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It is well established that urban community gardens (UCGs) can either challenge or reinforce neoliberal urbanism. This duality is especially evident among UCGs that sell garden harvests for income generation. In this article I therefore examine UCGs in low‐income areas of Cape Town, South Africa, to understand how they might sell their harvests while countering the neoliberal food system in cities of the global South. I draw on qualitative fieldwork, including observations and semi‐structured interviews with UCG representatives and civil society actors. Most harvests are currently sold to high‐end venues through intermediary actors in civil society organizations (CSOs) and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). However, this approach disregards the local community's socioeconomic conditions and undermines community gardens' nutritional objectives. Yet, under specific scenarios, the sale of garden harvests could mitigate the persistent food injustice in Cape Town's low‐income areas. In this article I introduce a model for harvest sales that advances sustainable urban agriculture and fosters food justice in neoliberal cities in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under conditions of globalization large cities present unique challenges for poverty reduction and the realization of rights. The urbanization of poverty also underscores the imperative of downscaling the emerging debate about the developmental state to the city scale. The arguments in this article start from the proposition that a universal rights agenda can and should be fulfilled as an alternative to neoliberal aspirations, and that to achieve this development action will be needed on a series of different scales. The article is structured in three main parts. The first section explores the implications for the state of adopting a rights-based agenda in the urban context, giving particular emphasis to defining those rights whose meaning arises from settlement planning or management-based policies and interventions on the individual, household, neighbourhood and more macro-environmental scale (what we call 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation rights or the ‘right to the city’). The second part of the article is dedicated to illustrating the particular nature of how rights to the city are blocked or achieved, using the experiences of the Greater Cape Town area. The final section of the article makes a more general case for a more radical rights-based agenda for cities. Résumé Dans un environnement mondialisé, les grandes villes présentent des problèmes particuliers de réduction de la pauvreté et de concrétisation des droits. De plus, l’urbanisation de la pauvreté met en avant la nécessité impérative de ramener au niveau de la ville l’échelle du débat naissant sur ‘l’État en développement’. Les arguments partent ici de la proposition selon laquelle un programme de droits universels peut et devrait être réalisé en tant qu’alternative aux aspirations néolibérales et que, pour ce faire, il faudra des actions de développement sur une série d’échelles différentes. La première partie de l’article explore les implications, pour l’État, d’adopter un projet basé sur des droits dans le contexte urbain; ce faisant, elle souligne l’importance de définir ces droits dont la signification naît de politiques ou d’interventions sur l’aménagement de l’habitat ou basées sur la gestion, à la fois à l’échelon de l’individu, du foyer, du quartier et d’un environnement plus vaste (ce que nous appelons respectivement les droits de 2ème, 3ème et 4ème génération ou ‘droit à la ville’). La deuxième partie illustre la manière particulière dont les droits à la ville sont soit bloqués soit atteints, à partir des expériences de Greater Cape Town. La dernière partie défend plus généralement un programme pour les villes qui soit basé sur des droits et plus radical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The virtuosity of Karen Bakker's book, Privatizing Water, lies in its depth of understanding and methodical assessment of water provision, its refusal to lapse into the easy embrace of entrenched dichotomies, and its relentless commitment to asking how we can find solutions to urban water crises that are workable and just. Bakker strives to extend this notion of justice to both the human and non-human realms. Whether she succeeds is moot, because 'ecological rights', as Bakker terms them, ultimately remain firmly bound to the anthropocentric: the future possibility of 'human' and 'community' rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work in the field of differential urbanisation in South Africa was first done in the late 1980s. The South African studies prompted further research in this field which subsequently led to the development of the differential urbanisation model. The model explains how groups of small towns, medium–sized cities and large metropolitan areas go through successive periods of fast and slow growth in a continuum of development that spans the evolution of urban systems in developed and developing countries. In this study an attempt was made to further test the relevancy of some elements of the model within the South African context. Looking at population redistribution trends from different angles, the study results show that the conclusion drawn during the first two studies, namely that the South African urban system seems to have approached the polarisation reversal phase of development during the 1980s was in fact correct. The study also shows that caution should be exercised when applying the model to actual case studies. The temporal model (graph) refers to an ideal situation where urban areas are evenly distributed in an area with relatively evenly distributed natural endowments. In real life it is important that local circumstances and the history of urban growth and decline in the growth patterns of groups of cities be carefully taken into account when the phase of development of an urban system is considered. In the South African situation, for instance, it appears that the country entered the polarisation reversal phase twice, once during the 1950s and again during the 1980s. It was found, however, that what appeared to be polarisation reversal in the 1950s can be interpreted as a particular form of urbanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]