Cityscapes #4: After informality
In the fourth issue: a grouped series of reports, essays and interviews tracing a zigzag path connecting Tel Aviv to Naples to Berlin to Guangzhou, all cities where African migrants are a feature of the urban matrix.
Publishing
We promote and disseminate quality publications by African scholars on urban topics in general, but rooted in our programmes.
Planning and Transformation: Learning from the Post-Apartheid Experience
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development
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
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.
Learning to Swim: Strengthening Flooding Governance in the City of Cape Town
Vulnerability to flooding is a growing concern in cities of the South, where resources are concentrated and poor people often settle in flood prone areas.
Why Is Change Elusive In Cape Town – Part 2
Part 2 features various Cape Town based academics and urban practitioners in a candid conversation about the city’s prospects
African Perspectives [South Africa]: City, Society, Space, Literature & Architecture
This volume of the Delft School of Design Series focuses on particular urban questions related to the South African urban context. The book seeks to construct a contemporary critical dialogue of current spatial practises and contemporary design instruments in relation to social, political and governance structures through an architectural and urban lens.