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Chartbook 479 Africa’s unprecedented urbanization - against historic normalization (#2)

Adam Tooze · 23 Oct 2026

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Even at low incomes, today's fast-growing cities are not centres of disease and mass death as 19th-century European cities were, because modern medicine and basic public health let them keep growing

    Their wordseven at relatively low per capita incomes the emergent cities of the 21st century are not centers of diseases and mass death, as they would have been in Europe in the 19th century. Modern facilities of medicine and rudimentary public health do a remarkable job in enabling huge agglomerations of people, even at low incomes to continue growing.

  2. Our reading

    If dense agglomerations of people are incubators of change, the mistake in studying African urbanization is to measure its convergence to a predefined modernity instead of looking at how society is being reinvented

    Their wordsIf it is true that dense agglomerations of people are incubators of innovation and change, the mistake is to focus on the degree of conformity with, or convergence to some predefined vision of modernity, rather than to focus on the "reinvention of society" that the Economist so aptly highlights.

  3. Our reading

    Mapping a new development onto historical precedents may be reassuring, but it can also be deeply misleading

    Their wordsSuch mental mappings may be reassuring, but they can also be deeply misleading

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