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5Overcoming the Challenges ofSecondary Cities DevelopmentMeeting the challenges of secondary city development is a daunting task forgovernments in all developing countries and regions. Urban systems insecondary cities are failing to provide capacity for them to grow and develop and thiscalls for new strategies and approaches to be taken by governments and internationaldevelopment agencies and banks to support their development. The following discussionaddresses the more significant challenges facing the development of secondarycities and outlines some approaches to overcoming these from global and regionalperspectives. The discussion addresses these challenges from a governance, economic,development, social and environmental systems perspective. Examples of best-practiceapproaches illustrating how some countries and cities have addressed specificchallenges of secondary-city development are included in the discussion.5.1 Conceptualizing the Problems and Challenges of SecondaryCities DevelopmentThe issues of economic, environmental and social sustainability in secondary citiesneed to be addressed aggressively if the challenges facing their development are tobe overcome. The challenges of secondary cities development occur at very differentscales, scope and levels of impact in countries across the world. The biggest challenge,as illustrated in Figure 5.1, is that its causes and effects are multi-dimensional, suggestingthat more systems and integrated, rather than traditional, sector approaches toaddressing these matters are required.Figure 5.1 shows a problem-tree analysis, which attempts to depict the challengesof secondary cities development. The analysis also applies to small and large cities,although the National Development Plan for South Africa noted secondary citiesbecause pressures of managing urbanization rarely outperform the national economyand generally perform worse than metropolitan economies (NPA, 2011). The coreproblem is that the management of secondary cities is failing to deliver sustainabledevelopment outcomes for them. There are many reasons for this, but the primarycauses are linked to the failure of urban governance, economic and finance, development,social and environmental systems.The consequences of these failures manifest themselves in many ways in the failure