Books Archives - Page 4 of 4 - African Centre for Cities

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

African Center for Cities / 7 October 2013

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

African Center for Cities / 7 October 2013

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

City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development

African Center for Cities / 7 October 2013

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.

Books, General

City Life from Jakarta

African Center for Cities / 7 October 2013

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.

Books

African Perspectives [South Africa]: City, Society, Space, Literature & Architecture

African Center for Cities / 17 September 2013

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.

Books

Quick Guide 07 – Rental Housing: a much neglected housing option for the poor

African Center for Cities / 26 August 2013

Millions of people in African cities are tenants.

Books

Quick Guide 06 – Community Based Organizations: the poor as agents of development

African Center for Cities / 26 August 2013

The emergence of community organizations of the poor in Africa has been a very important de- velopment during the past two decades.

Books, Publishing

Quick Guide 05 – Housing Finance

African Center for Cities / 26 August 2013

The two extreme outcomes of current shelter systems that are being witnessed today are affordable shelter that is inadequate, and adequate shelter that is unaffordable.

Books

Quick Guide 04: Eviction: Alternatives to the destruction of urban poor communities

African Center for Cities / 26 August 2013

Despite decades of work by housing and human rights organizations, NGOs, multilateral insti- tutions and community organizations, the eviction of poor households and poor communities is increasing in African cities, causing displacement, misery and impoverishment for millions of urban citizens.

Books

Climate Change at the City Scale: Impacts, Mitigation and Adaptation in Cape Town

African Center for Cities / 26 August 2013

Emerging from the inability, at COP15 (Copenhagen), of nation states and multi- national agencies to agree on a long-term commitment to tackling climate change and managing its consequences, there has been a renewed focus on local and self-styled responses to the challenges

Books

Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities

African Center for Cities / 26 August 2013

Rogue Urbanism is the outcome of a research exploration by the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. It arises from the need to push forward a debate on how we can think and theorise the specificity of African cities.

Books, Publishing

Quick Guide 01 – Urban Africa: Building with Untapped Potential

African Center for Cities / 7 May 2011

Africa and Asia are at the epicentre of the second large-scale urban transition in the history of the world. The first transition unfolded between 1750 and 1950 in North America and Europe, which saw the urban share of their total population grow from 10% to 52%. The second urban transition has been unfolding largely in the global South since 1950; by 2030 the urban share of the population in this region will have grown from 18% to 56%.

Books, Publishing

Quick Guide 03 – Land: A Crucial Element in Housing the Urban Poor

African Center for Cities / 7 May 2011

Without land, there can be no housing. And without looking at the issue of land, there can be no meaningful discussion about how to solve the problems of housing for the poor in our cities. The inaccessibility of decent, secure, affordable land is the major reason why there are so many informal settlements in African cities and is a contributing factor to urban poverty.

Books, Publishing

Quick Guide 02 – Low Income Housing: Approaches to Helping the Urban Poor Find Adequate Housing in African cities

African Center for Cities / 7 May 2011

This guide describes several ways of addressing low-income housing in African cities at the programme and project level. It focuses on well tried methods of improving the housing and living environments of people living in slums and informal settlements, and providing adequate housing for future generations of urban poor.