Chinese investments and its immigrants into Africa are helping shape urban cities in Africa as more African government look east for fund to pile into infrastructure spending. With these financial assistance the Chinese government also send in many of its experts, laborers and companies to assist in building roads, rail tracks and other urban related linkages.

The United Nations estimates that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, posing unique infrastructural challenges for African countries, where 90 percent of the growth is expected to take place. This is not different from what Asia, including China, has been experiencing for the last few decades back, where has been a big shift of people from the rural areas to the cities, created a big planning challenge.

“In most of the sub-Saharan countries most of the people who live in cities live in slums. This is not very strange to Chinese culture because we used to do that. We dismantled a lot of families and moved them up to cities and built news houses [for them],” Haung Zhengli, a Chinese architect, told CCTV Africa at a conference in Nairobi.