Urban Food Markets: The Beating Heart of Africa’s Rapidly Transforming Cities

Abstract Africa's rapid urbanization is shifting food insecurity to dense cityscapes. While global discourse favours ‘supermarketization’ and modernist ‘clean city’ narratives, this paper addresses the critical urban challenge of informal food markets being marginalized and under-recognized in formal urban planning. Despite their significance, many markets suffer from governance weaknesses and persistent infrastructural deficits. Moreover, a substantial proportion operates informally without formal gazettement, creating risks of land-related conflict during market upgrades. While these structural challenges are well documented, far less attention has been paid to the quotidian operational mechanisms of markets. This paper addresses this gap through a comparative examination of governance arrangements, gendered dynamics, historical trajectories, and everyday practices shaping market systems. The analysis highlights emergent and innovative practices within these markets that broaden economic participation. The study employs a qualitative approach across two African cities: Cape Town and Kisumu. The paper is based on a systematic literature review and secondary data synthesis of city-scale ethnographies and state of the city food system reports from the AfriFOODlinks project. The findings disrupt the binary of ‘modern/formal’ versus ‘backward/informal’ urban food systems. African urban food markets are revealed to be highly organized, dynamic, and indispensable hubs for food security and economic survival. Top-down attempts at formalization frequently clash with the lived realities and organic survival strategies of the urban poor, often resulting in spatial injustice. Grounded in ‘people as infrastructure theory’, this paper highlights quotidian operational mechanisms framing informal markets as the innovative, transformative ‘beating heart’ of African urban metabolism.