Urban Research

Active Projects

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  GreenGov

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  African Cities Thought Leadership Programme

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  SA-EU dialogue: Cultural Mapping, Planning and Impact Assessment for Sustainable and Just Urban Development

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  PEAK Urban

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  Whose Heritage Matters?

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  Cities of Integrity: urban planning and corruption in Africa

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  Platform

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  Co-producing urban knowledge in Angola and Mozambique through community-led data collection: towards meeting SDG 11

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  Nourishing Spaces

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  Coalition for Urban Transitions

Archived Projects

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  Exploratory Process into the Relevance of an Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) for Cape Town

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  Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish (TLR)

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  HICCUP: Heterogenous Infrastructure of Cities of Uganda Project: Thinking With the South

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  Governing Food Systems to Alleviate Poverty in Secondary Cities

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  Climate Change Adaptation at the Local Scale

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  The Density Syndicate

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  Cape Urban Observatory

• Anton Cartwright
  February 24, 2019

  Urban Stories: Documenting Everyday Life in Tanzania

  URBAN STORIES (English) – Documenting everyday life in Tanzania – Water and Sanitation from Eric Schaechter on Vimeo. To ignore informal service provision in Tanzanian cities is to miss an opportunity. Informal water and sanitation providers, featured in this film by an ARDHI University research team, have devised innovative ways to overcome service delivery backlogs. […]
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  November 3, 2016

  Visualising the Future of Our Neighbourhoods

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  October 27, 2016

  The City is the People

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  October 25, 2016

  Future Cities Laboratory

• Anton Cartwright
  January 22, 2016

  What is a smart African city like?

• Henrik Ernstson
  June 19, 2015

  Antipode Abstract: Situated Urban Political Ecology

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  October 7, 2013

  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, […]
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  September 26, 2013

  Densification, Quartering & Culture

• Ivan Turok
  September 26, 2013

  Driving Density Higher: Challenges for Central Cape Town

• Ian Palmer, Stephen Berrisford
  August 7, 2015

  African Urban Infrastructure Symposium

  Urban Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa – Harnessing Land Values, Housing and Transport  Symposium on research findings – Cape Town, 20 & 21 July 2015 Powerpoint slide presentations from the ACC’s end-of-project symposium on urban infrastructure finance. The research was supported by the UK Department for International Development (DfID), July 2014 – July 2015.     […]

• James Duminy, Susan Parnell
  May 28, 2020

  New book on urban reform and innovation

  African Centre for Cities has just published a new book Supporting City Futures: The Cities Support Programme and the Urban Challenge in South Africa by James Duminy and Susan Parnell.  In 2018 the Cities Support Programme (CSP), an initiative of the South African National Treasury, approached ACC to assist with the production of a book […]
• Warren Smit, Rike Sitas, Sylvia Croese
  April 2, 2020

  Comparative Urban Research from Theory to Practice – Co-Production for Sustainability

• Sophie Oldfield
  November 5, 2019

  Building Houses Bit-by-Bit: The stories of Hazeldean-Ekupumleni

• Caroline Skinner
  May 4, 2016

  Mean Streets: Migration, Xenophobia and Informality in SA

• Gina Ziervogel, Anton Cartwright, Anna Taylor, Warren Smit
  June 19, 2015

  Rising Waters: Working together on Cape Town’s flooding

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  November 18 - November 20

  Association of African Planning Schools Conference 2020

  Due to Covid-19 and associated risks and travel restrictions the Conference has been postponed to November 2021. The Institute of Spatial Planning (IRPUD) at TU Dortmund University (Germany), together with the Institute of Human Settlement Studies and School of Spatial Planning and Social Sciences at Ardhi University (Tanzania) hosts the fifth international conference of the […]
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  January 13, 2021 - January 17, 2021

  The coloniality of infrastructure: Eurafrican legacies

• Vaughn Sadie
  October 28, 2020

  Imagining Impacts – The Goethe-Institut in Africa

  While the value of cultural relations, and arts, culture and heritage practices are widely agreed upon, research into what this means in sub-Saharan Africa is limited. In a context where important questions about decolonisation and colonial legacies are being discussed, it seems timeous to collaborate on such a study to unpack these issues. (more…)
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  October 22, 2020

  A view from the inside

• Jane Battersby
  October 16, 2020

  Food Heroes: Fighting against hunger and malnutrition

• Jane Battersby
  July 15, 2020

  New policy brief on the impact of Covid-19 on food security in Kisumu, Kenya

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  July 10, 2020

  Second Cities of Integrity Working Paper reflects on the Zambian Qualitative Action Experiment

• Sophie Oldfield
  May 27, 2020

  Distinguished award for Prof Sophie Oldfield

• Rike Sitas, Vaughn Sadie
  September 22, 2020

  New report synthesises learnings from SA-EU Dialogue on cultural planning

  Funded by the SA-EU Dialogue Facility under the EU-SA Strategic Partnership, the purpose of this exchange was to provide a platform for dialogue between SA and EU partners about the role of cultural mapping, planning and impact assessment in promoting sustainable and just cities. We find ourselves in an unprecedented moment where global policy imperatives […]
• Liza Rose Cirolia, Nobukhosi Ngwenya
  September 22, 2020

  Conflicts Between and Within: The ‘Conflicting Rationalities’ of Informal Occupation in South Africa

• Liza Rose Cirolia
  September 22, 2020

  Contested fiscal geographies: Urban authority, everyday practice, and emerging state-finance relations

• Liza Rose Cirolia
  September 22, 2020

  Fractured fiscal authority and fragmented infrastructures: Financing sustainable urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa

• Amy Weimann, Warren Smit
  August 18, 2020

  Health through human settlements: Investigating policymakers’ perceptions of human settlement action for population health improvement in urban South Africa

• Rike Sitas
  August 18, 2020

  Creative Cities, Graffiti and Culture‐Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima (‘Play Your Part’)