Mzuzu

Mzuzu has expanded quickly as northern Malawi’s principal urban centre, but municipal infrastructure has not grown at the same pace. Road maintenance capacity is limited, while new residential areas often emerge before transport, drainage and utility networks are fully planned or financed.

Malawi’s urbanization review identifies these infrastructure and institutional gaps across the country’s four cities, and later transport work argues that future master planning must reserve space for multimodal movement and better connect urban growth with employment areas and services. For Mzuzu, this is especially important because dispersed expansion can lock the city into high service costs and weak accessibility. A more compact and coordinated relationship between land development, roads and utilities would make future growth easier to manage.