Can Lira escape Its urban nightmare?

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By Dr Bob Marley Achura

The high-rise buildings sprouting across Lira city present a deceptive narrative of progress. Behind the facade of concrete and glass lies a more troubling reality: Uganda’s newest city, elevated to municipal status barely five years ago, is developing the infrastructure of modernity while simultaneously nurturing the DNA of a slum.

Unless city leaders adopt bold, transformative planning measures now, today’s “new” Lira will inevitably become tomorrow’s “Old Lira”, a cautionary tale of squandered opportunity and haphazard urbanisation.

The Colonial Legacy: Planning for Exploitation, Not Habitation

To understand Lira’s current predicament, we must excavate its urban planning genealogy. When British colonial administrators established Lira as a district headquarters in 1906, their planning philosophy was extractive, not developmental. Colonial urban planning in Uganda prioritised administrative control and economic extraction over livable communities.

The town layout served to facilitate the movement of resources, cotton, copper, and labour, not the flourishing of human settlements.

This colonial imprint manifests in Lira’s contemporary geography: a centralised administrative core with organic, unplanned settlements radiating outward. The 1912 planning schemes that shaped early Kampala, covering Old Kampala and Nakasero hills, never extended their vision to secondary towns like Lira. The result? A century-old planning deficit that persists today.

The Post-Colonial Trap: Independence Without Infrastructure Vision

Post-independence Uganda inherited colonial urban frameworks but lacked the resources, expertise, or political will to reimagine them. Lira’s development trajectory mirrors this national pattern.

After 1962, the town grew reactively rather than proactively, responding to immediate pressures, displaced populations from regional conflicts, rural-urban migration, and commercial expansion, without comprehensive spatial planning.

The 1979 civil strife that engulfed Lira and the subsequent Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency further disrupted any nascent urban planning initiatives.

By the time Lira achieved city status on July 1, 2020, it carried decades of accumulated planning debt. Today’s population of approximately 250,000 (with a day population reaching 500,000) inhabits an urban space never designed for such density.

High-rise Buildings on a Crumbling Foundation

Walk through Lira city today and witness the paradox: gleaming multi-story buildings rising from streets plagued by chronic flooding, surrounded by neighbourhoods lacking basic sanitation infrastructure.

The sh800b five-year development plan unveiled by city leaders sounds impressive until you examine what it’s trying to fix: power blackouts, water scarcity, bad roads, poor waste management, and non-functional street lights, problems that should have been addressed before city status was conferred.

ecent infrastructure projects reveal the depth of this crisis. The sh1b Olwol road, completed under the USMID programme, immediately faced criticism over design flaws, inadequate drainage causing flooding, and missing safety features. This is not just poor execution; it is symptomatic of development without comprehensive physical planning frameworks.

Most alarmingly, parliamentary reports reveal that Lira city, like most of Uganda’s newly created cities, lacks an approved Physical Development Plan, the very document that should guide all construction, zoning, and infrastructure investment. Building a city without an approved physical development plan is architectural Russian roulette.

The slum of vertical development

Uganda’s urban trajectory provides sobering warnings. Kampala, the nation’s capital, exemplifies what happens when vertical growth outpaces horizontal planning. Despite its gleaming high-rises, 38.9% of Kampala’s residents live in extreme poverty, concentrated in informal settlements like Namuwongo, Masese, and Katanga. The city’s annual population growth rate of 5.6% far exceeds its infrastructural capacity, creating what scholars call “the urbanisation of poverty.”

The newly created cities of Mbarara and Gulu mirror this pattern. Research documents how rural areas have been integrated into Mbarara city without proper planning, creating pockets of underdevelopment surrounded by new construction. Parliament froze the creation of additional cities in 2025 after finding that only four of Uganda’s ten active cities have approved physical development plans.

The pattern is clear: vertical buildings do not equal vertical development. Without comprehensive planning, they become monuments to dysfunction, expensive infrastructure serving poorly planned, under-serviced neighbourhoods.

Lessons from Kigali

Contrast Uganda’s struggling cities with Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, which implemented its 2050 Master Plan with remarkable discipline. Kigali’s transformation wasn’t about building tall; it was about planning smart. The Rwandan government designated specific zones for different functions, created planned city extensions for Rubavu and Nyagatare, and enforced building codes with zero tolerance.

The results speak volumes: Kigali has successfully reduced informal settlements while accommodating rapid urban growth. The Green City Kigali initiative demonstrates how environmental sustainability can be integrated into urban expansion from conception, not retrofitted as an afterthought.

Nairobi offers another instructive example. While its old CBD faced congestion and decay, planners deliberately developed Westlands and Upper Hill as alternative business districts with modern infrastructure, adequate parking, green spaces, and proper utilities. Today, Old Nairobi CBD handles traditional commerce while Westlands attracts multinational corporations, tech startups, and premium residential developments, precisely because it was planned intentionally for 21st-century needs.

The Imperative: Identify Virgin Land for New Lira Now

Lira’s leaders face a defining choice: continue patching the current city centre until it inevitably degenerates into “Old Lira,” or exercise transformative vision by identifying and planning a new urban core on virgin land within the city’s boundaries.

This isn’t radical, it’s pragmatic. The current city centre, with its tangled land tenure issues, organic growth patterns, and infrastructure deficits, will never achieve world-class standards through incremental improvements. Attempting to retrofit comprehensive planning onto this legacy landscape is like trying to perform heart surgery on a marathon runner, theoretically possible but practically catastrophic.

Instead, city leaders should:

Immediately Commission a Comprehensive Physical Development Plan: Before approving another building permit, Lira needs an approved, detailed physical development plan that projects 30 years forward. This plan must identify a virgin area, currently agricultural or lightly inhabited, suitable for developing a New Lira City Centre.

Designate Functional Zones with Precision: The new centre must separate residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational zones with adequate buffer spaces and green belts. Study Kigali’s zoning discipline and Nairobi’s CBD-to-Westlands model.

Invest in Trunk Infrastructure Before Buildings: Water reticulation systems, sewerage networks, storm water drainage, electricity substations, and fibre optic networks must be installed before construction begins, not after. The new 20,000-seat Akii Bua Olympic Stadiumbeing constructed, offers a focal point, but only if surrounded by properly planned urban development.

Implement Strict Building Codes and Enforcement: Establish and enforce architectural standards, minimum plot ratios, building setbacks, parking requirements, and environmental impact assessments. Without enforcement, plans remain decorative documents.

Create Mixed-Income Housing Areas: Learn from Kampala’s mistake of spatial segregation. The new city centre should integrate affordable, middle-income, and premium housing to prevent the formation of homogeneous poverty zones.

Preserve the Current Centre as Heritage “Old Lira”: Rather than viewing this as failure, rebrand the current city centre as “Old Lira”, a heritage zone with historic significance, small-scale commerce, and cultural attractions. Cities like Paris, London, and Kigali successfully maintain old quarters while developing new ones.

The Cost of Inaction: From City to Slum in One Generation

The window for transformative action is narrowing rapidly. Every month that passes without comprehensive planning sees more buildings erected, more land tenure complications created, and more infrastructure deficits locked in. Urban planning research demonstrates that retrofitting infrastructure into established settlements costs three to five times more than installing it before development.

More devastatingly, once slum characteristics become entrenched, inadequate sanitation, overcrowding, poor housing, limited water access, and substandard roads, they prove remarkably resistant to intervention. Research on Uganda’s urban slums shows that even well-funded upgrading programs struggle to transform established informal settlements into livable neighbourhoods.

Lira’s current trajectory, unplanned high-rise construction amid infrastructure deficits, is creating a unique pathology: the vertical slum. In this emerging urban form, poor families inhabit multi-story buildings lacking elevators, adequate water pressure for upper floors, fire safety systems, proper waste management, or emergency access. These are slums that reach skyward rather than sprawling horizontally, but they’re slums nonetheless.

A Vision Worth Building

Imagine, instead, a different Lira in 2045. The Old Lira district bustles with heritage tourism, artisan markets, and cultural festivals, its colonial-era buildings preserved and repurposed. Five kilometres away, New Lira rises, a planned city centre with tree-lined boulevards, efficient public transport, underground utilities, modern water and sewerage systems, adequate schools and hospitals, recreational parks, and mixed-income housing developments where doctors live on the same streets as shopkeepers and civil servants.

This vision isn’t utopian fantasy; it’s achieved reality in dozens of African cities that chose planning over expediency. Kigali did it. Abuja, Nigeria’s purpose-built capital, did it. Even within Uganda, the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area Urban Development Program recognises this principle by designating new urban growth areas rather than only densifying the existing city.

The Leadership Moment

City leaders who greenlight another unplanned development or approve another building in the current centre without a comprehensive physical development plan in place are not facilitating growth, they’re cementing dysfunction. Real leadership requires the courage to say: “Stop. Pause. Plan. Then build properly.”

The residents of Lira deserve better than recycled colonial planning, better than the infrastructure poverty plaguing Kampala’s slums, better than high-rise buildings standing in flooded streets. They deserve a city conceived with intention, designed with foresight, and built with discipline.

The choice is stark: plan intentionally for New Lira now, or accept the inevitable degeneration of current Lira into Old Lira, a cautionary example of how not to build a 21st-century African city.

The land is available. The planning expertise exists. International development partners are seeking credible urban projects to fund. All that’s missing is the political will to prioritise long-term transformation over short-term construction. Lira stands at a crossroads. Which path its leaders choose will determine whether future generations inherit a thriving, planned metropolis or a vertical slum wearing the hollow title of “city.” The decision point is now. The consequences will be permanent.

The time for intentional urban planning isn’t coming, it’s here. And it’s running out.

This Op-Ed draws on urban planning research, parliamentary reports, and comparative studies of African cities. The evidence is clear: cities don’t fail because they lack buildings; they fail because they lack plans.