“The African Centre for Cities recently launched a new CityLab on “Urban Violence, Safety and Governance”. Led by Dr Mercy Luthango-Brown, this CityLab will look at the effectiveness of upgrading informal settlements as a response to violence and the improvement of safety within settlements.
Cape Town and Durban are both large metropolitan municipalities where climate change adaptation is being championed from within the environment departments. However, embedding these plans into municipal budgets and operations to progress implementation is proving difficult.
Warren Smit speaks about his work researching healthy cities at the 2011 Urban Age Conference in Hong Kong
In the years after the 1994 transition to democracy in South Africa, planners were convinced that they would be able to successfully promote a vision of integrated, equitable and sustainable cities, and counter the spatial distortions created by apartheid.
Working in Warwick offers a fresh look at street traders’ lives, the role they play in city life and their contribution to its economy; and shows that it is possible to include street trading in urban plans in a way that adds to the vibrancy and attraction of cities.
This lecture was delivered by Professor Manuel Castells during his visit to Cape Town in 2009.
Cities have long been connected with processes of bureaucratisation and state-building, as indeed they have long been linked to conflict and war. In bringing these two associations together we engaged with the historical sociology of Charles Tilly and research in the CAFS programme confirmed that the intersection of cities, states and violent conflict remains significant, although it is far more complex in today’s world.
Urbanization in Africa is real. Most political and policy leaders remain in denial about its centrality and urgency. Urbanization in Africa represents the most complex and intractable policy questions and as long as Africans do not take responsibility to shift the contemporary situation of policy failure, we are in for a crisis. This publication by the African Centre for Cities seeks to offer a resource to policy activists in African governments, development agencies, social movements, universities and business sectors who are committed to addressing the current policy lacuna.
Available from March 2010: Cape Town is undergoing a growth spurt driven along by both public and private sector investments. In the process a new city is being fashioned in front of our eyes but there are very few book length perspectives on the direction and meaning of this growth. This is particularly alarming given the many intractable problems that stare the city in the face and which require more considered and informed responses.
Cities and Development brings into conversation debates from urban and development studies. It grapples with both the challenges and opportunities associated with rapid urban change and provides a critical assessment of current policy and planning responses to the contemporary urban challenge.
This book is a powerful indictment of the current consensus on how to cope with the hundreds of “mega-cities” of the developing world. These cities are the future, and the problems surrounding this influx of people–slums, poverty, unemployment and lack of governance–have been well-documented.
City Life from Jakarta to Dakar examines the potentials of urban life through reflections on cities in Africa and Southeast Asia. It shows how much of what is considered peripheral to urban life is actually critical to it and thereby opens up new ways for understanding what it is possible to do in cities from now on.
This paper describes the methodology and data used to determine greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions attributable to ten cities or city-regions: Los Angeles County, Denver City and County, Greater Toronto, New York City, Greater London, Geneva Canton, Greater Prague, Barcelona, Cape Town and Bangkok.
The world’s population is now over 50 % urban, and cities account for the majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Many cities are developing strategies to reduce their emissions. Here we show how and why emissions differ between cities.
Regional development made a dramatic comeback on the international development scene in 2008. It featured prominently in the flagship UN-Habitat publication, State of the World’s Cities 2008/20091 and equally emerged as a strong theme in the World Bank’s annual development report, World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography,2 which reinforces the importance of space and place in effective development policy.
