Demographics and the Harare Metropolitan Region: Putting the Urban Sustainability Theory to Task.

This paper examines the patterns and trends of growth of Harare Metropolitan Region which ideally covers Harare City and its satellite towns of Chitungwiza, Norton, Epworth, Ruwa, and Christonbank together with their immediate peri-urban environments. Urban expansion, triggered by the processes of urbanisation, peri-urbanisation and anti-urbanisation, are defining an ungovernable and difficult situation to manage in the next 20 years or so. The basics that define a sustainable metropolitan region (housing, water and sanitation, public transportation) are at stake. With an appropriate population 5 million inhabitants, the metropolitan infrastructure and existing facilities are failing to cope with the demographic pressure. Two decades ago the state has down-tooled on public programmes in housing and transportation. Harare Metropolitan, like most urban centres in the developing world, has been shattered and buttered several times by the country’s adoption of structural adjustment programmes in the 1990s, a failing economy in the 2000s and, as far back as the 1980s, the challenges of adapting from colonialism. Data from the statistical office and other secondary sources of data aided with interviews from related sectors, have been geo-referenced and ‘modelled’ to reflect the metropolitan growth.