Author name: African Center for Cities

Books

A Comparison of Three SA Municipalities

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.

Books

Working in Warwick

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.

Audio, Video

Conflict and State Fragility

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.

Books

Urbanisation Imperatives for Africa: Transcending Policy Inertia

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.

Books

Counter-Currents: Experiments in Sustainability in the Cape Town Region

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.

Books

Cities and Development

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.

Books, General

City Life from Jakarta

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.

Papers

Regional Development: Strategies for the Future

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.

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