Subduing Global Ecological Threats in Cities: Governance, Business, and Wicked Problems

The development of big cities is determined by the ability of their key actors to bring about successful solutions to existing and emerging challenges. African big cities and countries have considerable, although not yet fully exploited, potential. The chapter wants to point out some of the new challenges that big cities will be exposed to in terms of the need for sustainability of their ecosystems and to present some concepts for use to cope with these challenges. These challenges mean significant opportunities for urban firms. All urban actors will be challenged to best reconcile their different interests so that the resulting effects benefit not only firms but also the urban population in terms of more comfortable living in a healthy environment and environmental sustainability. Parallel phasing concept (PPC) and constructed regional advantage concept (CRAC), unlike traditional approaches, consider the cross-sectional plane of the economic space and thus add another dimension to the analysis by using the integration of three spaces (physical, cyber-physical, and digital) and three knowledge bases (analytical, synthetic, and symbolic). The term parallel reflects the simultaneous integration of different kinds of space together with active-adaptive approaches to phenomena such as openness, creativity, flexibility, or variety that it is needed for the analysis of complex urban phenomena. A combination of CRAC, Penta Helix (5H), multi-level governance (MLG), and PPC concepts was performed to describe the dynamic and competitive components of big cities. The transformation of African big cities and their actors may be assisted using those concepts. Their rapid embedment in urban/national policies may be an important factor affecting successful urban development.