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, Susan Parnell and Mercy Brown-Luthango. In 2018 the Cities Support Programme (CSP), an initiative of the South African National Treasury, approached ACC to assist with the production of […]
Comparative Urban Research from Theory to Practice – Co-Production for Sustainability edited by David Simon, Henrietta Palmer, and Jan Riise reflects on the research and experience of the Mistra Urban Futures (MUF) programme, which concluded at the end of 2019. Reporting on the innovative, transdisciplinary research on sustainable urbanisation being undertaken by Mistra Urban Futures, the […]
Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi and Erzebet Strausz, develops an approach to both method and the socio-political implications of knowledge production that embraces our embeddedness in the world that we study. It seeks to enact the transformative potentials inherent in this relationship in how it engages […]
The City Research Studio (CRS) is a year-long course presented as part of the newly launched MPhil in Southern Urbanism as well as part of the Masters in Critical Urbanisms (University of Basel) semester at UCT. The CRS is a three-part experimental space for students, and faculty, to engage in the city, to learn to walk, see, smell, touch, embrace, explore […]
ACC Honorary Associate Professor Henrik Ernstson has co-edited a new book entitled Grounding Urban Natures – Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies with Sverker Sörlin. (more…)
Cape Town’s drought crisis grabbed global headlines in 2018 and its causes and solutions were – and continue to be — hotly debated. But managing water shortages and other climate change impacts have been integrated into the city’s urban policy-making for some time, in response to rapid urbanisation and uncertainty about the exact nature, timing […]
“It is a public secret that we have no practical idea how to undo and remake the legacy of the spatial inequality apartheid has bequeathed us,” says Professor Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Centre for Cities and NRF South African Research Chair in Urban Policy. “Our visions, and much more our concrete plans, are constrained by private […]
HOW DO THE CITIES WE LIVE IN SHAPE WHAT WE EAT? This question is central to a new book, Tomatoes & Taxi Ranks: Running our Cities to Fill the Food Gap, by Leonie Joubert with Jane Battersby and Vanessa Watson published by the African Centre for Cities. (more…)
African societies and economies are caught up in the intersection of at least five megatrends: population growth, urbanisation, climate change, migration, and the knot of food, water and energy insecurity. (more…)
Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda by Korydon H. Smith and Tomà Berlanda explores the pressing challenges and opportunities to be found in planning, designing, and constructing a healthy, equitable and sustainable city. Asking “what is an authentic-yet-modern, prosperous-yet-feasible African city, Rwandan city?” Smith, Berlanda and colleagues conducted research on Rwandan activities of daily living and how these routines […]
As Africa urbanises and the focus of poverty shifts to urban centres, there is an imperative to address poverty in African cities. This is particularly the case in smaller cities, which are often the most rapidly urbanising, but the least able to cope with this growth. This book, a research output from the Consuming Urban […]
First published in 2002 Democratising Local Government: The South African Experiment edited by Susan Parnell, Edgar Pieterse, Mark Swilling and Dominique Wooldridge is now available through open access. Local government is at the forefront of development. In South Africa the ambitious policy objectives of post-apartheid reconstruction and development hinge on the successful creation of a democratic […]
The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South offers an edited collection on planning in parts of the world which, more often than not, are unrecognised or unmarked in mainstream planning texts. In doing so, its intention is not to fill a ‘gap’ that leaves this ‘mainstream’ unquestioned but to re-theorise planning from a deep […]
There has been a growing recognition that planning ideas emerging from the industrialised economies of the ‘Global North’ are not necessarily appropriate in regions of the world with very different social, political and economic contexts. The Companion to Planning in the Global South offers a collection of essays on planning in parts of the world which, […]
Palgrave Macmillan have recently published a new title by Richard de Satgé and ACC’s Vanessa Watson Urban Planning in the Global South – Conflicting rationalities in contested urban space. (more…)
The South African Informal Sector: Creating Jobs, Reducing Poverty (HSRC Press) has just been released. Reseacher at ACC Caroline Skinner acted as consulting editor on the volume and also contributed two chapters. (more…)
Urban Planet, a new open-access edited volume on sustainable urban development, is launched. The book is a collaborative project within Future Earth and emphasises the need for a new knowledge generation agenda, given the urgency of understanding the sustainability challenges and options for a rapidly urbanising planet. The urban future is a critical determinant of […]
Zed Books has released Building a Capable State: Service Delivery in Post-Apartheid South Africa co-authored by Ian Palmer, Susan Parnell and Nishendra Moodley. (more…)
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 […]
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.
Millions of people in African cities are tenants.
The emergence of community organizations of the poor in Africa has been a very important de- velopment during the past two decades.
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.
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.
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
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.
Millions of people in African cities are tenants. Rental housing may be only a partial answer to urban housing problems, but it is an important housing option – especially for the urban poor, and particularly in situations where people are not ready or able to buy or build houses of their own.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
