Search

Path-breaking transformative change is needed in human-environment relations to move towards more sustainable development trajectories at local, national and global scales. Crises may trigger transformative change and learning in the short and in the long term. However, in particular, a short-term response to crises may also be reactive, strengthening established unsustainable practices and further perpetuating vulnerability and inequality rather than supporting transformative change towards a more sustainable path. To understand the nature and response to a crisis in the context of sustainability transformations, this paper elaborates on the following aspects of a crisis: What are the characteristics of a crisis? What and who shapes the narrative(s) of a crisis? What and who shapes the nature of the response to a crisis? Do responses to crises trigger higher levels of learning? Conceptual synthesis is complemented with an exploratory comparative analysis of the Cape Town water crisis and of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. To this end the paper analyzes the interplay between mobilizing individual, collective and relational agency and navigating and transforming power relations to challenge and profit from already weakened unsustainable structures. This approach proves to be promising to understand the role of crises in catalysing and supporting transformative learning to eventually replace unsustainable structures. ● During and immediately after crises, it is important to identify opportunities for policy change to address persistent governance failures. ● To support transformative change towards sustainability, governments typically should adopt a network governance style and act more as a convenor for deliberative processes in the later phase of the response to a crisis. ● Formation of innovation platforms bringing together actors from different levels and different roles (e.g. pioneering innovators, investors, scientists, policymakers, regulators) could support the scaling up of local initiatives and innovative approaches that have been developed during crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the economic risks of climate shocks and climate stressors on spatially heterogeneous cities over time remains highly challenging. The purpose of this paper is to present a practical methodology to assess the economic risks of climate change in middle-income cities to inform municipal climate response strategies. Building on a capital-based framework (CBF), spatially disaggregated baseline and future scenario scores for economic wealth and its exposure to climate change are developed for six different classes of capital across 77 major suburbs in Cape Town, South Africa. Capital-at-risk was calculated by combining relative exposure and capital scores across different scenarios, with population impacted for major suburbs and the city's eight main planning districts. The economic risk assessment presented here provides a generic approach to assist city managers through an enhanced understanding of the relative levels of capital endowment across the city vis-à-vis relative levels of exposure to climate-related hazards over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptually grounded, integrated, city-scale and comparative studies remain rare and are based mostly on meta-reviews of the literature or broad surveys. Conversely, debates about the limitations of incremental or transitional change and exhortations towards more ambitious processes of system or transformative changes are rarely grounded in adequate empirical analysis. Accordingly, this paper examines city-scale plans and actions in order to throw light on these issues in a carefully contextualised Global South-North comparison between Cape Town, South Africa, and Greater Manchester, UK. Cape Town has a considerable pedigree of citywide climate policy and action but achieving cross-departmental integration remains a key challenge, along with operationalisation and monitoring. Greater Manchester has abundant climate ambitions to become a leading European green city, but recent innovative policy processes revealed a lack of capacity and in-house expertise. The comparative analysis therefore focuses on capacity constraints hampering fulfilment of progressive city aspirations that engage with global agendas, and on how they use innovative planning and implementation processes and different forms of knowledge to address integrative or cross-cutting issues, as well as on their relative success to date in doing so in the face of different extents of inequality and power asymmetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The democratic transition in South Africa was accompanied by large-scale institutional re-engineering at all levels of government. This was an extremely complex process in local government, where a racially fragmented system of municipalities underwent extensive reorganisation. Despite this, historical patterns of settlement based on race have entrenched socio-economic inequalities and highly uneven experiences of local democracy. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates the differing roles of ward councillors. It examines a stratified sample of low-, mixed- and high-income wards in the City of Cape Town, and finds general yet qualified support for a view that ward councillor roles are conditioned by the socio-economic character of the areas they represent. In broad terms, councillors in low-income wards play a service broker and conflict mitigator role; councillors in mixed-income wards act as reconcilers and integrators; and councillors in high-income wards perform a placeholder and maintainer role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years several new forms of lodging have developed as alternatives to the hotel. For business travellers the serviced apartment has emerged as a new phenomenon. Within extant accommodation scholarship the service apartment sector has attracted minimal international attention either from tourism or property researchers. This paper analyses the development and character of service apartments in one of South Africa's major business tourism destinations, the city of Cape Town. It is disclosed that serviced apartments are clustered around different business nodes in the city and spatially differentiated in terms of serving distinctive business traveller markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the role of information in disputes over temporary relocations and housing allocation in Delft, Cape Town. Delft is a community with several temporary relocation areas (TRAs), and where massive housing construction takes place. Demands for information and grievances over limited transparency around the future of TRAs and the allocation of housing have become key issues in local politics. Using Mazzarella's work on mediation as an entry point, I explore how information works as a mediator of power in everyday politics. Information can be a resource for exercises of power, while also being something that is mediated in and through local political identities, social relations, and experiences. Depoliticized notions of information as a tool for frictionless development freed from interest-based politics can be perceived as a mode of regulation through which state actors aim to govern communities and regulate citizenship. But in the everyday politics of citizenship, claim-making based on the right to information also underlie political agency and influence multiple political practices in response to such disciplinary powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]