One in every 10 Batswana city dwellers live in neighbourhoods that look crowded and chaotic. These are areas where houses are packed too close together, streets are too narrow for cars to pass, and there is very little planned open spaces. Scientists and planners call this ‘ morphological deprivation,’ which is just a fancy way of saying a neighbourhood’s physical layout is cramped and poorly built because it lacks proper town planning.
Botswana is among the African countries where about 10% of the urban population lives in neighbourhoods showing signs of morphological deprivation.
This claim is contained in a study titled: Hidden living-condition deficits in small and medium-sized cities, that maps housing and infrastructure conditions across thousands of cities. The finding places Botswana near the lower end of the African scale, where deprivation ranges from about 10% in countries including Botswana and Algeria to more than 70% in Somalia and the Central African Republic.
The study, published in Nature Cities, examined 5,132 cities across 103 countries, using satellite and geospatial data to identify neighbourhoods characterised by dense and irregular development, limited road connectivity and other built-environment deficiencies. About 395 million people, or 20.2% of the urban population covered, were estimated to live in such areas.
The researchers warn that the problem is not confined to Africa’s biggest cities. Globally, small and medium-sized cities account for 34%, or 136 million, of people living in morphologically deprived neighbourhoods. In Africa, small cities alone account for 63 million affected residents, compared with 67 million in large cities.
That has implications for Botswana as urban populations expand beyond the country’s largest centres. The researchers say smaller cities often receive less policy and investment attention despite facing rapid growth and multiple forms of deprivation.
‘High building density, limited open space, constrained road networks and fragmented access routes’ can increase exposure to flooding and extreme heat, restrict emergency access and worsen service shortfalls, the study says. The authors caution, however, that the mapping does not directly measure income, tenure security or access to services. It is designed as a screening tool rather than a definitive measure of poverty.
The study argues that governments should use such neighbourhood-level data to target infrastructure and services, particularly in smaller cities that are often poorly represented in official statistics.