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Business parks have increasingly become part of Cape Town's industrial built environment over the last 25 years. It signifies a shift from large industrial premises to smaller units in communal industrial settings. This paper investigates the types of business activities found in the business parks using the conceptual underpinnings of location theory and industrial cluster theory. Online and fieldwork surveys of the businesses found in 49 business parks in Cape Town, South Africa, were conducted to compile a database of businesses and their activities. Each business was classified using the South African Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes to establish which economic sectors are represented in the business parks. It was found that the predominant economic sectors in business parks were the wholesale and retail trade, which included the repair of motor vehicles, motorcycles and personal and household goods and catering and accommodation, as well as the financial sector consisting of banking, insurance, real estate and business services. Manufacturing activities and commercial, social and personal services were also well represented. The findings indicate that business parks are the popular location for retail-orientated businesses and small manufacturing concerns and affirm the growing importance of the professional and business service sectors. The paper lays the groundwork for further investigation into the multi-scalar economic linkages of firms in business parks in Cape Town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quarried stone has a multitude of uses in the built environment. Often old, abandoned quarries near cities have become enveloped by urban expansion. This paper investigates what becomes of disused quarries, specifically in Cape Town, South Africa. The study is scaffolded by the theoretical underpinnings of urban materiality which, in turn, draws from assemblage theory. It is posited that the urban materialities of quarries, as one-time sites of material extraction, do not cease with closure. The infill, rehabilitation and repurposing of quarries for other uses result in continued contributions of quarries to the urbanscape, in addition to being historical sites of meaning and memory. The location of 77 quarries in Cape Town were mapped using data from various sources. Seventy-one quarries are in a post-extractive state. Thirty-five per cent of disused quarries have not been rehabilitated or altered by human activity after closure. However, they are sites of non-human use. Sixty-five per cent of the post-extractive quarries are sites for housing, commercial and educational activities; for recreational activities; have been infilled; or they store water for agricultural purposes. The reuse of quarries speaks to the creation of new urban materialities and assemblages by humans and non-humans which are worthy of further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary literature on urban agriculture often analyses urban community gardens as 'existing' commons with the capacity to counter neoliberal urban development and resource management practices. However, the existing literature on 'political gardening' generally focuses on cities in North America and Europe, despite the prevalence of urban community gardens and neoliberal planning across other regions, including Southern cities. This paper examines urban community gardens in Cape Town, South Africa to assess their capacity to function as urban commons in six areas: infrastructure, inputs, land, produce, labour and immaterial components. This mixed‐methods study employed questionnaires, semi‐structured interviews and observations across 34 urban community gardens in the city. The findings and analysis demonstrate how the urban community gardens counter neoliberal privatisation and individualisation processes. However, their capacity to function as urban commons is significantly curtailed by an entrenchment within the neoliberal context. Thus, the urban community gardens are framed as 'experimental' commons, a valuable re‐conceptualisation of alternative resource utilisation in neoliberal Southern cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Mass urbanisation in cities of the global South, is causing cities to evolve, with informal settlements being central to this evolution. While local government is the official point of interaction for urban informal settlement dwellers, those interactions are often characterised by a lack of meaningful participation. Engaging with the co-production literature and two case studies of informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper examines how they shed light on the shifting and constantly evolving roles and practices of local government and community actors within a co-production engagement. Based on the findings from these cases, the paper argues that co-production as a practice of collaboration between the local state and citizens can allow for the forging of new relationships, built on trust, sharing of resources and a more equal distribution of power where communities can shape the outcomes of service delivery projects to respond to their needs and demands. [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]

This paper draws principally from COVID-19 diaries written by young women whom we had previously trained as peer researchers in a mobility study of low-income neighbourhoods in Abuja, Cape Town and Tunis. Some live with parents or older extended family members, others have children in their care, but concerns around avoiding contagion have forced all peer researchers to reflect on their everyday socio-spatial mobility practices. This includes whether/how much they need to travel or can substitute virtual for physical travel; which transport mode to take and when; what precautions they must take on the move; what strategies of engagement are required to cope with externally imposed rules and contingencies – and the potential impact of their negotiations, decisions and experiences on the health of those dear to them at home. Reflections on these pandemic-induced responsibilities range from social distancing and mask wearing to issues around handling cash, modes of greeting and travel to funerals. The personal interpretations of responsibility that are reported in individual diaries point to the complexity of entanglements between everyday mobility practices on city streets and negotiated relations of care within the household (and other relational settings) that have emerged and deepened as the COVID story unfolds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inclusion of Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) in global health policies has resulted in significant resource prioritisations in order to treat and prevent the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). MSM policy inclusions and health prioritisations, however, are primarily motivated by an epidemiological understanding of male same‐sex sexual behaviours, based on biological risks associated with HIV infection. Owing to South Africa's high HIV rates and MSM policy prioritisations, we aimed to examine experiences of engagement in urban MSM‐targeted HIV interventions. Qualitative interviews were conducted with participants (n = 20) who previously engaged in MSM‐HIV interventions, across a variety of historically marginalised "township" spaces in Cape Town, South Africa. Interviews were audio‐recorded with the consent of all participants, transcribed verbatim, and verified, and anonymised using alpha‐numeric codes. Data were analysed for core themes and in this paper we describe interactions between biological and social risks that shape city life for MSM in diverse township spaces. When positioned against the background of the Neuropolis, a recent sociological intervention by Des Fitzgerald, Nikolas Rose and Ilina Singh, our results portray urban life among MSM as a form of biological citizenship: (1) constructed by experiences that are constitutive of biosocial stressors, based on (2) health‐seeking attitudes and behaviours, and (3) reinforced through socio‐spatial engagements in peer‐led and community‐based HIV interventions. We conclude by offering critical insight into recent calls for the development of comprehensive and localised peer‐led health programmes as a current void in the geographies of health and sexualities in the global south. In this paper we describe Men who have Sex with Men and their urban experiences associated with HIV/AIDS interventions, and socio‐economic and spatial health inequalities in "townships" across Cape Town, South Africa. MSM's engagement in HIV interventions was examined as a form of urban citizenship that is: (1) constructed by biological and social interactions, (2) based on health‐seeking attitudes and behaviours, and (3) reinforced through peer‐led socio‐spatial relations. We offer critical insights into recent calls for comprehensive urban interventions in Africa as a current void in the geographies of health and sexualities in the global south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International migration has continued to increase over the years. As people relocate to seek opportunities, their hopes and aspirations for a better life become a driving force. The extent to which their expectations are achieved is not documented in South Africa. This paper examines the expectations versus experiences of international immigrants in South Africa using Cameroonian and Democratic Republic of Congo immigrants residing in Cape Town. A qualitative approach with snowball sampling selected key informants from Cameroonian and Congolese nationalities in Cape Town. Results suggest that most immigrants did not meet their expectations for migrating, due to migration policy limitations of the host country exempting them from opportunities. The results align with both the Capability Approach theory and Lee's model of migration. Most of the immigrants showed despondency but do not prefer the option of returning to their home country. This is because they have not attained their goals for migration. The paper recommends that policy discussion between the South African government and stakeholders has become imperative to obtain an informed perspective on the dynamics of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many urban settings around the world the severity of water scarcity has induced changes in household behavior, leading to reduction in the volume of water demanded. One of the most widely used strategies is the adoption of water-saving equipment that collects, stores and eventually treats wastewater from various sources within the household. This paper investigates the factors that drive adoption of water-saving equipment in Cape Town, South Africa, following the catastrophic "Day Zero" water crisis in 2018. First, the paper develops a disaggregated technology diffusion model. Second, we make use of choice experiments to determine the attribute levels and socioeconomic characteristics that influence adoption of water-saving equipment in urban communities in South Africa. Data collected from a sample of 465 representative households in Cape Town are used in a choice modelling framework. Latent class analysis (LCA) is compared with both multinomial logit and conditional logit models to estimate marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for adoption of water-saving equipment. The LCA identified three household classes with distinct preferences, suggesting divergence in adoption of water-saving equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops infrastructural citizenship as an analytical framework that bridges geography's sub‐disciplinary silos. While urban geography promotes infrastructure as a core lens for understanding the city, recognising that political struggles are mediated through infrastructure, discourses of citizenship are rarely employed. Similarly, while political and development geography promote citizenship as vital in understanding socio‐political life, often framed by citizen‐led action to secure basic rights and services, critical debates on urban infrastructure are typically overlooked. Consequently, despite the growth in studies recognising the politicised nature of urban infrastructure and the centrality of citizenship to urban life, the multiple ways that citizenship and infrastructure relate in diverse urban settings has received limited critical attention. This paper demonstrates how urban dwellers' relationship to public infrastructure in the domestic spaces of the home and settlement, and the temporal scale of the everyday, offers a representation of broader political identities and perceptions, framed through the language of citizenship. In South Africa, despite 25 years of significant post‐apartheid public investment in housing and services, frustration at poor service delivery and beneficiary (mis)use of public infrastructure remains dominant. While citizens adapt and consume public infrastructure in ways deemed "illegal" and "uncivil" by the state, citizens view these actions as a legitimate form of "citizenship‐in‐action" in the context of rapid urbanisation and poverty, and are frustrated by perceptions of state neglect. Using the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship, the paper reveals how this state–society disjuncture represents a citizenship mismatch that is embodied in infrastructure, rather than a material product of state disinterest or citizen destruction per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Globally, over 95% of fire related deaths and injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries. Within informal settlements, the risk of fire resulting in injury or death is particularly high. This paper examines fire risks in informal settlements in New Delhi and Cape Town, and tented informal settlements in Lebanon. Design/methodology/approach: Our analysis draws on primary sources, secondary literature, statistical data and qualitative interviews. Findings: The distribution of fire risk across urban societies is a fundamentally political issue. Residential fire risk can be tackled by accessible, affordable, safety-compliant housing. That said, important interim measures can be taken to mitigate fire risk. Some of the risks requiring attention are similar across our case studies, driven by high population densities; flammable housing materials; unreliable or inaccessible access to safe power sources; and – in the case of Cape Town and New Delhi particularly – the inability of fire services to reach sites of fire. However, these common risks are embedded in distinct social, economic and political contexts that must be placed at the center of any intervention. Interventions must also be aware that the risk of fire is not spread evenly within informal settlements, intersecting as it does with factors like gender, age, health and disability. Originality/value: Informal settlement fires have been under-studied to date. The studies that do exist tend to operate within disciplinary silos. This paper represents an important interdisciplinary approach to fire within informal settlements, which grounds technical data, modeling and experiments in political, social and economic realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end‐users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno‐fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyday life in African cities and beyond. Building on this work, we deploy the concepts of "micro‐worlds" and "migrant infrastructure" to make sense of the complex networks of actors, practices, regulations, and materialities that shape remittance worlds. To ground the work, we narrate two vignettes of remittance service providers who operate in Cape Town, South Africa, serving the Congolese diaspora community. We showcase the important role of logistics companies in the "informal" provision of remittance services and the rise of fintech companies operating in the remittance space. These vignettes give substance to the messy and relational dynamics of remittance micro‐worlds. This relationality allows us to see how remittances are circulations, not unidirectional flows; how they are not split between formal and informal, but in fact intersect in blurry ways; how digital technologies are central to the story of migrant infrastructures; and how migrants themselves are compositional of these networks. In doing so, we tell a more relational story about how remittance systems are constituted and configured. This paper aims to give substance to the dynamic micro‐world of remittances in the context of Cape Town's Congolese diaspora. Using two vignettes of transnational mobile money providers, we show that remittances: are circulations, rather than unidirectional flows; are neither distinctly formal nor informal in nature; deploy digital technologies in emergent ways; and require the active agency of migrants themselves in their composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using ideas from the mobilites/transfer and policy learning literatures, this paper unpacks how system factors and socio-cognitive behaviours of policy actors create conditions of policy absence. Whilst mobilities/transfer studies have ballooned over the years thanks in part to continuously evolving global communication and travel systems, these studies have tended to overwhelmingly focus on sites where policies are present. For the most part, sites where policies are absent, rejected, de-activated, redirected or failed have received little attention. This paper responds to recent calls for scholars to focus on places where best-practice policy models are absent by employing the presence of Business Improvement Districts in Cape Town as an empirical lens to understand policy absence in Accra. The paper relies on a combination of literature review, discourse analyses and semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate that presences and absences of urban policies are conditions of prevailing political, social and economic perturbations in a country. Additionally, at the local level, the exercise of power, dominance, opinions, attitudes and values by actors equally contribute to creating policy presence or absence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many cities are experiencing increasing water resource stress. In Cape Town, South Africa, surface water supplies are at a record low due to a multi-year drought crisis which began in 2015. This paper analyzes the range of motivations, possibilities and obstacles related to diversifying Cape Town's water supply system through the upscaling of groundwater resources. Drawing on insights from local experts, it is maintained that uncertainty surrounding groundwater and drought-management practices present significant barriers to Cape Town's ongoing water diversification efforts. This paper provides further insight and discussion for future water planning in Cape Town, as well as for other urban, water-scarce, regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-conflict and divided cities where urban spatial injustice is reinforced by enduring divisions, the frameworks of spatial intersectionality and transformative justice hold significant potential to address inequity through urban planning. All cities can be considered divided in some way and these divisions often represent spatial injustice or inequitable access to resources and space. However, in post-conflict and divided cities these divisions may be entrenched and may transgenerationally maintain conditions of inequity and violence. This paper presents spatial intersectionality and transformative justice as frameworks for urban planning that have the potential to address inequity and divisions in all cities, but particularly in cities catergorised as divided due to violence or conflict. I propose a set of guiding questions for transformative justice informed urban planning. • Spatial intersectionality can help identify how structures of inequality restrict movement and use of cities. • Applying transformative justice to urban planning can address the roots of social and structural inequity. • The two frameworks are complementary and can broaden the scope of urban planning to address inequity, violence, and division. [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]

Cities undergo constant change and their industrial spaces are particularly impacted on by new technologies, changing industries and the vagaries of the global and national economies. This paper reports on an investigation of the changing commercial and industrial landscape in Cape Town, South Africa, by focussing on commercial park spaces, specifically those that have been purposely named as business parks, industrial parks and office parks. The study is grounded in the literature on the changing spatial economy of Cape Town. A comprehensive database of commercial parks was created from a host of online sources and documents as well as a field survey. The spatial distribution of commercial parks was analysed in relation to the 11 districts mapped by a previous spatial economic study of the city. It was found that while the commercial parks were predominantly located in four districts, a nuanced locational analysis of the three different types of parks provided evidence of subtle differences in their distribution. The commercial parks are located both in traditional industrial suburbs and in newer commercial spaces and, although most are new developments, some are housed in old industrial spaces that have been converted. Almost half of the commercial parks are managed as sectional title schemes which mirror the management model of gated communities. Purposely named commercial parks are essentially a post-apartheid phenomenon as the majority are post-1994 developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have argued that the technocratic apparatus of development is sustained – and not undermined – by its fallacies. Building on previous failures, development experts envision new plans, new analytical tools and new modes of governance. One recent example is the bottom-of-the-pyramid approach (BOP), a development doctrine predicated on the failure of previous anti-poverty approaches and based on the creation of products, services and entrepreneurial opportunities for the poor. Critically bracketed as a hallmark of millennial neoliberalism in the Global South, BOP projects, like previous development schemes, fail too. Through the narration of two experiments that, in 2015, had failed to create profit at the bottom of the pyramid in Cape Town (South Africa), this paper focuses on how development expertise makes sense of and engages the lack of profitability at the BOP, showing that failure is an important entry point into the actually existing forms of neoliberal anti-poverty enterprises in the Global South. Using J. K. Gibson-Graham's feminist economic geography framing, this article argues that neoliberal doctrines themselves sank these market experiments, whilst opening possibilities for development experts to engage alternative economic forms that stemmed from their failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cape Town (South Africa) provides a unique setting to critique the myriad forces producing the varied, contextual conditions of water security. In post-apartheid Cape Town, water is considered a constitutional right and all citizens are guaranteed free minimum access. Despite this progress, water security is often fragmented and personalized. This paper examines the perspectives and experiences of residents in Langa township following the 'Day Zero' event of 2018. Embedded in the optics of the crisis we found differentiated dimensions of security more reflective of the apartheid era. Our findings illustrate the need for adaptive water governance to promote water justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly research has shown the importance of moments of crisis, in particular the direct aftermath of urban crises, as opportunities to learn about urban vulnerabilities. However, if it is widely assumed that learning is important, in particular for resilience-building, we still know very little about how such learning occurs in a moment of crisis. This paper starts addressing this gap, arguing that moments of crisis constitute a specific type of 'learning space'. This proposition is taken forward through the analysis of a large-scale (social and humanitarian) urban crisis in the city of Cape Town. The paper maps out the emergence of multi-stakeholder knowledge networks throughout the crisis management process and explores the extent to which these were embedded into city-wide learning infrastructures after the crisis. It shows that moments of crisis represent an opportunity for ephemeral transsectorial knowledge coalitions to come about around issues that are made visible through the crisis itself. This can also be seen as an opportunity for potential learning spaces to open up. [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]

Created in 2002 in Cape Town by Ntone Edjabe, Chimurenga is a multidimensional project that combines a print magazine, a workspace, a platform for editorial and curatorial activities, an online library, and a radio station (the Pan-African Space Station). Based on collaborative ethnographic research with the Chimurenga team, this paper discusses the collection, production and creation of an archive about Pan-African festivals that this collective has developed through their cultural activities. After a brief overview of Festival of Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC) which took place in Lagos in 1977, and the history of Pan-African festivals, I describe the materials collected by Chimurenga and the projects in which they have participated. By following the travelling routes which have led to this informal and unstable collection of materials, I highlight how Chimurenga's work contributes to challenging the idea of the archive, transformed through their practice into a dynamic and generative medium. I consider how the archive and memory of FESTAC is spread by Chimurenga in global and local spheres, and how it is used to produce new cultural and art forms in the present day, scrambling boundaries between past, present and future to perform a Pan-African transtemporal space in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While urban divisions are commonly emphasized in urban studies, there has been less emphasis on reproductions and contestations of divides within marginal urban spaces. This paper explores the dynamics of juxtaposed differences related to housing and urban citizenship in Delft, Cape Town. Delft is a microcosm of thirty years of official housing interventions in post-apartheid South Africa. It is also a space in which differences of urban formality and informality and of permanence and temporariness co-exist, and where housing is at the centre of community politics. This is driven by residents' perceptions, interpretations and negotiations of differentiated housing rights and opportunities, residential categories and identities and notions of belonging. A particular manifestation of juxtaposed material and temporal differences in housing infrastructure is the construction of temporary relocation areas (TRAs). The multifaceted challenges with the TRAs in Delft illustrate the political nature of housing infrastructure as reported by (Lemanski 2019a, b) and how citizen-making is shaped in and through articulations of formality and informality, and of permanence and temporariness. This informs a politics of citizenship where the precariousness of permanent temporariness as reported by (Yiftachel 2009) for those living in the TRAs is set against those whose right to secure housing is realized, giving them recognition and permanence as 'proper' citizens. These dynamics may simultaneously inform rights-based claims to citizenship through collective struggles and individual actions, and localized forms of exclusion from the project of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lack of scholarship on gang leaving in Cape Town, South Africa creates the impression that joining gangs is a death sentence. However, this paper shows that gang members can disengage, even amidst the scarcity of an emerging city. It combines life history research with Ebaugh's (2013) role exit theory in an analysis of the disengagements of 24 former gang participants. Research considers the various stages of out-of-gang transitions, profiling the drivers and impediments to gang exit. Specific focus is placed on understanding how violence both catalyzes and challenges out-of-gang transition during the differential processes of disengagement. Findings indicate a lengthy and challenging transitional process from the point the first doubts emerge to the time a person successfully becomes an ex-gangster. Progress through different phases of gang exit is generally uneven and unpredictable, and carried out in a context with significant social, economic, and security challenges. Still, those interviewed for this study offer compelling examples to show that disengagement is possible. Their journeys yield insights that can be leveraged to design better informed efforts to reduce gang violence—whether in Cape Town, or in other similarly inequality prone and insecure cities around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on urban agriculture as a source of social capital amongst local communities in African cities through a case-study of Mitchells Plain, a low-income neighborhood in the Cape Flats region of Cape Town, South Africa. A mixed-methods approach, combining a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with urban gardeners, as well as interviews with officials was undertaken. The findings show that urban agriculture increases social interaction among urban gardeners and the community. They also show that non-governmental organizations and government actors are crucial in enhancing social interaction within the community. Therefore, these findings have implications for development practitioners who continue supporting and encouraging the uptake of urban agriculture by residents of Mitchells Plain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Cape Town, as in other cities of the Global South, the paradigms of millennial development are continuously mobilized in specific material ways. The idea that poverty can be fought with profit is manifest in a series of urban experiments that involve informal entrepreneurs, corporations, real estate developers, local architects, economists, non-governmental organizations and state agencies, in the search for market solutions to economic marginality. To illustrate this argument about the spatial politics of development, this paper charts the architectural, organizational and pedagogical making of Philippi Village, a building complex in one of Cape Town's poorest neighbourhoods. A former cement factory turned into an entrepreneurial hub, Philippi Village is a material inscription, at the so-called bottom of the pyramid, of the possibility of expanding the frontiers of accumulation. However, while this entrepreneurial village may be a brownfield site for new forms of profit, its architectures also reveal the diverse economic rationalities that emerge from the quest of good entrepreneurship, including the politics of seeking spatial justice amid the urban legacies of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cape Town is home to a series of extreme disjunctive arrangements of wealth and poverty. Key to understanding the city is the deep inscription of historical injustice and its expression in contemporary forms of social injustice. In the paper that follows, we report on conversations with four indispensable commentators on the contemporary state of the city: artist Thania Petersen, architect and artist Ilze Wolff, museum practitioner Bonita Bennett, and heritage practitioner Calvyn Gilfellan. These conversations occur at a particular moment in South African life and being: in the aftermath of the Zuma presidency, in the aftermath of #RhodesMustFall, in the context of the perceived failure of the project of non-racialism, in the context of growing frustration over the intractability of historical inequality and the slow pace of change, and amid a heated national debate around the ANC government's draft land expropriation bill. A common set of themes and preoccupations emerge: questions around race and religion; history, representation, and restitution; memory and forgetting; social justice and the abiding presence of historical injustice. Thinking inside and outside of the disciplines of art, architecture, and museum and heritage practice, these conversations present an accumulated body of wisdom and insight that might also be read as a transcript on the contemporary state of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Viable alternatives to paratransit corporatization and contracting exist. • Alternatives appear much more affordable to the City, but offer less service quality control. • Small-scale interventions could provide quick QoS wins and build trust between government and industry. Cities across the Global South are seeking to improve public transport services, but the presence of large numbers of independent paratransit operators complicate reforms. City officials often seek to eliminate paratransit services in favor of scheduled services; but such reforms have proven impossible to achieve. Cape Town is one such city, whose planning officials are now reconsidering the approach to 'industry transition'. Realizing that the transition and operating costs of new scheduled services are unsustainable, the City has acknowledged a continued role for paratransit services. The question this raises is how paratransit should be integrated and, more specifically, how paratransit should complement scheduled services at transfer points. This paper reports on findings from a stated choice survey administered to paratransit drivers to understand opinions on potential reforms that the City might use to address issues of mismatched service span and long off-peak headways in service provided by paratransit operators. The research seeks to assist operators in sharing their perspectives outside of a City-structured engagement process and to assist City officials in understanding what reform paths will be most feasible based on driver acceptability and cost to the City. Results show that alternatives to the corporatization of paratransit services are viable and appear to be more affordable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informalization and casualization have been twin meta-trends in African development over the last several decades. However these processes are also now being articulated with, and altered by, processes of virtual accumulation and informationalization, giving rise to what some have called Uberization. What does the rise of the 'sharing' economy mean for employment practices and labor relations and conditions in Africa? This paper examines the implications of this phenomenon through a case study of 'ride sharing' operations in Cape Town. It finds hollowing out of the formal sector and the creation of a new (in)formal sector, where drivers are engaged through use of a mobile phone applications, but are still liable for taxes to the state. This has led to the emergence of a new form of 'virtual capital' which extracts 'value' from assets it doesn't own, and labor it doesn't manage. [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 the prolific contemporary discussions on the right to the city, little attention has been paid to the multifaceted political meaning of the reshaping of city dwellers' rights, duties and responsibilities through regularisation processes inspired by neoliberal logics. This paper fills in this gap by engaging in an analysis of the dialectical relation between the political dimension of everyday life, urban rights, neoliberal urban policies and political emancipation. We thereby break from a radical reading of Lefebvre's notion and from a focus on political mobilisation in order to cast a new light on the debate on the right to the city. Three regularisation policies, all linked to the affirmation of a commercial or fiscal relationship to the state are considered through a cross-case analysis: the regularisation that followed the forced displacement of street traders in central Accra; an in situ process of regularisation of street trading in a Cape Town central market; the regularisation of electricity services in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a policy that seeks to re-establish a commercial relationship with favela residents by redefining their rights and responsibilities as registered customers of a private electricity provider. We resort to an exploratory notion, the actual right to the city, to examine how these forms of administrative regularisation have reshaped urban life. We argue that these processes of regularisation convey de-politicisation dynamics, such as the fragmentation and individualisation of political identities, along with the possible re-politicisation of certain stakes, such as the strengthening of individual and collective political expectations toward the State. This tension is due to the ambiguous nature of the new social and spatial contract between State and citizens emerging from regularisation. Beyond the necessary analysis of political struggles against neoliberal policies, and the essential assessment of their impact on urban inequalities, we therefore call for a better consideration of the ambiguous and less visible political impact of processes of selective inclusion and recognition by the State on the way city dwellers envision their rights and duties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses attention on the fortunes of Darwin's theory among the English-speaking community in Cape Colony during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The paper begins with a review of early encounters with Darwin dwelling particularly on the response of figures like Roderick Noble - professor and editor of the Cape Monthly Magazine , the geologist John Shaw, and Sir Henry Barkly, governor of the colony. Besides these more theoretical responses, Darwin's ideas were also mobilised in a range of scientific inquiries on such subjects as birds and butterflies. But most conspicuous was the use of evolutionary thought-forms in the work of the eminent philologist Wilhelm Bleek, cousin of Darwin's leading German apologist, Ernst Haeckel. The prevailing sense is of a liberal intelligentsia calmly interacting with a novel theory with all due deference. During the 1870s, an address by Langham Dale at the South African Public Library injected new energy into the Darwin discussion. Dale expressed disquiet over some of the anthropological implications of evolution as well as its apparent reductionism, and this stimulated a range of reactions. Several anonymous commentators responded but the most sustained evaluation of Dale's position emanated from the Queenstown physician and later politician, Sir William Bisset Berry. Then, in 1874, copious extracts from John Tyndall's infamous 'Belfast Address' were printed in the Cape Monthly and this added yet further impetus to the debate. Tyndall's seeming materialism bothered a number of readers, not least Hon William Porter, former attorney-general of Cape Colony. To figures like these the materialist extrapolations of radical Darwinians such as Haeckel were deeply disturbing, not just for religious reasons, but because they seemed to destabilise the moral and pedagogic progressivism that lay at the heart of their civilising credo. While reservations about Darwin's proposals were certainly audible, taken in the round Darwinian conversations among the English-speaking literati at the Cape were conducted with liberal sentiments, not least when evolutionary science approached questions of race. For Darwin's writings were seen to confirm a monogenetic account of the origin and unity of the human race, and could readily be called upon to justify the paternalistic ideology that governed colonial affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the urban enclave in Cape Town known as De Waterkant, this paper examines the product and process of 'quartering' urban space-shaping urban space as the locus for the symbolic framing of culture. This paper advances recent studies of De Waterkant by applying the concept of quartering to understand urban change in an African context. Complicating existing research on De Waterkant, the findings show that the area has witnessed four distinct quartered identities including an ethnic quartering which was dismantled under apartheid, a Bohemian quartering that changed racial dynamics and improved housing stock, a 'gay village' quartering that engaged sexual identity performance as a strategy for place making and most recently a consumer lifestyle quartering that exhibited new notions of citizenship and consumption. This paper advances theorisation of how quartering as a process is articulated through the application of discursive and material tropes to the urban fabric of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing consensus suggests that urban scholarship can benefit from engaging with knowledge in multiple sites in and beyond the academy, for instance with activism central to politics in cities worldwide. This paper explores narratives of urban politics produced with activists to reflect on how we account for knowledge and practice in theorising the urban as political terrain. Research conducted with activists in a community-based ‘Civic’ organisation in Cape Town, South Africa highlights the everyday toil that shapes resistance and its politics, the frictions and engagements behind protest headlines. In opening up theorisations of activism and revolution to the knowledge practices of movements, the paper argues we may more cogently take account of the strategic and intimate politics that characterise contemporary activism, and reshape notions of ‘revolution’, urban politics and research practice in contemporary cities, a project broadly relevant in the Global South and North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are increasingly recognised as places in which climate change risks coalesce and from which climate change adaptation efforts are most likely to be mobilised. In an effort to reduce damages from storm surges and sea-level rise, the City of Cape Town municipal government set out to establish a coastal set-back line. This paper describes the process and highlights the potential for unanticipated conflict and resistance when notions of ‘best practice’ fail to consider local institutional interests and pre-existing legislation. This insight is important as coastal municipalities in South Africa look to implement set-back lines in compliance with the Integrated Coastal Management Act (Act 24 of 2008). McKenna et al. [McKenna, J., Cooper, A., & O'Hagan, A.M., Managing by principle: A critical analysis of the european principles of integrated coastal zone management (ICZM).Marine Policy, 32, 941–955. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2008.02.005] elucidate the potential for conflicts and contradictions when applying the principles of Integrated Coastal Zone Management in Europe. Developing and a applying a set-back line for Cape Town's coastline was anticipated to be difficult given that the city remains socio-economically unequal and spatially segregated and that the coastline provides multiple different communities with amenities, resources and opportunities at the same time. What was not anticipated was the encountered resistance from within public sector directorates operating under the same policies. The paper suggests that differences in mentalities, technologies and resources (following Wood, J., and Shearing, C., (2007)Imagining security.Devon: Willan Publishing) make for subjective policy interpretations and applications by local officials. Recognising and managing these differences is critical if notions of ‘best practice’ prescribed at higher governance levels are to prove useful to climate change adaptation measures at the local scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of the ‘polycentric urban region’ has been popularised both as a theoretical concept for understanding regional urban systems in an era of reduced transport and communication costs, and as a normative policy objective in its own right. This paper explores its relevance to the rapidly urbanising Cape Town city-region. First, empirical evidence for the emergence of polycentric regional development patterns was considered. Shifts in relative settlements sizes (morphological polycentrism) over the period 1991–2011 were examined using population data, and patterns of inter-settlement interactions (functional polycentrism) were explored by analysing commuting information. Contrary to expectations, trends toward polycentric development were found to be weak. Second, the paper considers the relevance and value of polycentric development thinking for regional economic and spatial planning policy, concluding that there are insufficient grounds for policy intervention aimed at encouraging polycentric regional development or countering the dominance of Cape Town in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through the lens of South Africa’s informal settlements, this paper explores the intersections between plans, practices and materiality. These three arenas are each presented as uniquely agentic, contributing to plural configurations. In doing so, this work questions a prevalent tendency to frame governance/government solely as relationships between state and non-state actors. By reintroducing the agency and power of matter and materiality, not as adjunct or background, but as a critical technology of government and/in place, this work contributes to a growing debate within the (emerging) urban socio-technical systems literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the findings of the study that investigated the relevance of the theoretical approach and the usefulness of the theory of information worlds to study the information behaviour of people living in a small world, in this case, the South African city of Cape Town. Using the information world theory, the study shed light on the complexity of the phenomenon of immigrant information behaviour. From the findings of the study it was clear that African immigrants use formal and informal sources of information, from interpersonal sources, the Internet, the mass media, to public libraries and non-governmental organisations. The findings further confirm that, owing to language barriers and the unfamiliarity of the area, African immigrants upon arrival in South Africa tend to rely on friends, relatives and the Internet for information. Over the course of time as they become more familiar with the area, their information sources change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western Cape Province of South Africa has a Mediterranean climate of winter rainfall and hot, dry summers. The rivers have all been dammed to manage the available water resources. Every year at the end of summer, water restrictions are enforced by fines by the municipality in Cape Town, to ensure economies to eke out the dwindling reserves until the winter rains set in. The paper describes the situation in the 2017 dry season and examines possible solutions to the chronic water shortage such as use of ground water, desalination of sea water and recycling of waste water. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been growing interest in the use of urban agriculture to address food insecurity and poverty in Cape Town. This reflects debates on urban agriculture in the global south. In the north, growing food in cities has been tended to be framed in terms of its social benefits. This paper investigates the perceived benefits of urban agriculture in projects in Seawinds and Vrygrond in Cape Town. Using the concept of metabolic rift is argues for connections between northern and southern constructions of urban agriculture. This approach enables connections to be seen between the practice in seemingly different areas without losing the local context. The paper argues that by using this integrated approach, projects may be more sustainable and ultimately provide both clearer social and economic benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A sociocultural approach to the analysis of migrant identity and multilingualism. • A qualitative study of Congolese youth in Cape Town. • Young multilingual migrants, their peer and sociocultural networks and practices. • Analysis demonstrate how language, identity, and vulnerability are stylized. • Illustrates sociocultural stylization of language and identity interactions. This paper takes a sociocultural approach to the analysis of migrant identity and multilingual negotiations among young Congolese migrants in Cape Town. The data for this study draws on a qualitative interactional study of Congolese youth in Cape Town, South Africa. These youth form part of a migration class that have shaped immigration sociolinguistic practices in the Global South. They arrived in South Africa at a young age with their parents and have to date been significantly exposed to the local sociocultural dynamics of language and identity practices and negotiations. In this paper we demonstrate that the task faced by these young migrants is to immerse in education, peer and cultural networks and practices that help shape their new identities in the host country, and sustain links to their country of origins (Congo). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political ecologists have considered the sociomateriality of diverse hybrids and the metabolism and circulation of urban flows such as water, food and waste. Adding alcohol to this list enhances our understanding of the geography of alcohol as well as the theory of sociomateriality. Viewing alcohol as a sociomaterial hybrid draws attention to the power-laden, dynamic processes which shape its flow, rather than considering it as already in place. Additionally, my examination of alcohol calls attention to aspects of sociomateriality which are widely relevant but underexplored in the literature: the role of friction in shaping flows; the need to examine microscale impacts of sociomateriality on the body and community; and the conditional impacts of complex, unpredictable sociomaterial hybrids. I use a case study of alcohol in Cape Town to examine how alcohol flows, encounters friction, flows over boundaries and shapes sociability and harm in complex, indeterminate ways. Studies of alcohol typically focus on either its negative impacts on health and wellbeing or positive impacts on economic development, while policy debates focus on whether and how to control access. In this paper, I move beyond these binaries to provide a more nuanced, grounded articulation of how alcohol flows and what inhibits its flow. I examine the distribution of power and agency, limitations of state regulation, willingness of community members to act outside of and with little fear of the law, and the specificity of alcohol as a highly desirable commodity which easily flows around artificial barriers. These insights help clarify relationships, power and the (in)efficacy of policy efforts, and suggest the need to refocus debates. The paper is unable to provide specific policy recommendations, but instead argues that a better understanding of flows and frictions can move the focus from alcohol control to reducing alcohol-related harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an analysis of how visual and musical aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, as creolization, and ethnically specific 'heritage', and how the self-stylization is employed in asserting a linguistic-cultural 'identity'. This is done through an investigation of the aesthetics and politics of the 'hip-hopera' Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three-week run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in South Africa and abroad and the documentary by a Cape Town film maker. Dylan Valley's [2011. Afrikaaps. Directed by Dylan Valley. Amsterdam: Plexus Films/The Glasshouse] film follows this group of local artists creating the stage production as they trace the roots of Afrikaans to KhoiSan and slaves in the Cape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a reflection on 15 years of policy change in the City of Cape Town aimed at fostering sustainability from the perspective of a City practitioner. The persistent continuation of unsustainable outcomes, despite ongoing policy reforms, is understood as a combination of the emergence of wicked problems, within a changing local government mandate, in the absence of a transformation of institutional structures, tools and approaches. While the approach to policy reform in Cape Town has focussed on reducing substantive uncertainty through its knowledge-based approach, we show that in the context of an expanding local government mandate, sustainability becomes an aspect of many departments’ directive resulting in strategic uncertainty. The untransformed traditional line-function-based structure of local government in turn works against integration between departments (fundamental for addressing non-linear wicked problems), thus promoting institutional uncertainty. In addressing this combination of strategic and institutional uncertainty, our findings indicate that integration has to happen in the policy stage in order for sustainability principles to be implemented in relevant departments; that implementation requires resourcing across the institution, and ought to be included in departments’ targets; and that competing and conflicting rationalities underpin the policy–practice gap. It is suggested that a first step in breaking down the strategic and institutional uncertainties would be to foster shared values through creating deliberative spaces within the City in which debate, discussion and learning can occur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to explore the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscape of contemporary Cape Town. The kramat sites have been proclaimed as heritage sites because of their importance as tangible signs of Islam at the Cape. At the same time, the process of the kramats becoming heritage sites has contained moments of intense, often sensational, public contestation. Offering a reading of the discourses surrounding two contested kramats in Cape Town, this paper explores the way kramats mark out a miraculous space in the prosaic modern city and introduce into the post-apartheid evaluation of heritage, alternative conceptions of space and notions of temporality. They are sites of impossibility where, it is claimed, the laws of nature themselves are interrupted to mark the intangible particularities of the site. This paper explores what happens when this miraculous space is subject to the demands of private property and municipal law and the conflicts that arise from this collision of different conceptual and experiential modalities. It considers the effects of the entanglement of legend and history that result from the production of these sites as heritage in a market-driven economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soccer has often been hailed as a key motivator in rehabilitation and restoration work with young people in difficult circumstances and for overcoming street life. Across much of Africa, the literature identifies many urban public places as play spaces for poor children who have limited alternative access to parks and playgrounds. 'The street' has regularly been transformed into a soccer pitch, as a space where children have easy access. Against this backdrop, South Africa's success at securing the 2010 World Cup bid, may be viewed as an opportunity to demonstrate the uplifting achievements of team sports for impoverished youth, yet at the same time, is juxtaposed against the removal of young people from the city streets, with little consideration of the impact on their lives. This paper draws on qualitative research with over 50 street children and 30 street youth aged between 10 and 28 from Cape Town's city centre. Using key narratives, it demonstrates how vagrant young people are being excluded from the city in an effort to clean up the streets. The paper ends with a consideration of these measures for young people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper provides an assessment on the structural living conditions of selected government-subsidized low-cost housing settlements in the City of Cape Town and the associated health conditions of the inhabitants. Almost all of these houses have one or more informal dwellings in the backyard. Four subsidized housing communities were selected within the City of Cape Town in this cross sectional survey. Structured interviews were administered in 336 dwellings on 173 plots. Data was obtained from 1080 persons with a response rate of 100%. The vast majority of the main houses had two (38%) or three (48%) structural problems and 99% of the home owners could not afford repairs to the home. The integrity of the walls of the dwelling structure was problematic, showing large visible cracks. None of the walls were plastered causing rainwater to penetrate during rainstorms. During an inspection of the sanitation facilities in the home, 58% of toilets were non-operational, 66% of the bathrooms did not have toilet paper but had a supply of old newspaper instead, while 82% of the bathrooms did not have soap available to wash hands. At present the design of these low-cost housing schemes contribute to an increased risk of communicable diseases, rather than an improvement. The recipients of these houses were previously disadvantaged and their sanitation behaviour is inter alia shaped by the amenities at their disposal. The designers of low-cost houses should take serious note of the pathways of disease created by the provision and layout of sanitation-associated structures. The design of low-cost housing should not force the inhabitants of such houses into unsafe habits because of poor provision or poor layout of basic amenities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do male youngsters growing up on the Cape Flats in Cape Town avoid violence in their everyday lives? When are they perceived as a risk and at risk, and how is their way of navigating in those situations related to negotiations of social change? This paper seeks to explore, by way of insights generated through ethnographic fieldwork, how young males coming of age in townships around Cape Town navigate courses of action in contexts of endemic violence - contexts in which they are ambiguously at risk and are themselves perceived as sources of risk. It investigates a set of identifiable strategies for managing the implications of violence in pursuit not only of self-preservation, but also of core projects and values of future-making, and argues that the dichotomy between being at risk and being a risk does not counter for the intersubjective character of the process of navigating terrains of violence. In examining four differently located actors living on the Cape Flats, the paper seeks to counter more conventional analyses of such youth as a thoroughly 'high-risk' group of victims and perpetrators. It suggests that this picture may be rethought by means of a qualitative, grounded focus on the large number of young men who manage to live relatively 'normal' lives in highly challenging circumstances. Such an approach serves not merely to balance an excessive preoccupation with the production of violent masculine subjects; it also shifts the analytic focus to a concern with the manner in which actors navigate their way with respect to the complex implications of 'violence', which should itself be viewed as an ambiguous, multi-faceted social force, as both a structural characteristic and a means that can be harnessed by those experiencing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]