The challenges of rapid urbanisation in large parts of Africa are beyond the capacity of local government to manage. The paper explores the arguments for a national urban policy to complement local strategies, reflecting the unique power of the central state and the special circumstances of cities. With appropriate support, urbanisation could become a more positive force for economic and human development.
This report summarizes the presentations and discussions at the SUD‐Net Workshop ‘Promoting Sustainable Urban Development Networking in African Cities’, held at the Townhouse Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa, on 17‐19 February 2009. The event was hosted by UN‐Habitat, the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Funding was made available by UN‐Habitat and SIDA.
Late in 2000, I asked Ponkies to accompany me through The Park to introduce me to people who had arrived since my last period of work there and to find old acquaintances after my long absence.
The apartheid city was always the ultimate paradigm for urban division and exclusion. This was even more so in the 1990s when it became clearer that urban forms and patterns in many parts of the world were going the way of intensifying segregation, fragmentation and splintering, resulting in deepening intra-urban inequalities (Graham and Marvin 2001).
It is pertinent to move away from the tropes of segregation, fragmentation and bifurcation in thinking about the African urban condition. However, it would be an error to simply trade the dominant ideas on polarisation for an account that only foregrounds interconnections and fluid intermingling.
The use and disposal of nickel–cadmium secondary cells (the basic components of NiCd batteries) in Cape Town, South Africa, has been investigated with the objective of quantifying the associated flows of cadmium.
In the wake of Mumbai terror attacks one is forced to reflect on the nature and representation of urban violence across the global South. It is clear that only certain kinds of violence and upheaval warrant attention in the public domain as reflected in the world’s globalized media.
The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that low-skilled black residents, who are restricted to excluded ghettos, have been isolated from the knowledge of job opportunities by the suburbanisation of jobs.
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 paper examines the use of a discourse of citizenship by the leaders and members of the São Paulo housing movement, the Uniao de Movimentos de Moradia, and illustrates how they ‘see the state’ (Corbridge et al. 2005) and mobilize their members.
The majority of wars are fought in impoverished countries with often devastating and transformative impacts on their urban spaces. Nevertheless, the relationship between acts of terror and development is under-explored and little focus is placed on the impact on cities of the global South.
This article adopts a ‘state-in-society’ approach in order to take account of the impact of the transition to democracy in South Africa on social groups and their engagement with the state. The article suggests that democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state but also new interfaces between state and society.
South Africa was not atypical in having to accommodate indigenous institutions in its new political order when the country made its transition from minority rule to a non-racial democracy in 1994. In many parts of the world, and especially post-colonial states, customary forms of governance remain salient, being deeply rooted in local institutions.
From the early 1980s decentralisation became integral to international development and by the mid-1990s 80 per cent of countries were engaged in some form of decentralisation (Crook and Manor 2000).
The purpose of this draft national urban development framework (NUDF) is to provide a common nation-wide view on how to strengthen the capacity of South Africa’s towns, cities and city-regions to realise their potential to support national shared growth, social equity and environmental sustainability.
