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.
