Writer, artist and research associate at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (ACC), Kim Gurney pens a new book on the evolving art space August House in Johannesburg. (more…)
Polity Books has just published New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times by AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, which explores the emerging epicentres of global urbanisation. (more…)
Kim Gurney takes readers through Johannesburg via three arts projects. It is a journey that gives a unique insight into the potential of public art to fashion new public imaginaries of common space says LSE’s Kate Dawson. Read the full book review by Kate Dawson here.
Mean Streets, edited by ACC partners Jonathan Crush, Abel Chikanda and Caroline Skinner, demonstrates powerfully that some of the most resourceful entrepreneurs in the South African informal economy are migrants and refugees. Yet far from being lauded, they take their life into their hands when they trade on South Africa’s “mean streets.” Thirteen chapters draw […]
The seventh and latest edition of Cityscapes is framed around the rubric of “futurity”. What will tomorrow be like? It will be more urbanised. It will also, agree various contributors, bear the imprimatur of China. “Whatever the case, China has, for now, become a far more prominent actor than others in the future-making of Africa,” […]
The Flooding in Cape Town under Climate Risk (FliCCR) Project book explores the challenges and opportunities of collaborative governance as a way to get a broader group of stakeholders involved in flooding responses.
A journey through Johannesburg via three art projects raises intriguing notions about the constitutive relationship between the city, imagination and the public sphere–through walking, gaming and performance art. Amid prevailing economic validations, the trilogy posits art within an urban commons instead. Imagination counts, says the author, even when it cannot be counted.
One city, eleven people, ten ideas. This, in a nutshell, is what this issue is about. In a departure from past issues of this magazine, we pause to look at one city in detail. The city: Cape Town, home to nearly 4 million inhabitants
Where past issues of Cityscapes have looked east, particularly to the Indian subcontinent, issue five shifts the focus decisively west. Inaugurating our collaboration with USP Cidades, a research centre at the University of São Paulo, architectural critic Fernando Serapião recapitulates the history of social housing design in Brazil. “Heirs of an architectural school with deep […]
Cape Town and Durban are both large metropolitan municipalities where climate change adaptation is being championed from within the environment departments. However, embedding these plans into municipal budgets and operations to progress implementation is proving difficult.
The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, Edited by Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield engages the twenty-first-century city through a ‘southern urban’ lens to stimulate scholarly, professional and activist engagements with the city.
Drawing on the expertise of scholars and practitioners associated with the African Centre for Cities, and utilising a diverse array of case studies, Africa’s Urban Revolution provides a comprehensive insight into the key issues – demographic, cultural, political, technical, environmental and economic – surrounding African urbanisation.
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.
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. Its unique ambition is to produce new and relevant theoretical work […]
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 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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 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 […]
