Kampala, Kigali and Addis Ababa are changing fast: new book follows their distinct paths

Kampala is one of the three Eastern African cities that transformed with little historical precedence GettyImages

Kampala, the Ugandan capital where I live, is naturally the city I have studied and worked on the most as an urban economist. Yet even with this background, reading Tom Goodfellow’s recently published book, Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa, I learned astonishing new facts about Kampala.

I also learnt a great deal about the urbanisation processes of two other major East African cities – Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.