heat to biodiversity, this framework focuses their application on urban water systems. This framework maps these global examples to extract lessons of governance, financing and social inclusion relevant for African urban contexts. The core proposition: water-responsive urbanism offers not blueprints to copy but philosophies and principles to adapt; governance determines success more than technology; and successful implementation deploys NbS and hybrid infrastructure as context-specific tools rather than universal solutions. While sponge cities provide comprehensive frameworks with quantitative targets (typically 60-80% stormwater retention) for managing pluvial and fluvial flooding through hybrid green-blue-gray infrastructure networks, Nbs offer both core interventions within these frameworks and standalone tools for broader ecosystem services, a flexible relationship that enables context-specific adaptation.
Briefing Paper No.2: Water-responsive Urbanism in Africa
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, cities are beginning to reimagine their relationship with water. While China’s state-led Sponge City Program and the Netherlands’ Room for the River (RfR) offer instructive precedents, African pathways are unfolding differently, defined by community initiative, urban informality, modest scale, and adaptive innovation. This paper focuses on implemented and well-advanced projects that demonstrate how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and Sponge City approaches are already being applied in practice across the continent. In Africa, water-responsive urbanism is emerging that integrates flood resilience with informal settlement upgrading and local livelihoods. From Mozambique’s Chiveve River Rehabilitation and Cape Town’s Liveable Urban Waterways, to Kenya’s Sponge Towns and Ghana’s Greater Accra Climate Resilient and Integrated Development, these projects demonstrate how Sponge City approaches and NbS can work within Africa’s socio-economic and ecological realities. Across the continent, demand is growing to scale up these proven interventions. Kigali, Rwanda, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, are advancing strategic frameworks for NbS integration; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is piloting urban greening for sustainable drainage; Accra, Ghana, is positioning itself as a hub for urban water resilience innovation; and in Nakuru, Kenya, the first phase of a Sponge City Project has been completed, with construction of physical infrastructure scheduled to begin in the near future.
Briefing Paper No.3: Global South Innovations in Water-responsive Urbanism
Three examples from the Global South, Medellín (Colombia), São Paulo (Brazil) and Bangladesh, offer critical insights into how water-responsive urbanism can emerge under complex social, economic and environmental constraints. Selected for their diversity and relevance to African contexts, these examples reveal how communities, municipalities, and national agencies can collaborate to deliver practical, inclusive and climate-resilient solutions. In Medellín, community-led green corridors link informal settlement upgrading with slope stabilization and flood mitigation. São Paulo illustrates the challenges of transitioning from engineered flood control to nature-based river restoration, balancing ecological goals with the realities of informality and resettlement. Bangladesh shows how local knowledge and adaptive design enable low-cost, community-centred responses to extreme flooding and unstable terrain. Together, these experiences highlight key lessons for African cities: the importance of participatory planning, institutional coordination, incremental implementation, and respect for local adaptive practices. They underscore that effective water-responsive urbanism depends as much on governance and social equity as on technical design.
