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Sustainable Cities
Urban issues are increasingly receiving attention in social media websites and
blogs, including UrbanAfrica.net,
a website managed by the ‘State of Cities
in Africa’ programme hosted by UCT’s African Centre for Cities (ACC). Urban
affairs is one strand of UCT’s suite of strategic research initiatives, this one firmly
located in the ACC Signature Theme; careful scrutiny of city governance and
urban livelihoods complements another strategic research thrust, the Safety and
Violence Initiative. Urban affairs also resonate well with UCT’s drive to research
the urbanisation of poverty.
Development Initiative, the Energy Research Centre,
and the Association of African Planning Schools, and
is given impetus by maintaining strong academic and
research links with major urban research groups and
funders in the UK, Europe, and the USA, while new ties
are braiding into Africa, Latin America and India.
During 2012, ACC personnel and affiliates travelled
extensively to speak at conferences and meet colleagues
in Boston, Dakar, Gothenburg, Johannesburg, Lagos,
London, Manchester, Nairobi, New York, Paris,
Stockholm and Tokyo. A large delegation participated
in the World Urban Forum in Naples, a professional
‘shop window’ for urban authorities and practitioners.
Conferences hosted in Cape Town included one on
‘Migration, Urbanization and Food Security in Cities of
the Global South’, with delegates coming from across
Africa as well as from Canada, the Caribbean and India.
D
uring 2012, the African Centre for Cities
continued to spearhead applied urban research
at UCT, and to be a forum for public and scholarly
conversations about pressing urban issues. These
include matters of public service delivery, climate
change and urban resilience, informality, food
security, safety, public housing, public art and public
spaces, flooding risk, public health, and governance.
Urban transportation is the focus of UCT’s Centre
for Transport Studies, and there exist multiple close
linkages between the research of these two units.
The daunting range of livelihood and policy challenges
in all cities of the global South creates an opportunity
to reconsider conventional ways of intervening in urban
affairs, as well as an opportunity to think differently
about cities as places, and how to generate the
appropriate knowledge to make them more liveable,
sustainable and equal.
The ACC is passionately vested in all aspects of
this work, notably through its published research,
and CityLabs and Knowledge Transfer Programmes.
As part of its advisory services, in 2012 the ACC
Director, Professor Edgar Pieterse, was appointed
convenor of the Urban Section of the National Planning
Commission, an initiative of government chaired by
the Minister in The Presidency. ACC staff, together
with other researchers in the Faculty of Engineering &
the Built Environment, work across faculties in a highly
interdisciplinary research programme. This is illustrated
in the strong collaborative links with Environmental
Sciences, Planning, Sociology, the African Climate and
Issues include matters of public
service delivery, climate change and
urban resilience, informality, food
security, safety, public housing, public
art and public spaces, flooding risk,
public health, and governance.