Southern Africa
Food Security
In partnership with Queens University, ACC supports a research project that explores urban food security in eleven Southern African cities. The project seeks to uncover new data and develop appropriate policy responses to this vexed challenge in partnership with local actors.
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.
The African Food Security Network
The African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) was founded in 2008 to address the crisis of food insecurity in Africa’s rapidly-growing towns and cities. AFSUN aims to improve the knowledge base of the dimensions and causes of urban food insecurity in Africa and to develop and advocate for international, national and local policies to enhance food and nutrition security.
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.
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.
Reshaping Cities, Rebuilding Nations: The Role of National Urban Policies
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.
Post-Apartheid Geographies
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).
Labour Market Spatial Mismatch
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.
Fragile Stability: State and Society in Democratic South Africa
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.
Indigenous Institutions, Traditional Leaders, & Elite Coalitions For Development: The Case of Greater Durban South Africa
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.