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The paper traces the evolution and periodization of shifting ideas about the critical issues shaping city planning in South Africa, looking both at the relative and variable importance ascribed to health and other factors such as labour, economic reconstruction and housing. While the evolution of the South African city cannot be read without an understanding of the role of public health, changing ideas about cities and public health necessitate careful historical unravelling before any causal relationships can be identified. Any urban reconstruction, including post-COVID-19 reform, will demand deep knowledge of how the health/planning nexus has evolved, alongside expert advice on how to maximize urban health.

The multi-sectoral nature of urban health is a particular challenge, which urban family planning in sub-Saharan Africa illustrates well. Rapid urbanisation, mainly due to natural population increase in cities rather than rural–urban migration, coincides with a large unmet urban need for contraception, especially in informal settlements. These two phenomena mean urban family planning merits more attention. To what extent are the family planning and urban development sectors working together on this? Policy document analysis and stakeholder interviews from both the family planning and urban development sectors, across eight sub-Saharan African countries, show how cross-sectoral barriers can stymie efforts but also identify some points of connection which can be built upon. Differing historical, political, and policy landscapes means that entry points to promote urban family planning have to be tailored to the context. Such entry points can include infant and child health, female education and employment, and urban poverty reduction. Successful cross-sectoral advocacy for urban family planning requires not just solid evidence, but also internal consensus and external advocacy: FP actors must consensually frame the issue per local preoccupations, and then communicate the resulting key messages in concerted and targeted fashion. More broadly, success also requires that the environment be made conducive to cross-sectoral action, for example through clear requirements in the planning processes’ guidelines, structures with focal persons across sectors, and accountability for stakeholders who must make cross-sectoral action a reality.

There is growing science and policy interest in multi-sectoral action, but bridging the gap between family planning and urban development is challenging. This paper analyses the experience of integrating these sectors in sub-Saharan Africa via building research capacity. Family-planning researchers were supported to link with urban-development actors, one goal being to generate lessons on the process of getting their research into the policy domain. The urban governance sector’s dynamic and complex nature was a particular challenge for family-planning researchers; in future, structured familiarisation with a sector might facilitate multi-sectoral action and better enable researchers to link with the policy world.

Debates within urban studies concerning the relationship between urbanisation and infectious disease focus on issues of urban population growth, density, migration and connectivity. However, an effective long-term risk and wellbeing agenda, without which the threat of future pandemics cannot be mitigated, must also take account of demographic forces and changes as critical drivers of transmission and mortality risk within and beyond cities. A better understanding of the dynamics of fertility, mortality and changing age structures – key determinants of urban decline/growth in addition to migration – provides the foundation upon which healthier cities and a healthy global urban system can be developed. The study of how basic demographic attributes and trends are distributed in space and how they interact with risks, including those of infectious disease, must be incorporated as a priority into a post-COVID-19 urban public health agenda. This perspective concurs with recent debates in urban studies emphasising the demographic drivers of urban change. Moreover, it raises critical questions about the microbial and environmental emphasis of much research on the interface of urban health and governance.

Amid widespread enthusiasm for ‘scientific’ approaches to reading and understanding the city, driven by the increasing availability of ‘big data’ and sophisticated tech-driven analytics, we call fo...

Amid growing enthusiasm for a "new urban science" and "smart city" approaches to urban management, "big data" is expected to create radical new opportunities for urban research and practice. Meanwhile, anthropologists, sociologists, and human geographers, among others, generate highly contextualized and nuanced data, sometimes referred to as 'thick data,' that can potentially complement, refine and calibrate big data analytics while generating new interpretations of the city through diverse forms of reasoning. While researchers in a range of fields have begun to consider such questions, scholars of urban affairs have not yet engaged in these discussions. The article explores how ethnographic research could be reconciled with big data-driven inquiry into urban phenomena. We orient our critical reflections around an illustrative example: road safety in Mexico City. We argue that big and thick data can be reconciled in and through three stages of the research process: research formulation, data collection and analysis, and research output and knowledge representation.

Health agendas for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) should embrace and afford greater priority to urban family planning to help achieve a number of the global Sustainable Development Goals. The urgency of doing so is heightened by emerging evidence of urban fertility stalls and reversals in some sub-Saharan African contexts as well as the significance of natural increase over migration in driving rapid urban growth. Moreover, there is new evidence from evaluations of large programmatic interventions focused on urban family planning that suggest ways to inform future programmes and policies that are adapted to local contexts. We present the key dimensions and challenges of urban growth in LMICs, offer a critical scoping review of recent research findings on urban family planning and fertility dynamics, and highlight priorities for future research.

The focus is on the limitations, politics, and spatiality of statistical knowledge in colonial Kenya, with particular reference to population and agricultural statistics. The objective is to contribute to recent debates surrounding the role of statistics and enumeration within colonial government and, in particular, research emphasizing the uneven nature of colonial statistical knowledge. It is shown that this unevenness took particular forms in a settler colonial context such as Kenya, where state enumeration was enrolled within particular kinds of political contestations and objectives. These centered on the conflicts between settler capitalism and African production, and resulting demands made on the colonial state. Statistical knowledge concentrated on settler production, but was extended to African areas and economic activities in accordance with specific economic and political objectives. This historical perspective helps to explain why the colonial statistical record in Kenya is piecemeal, incomprehensive and largely blind to specificities of “the urban” as a domain of knowledge and practice.

Ecologizing regions; securing food: governing scarcity, population and territory in British East and Southern Africa. Territory, Politics, Governance. The focus is on the government of food systems...

We begin with the assertion that epistemological standpoints shape – and are shaped by – ethical principles and that epistemologies of action are constantly evolving. Yet, while many contemporary planning theories are influenced by post-structural and postcolonial epistemologies that recognise the value of subjective and situated knowledge, work on planning ethics tends to retain a focus on normative ethical theories. This focus precludes further explorations of the nature and meaning of adopted ethical values. By means of a case example, we suggest that some engagement with meta-ethical questions might offer scholars of the global South-East an alternative basis for developing knowledge.

In early 2007 the African National Congress majority within the local government authority of Durban, South Africa, approved two phases of a street renaming process, which culminated in the renaming of over one hundred prominent streets after various anticolonial and antiapartheid ‘struggle heroes’. The process led to an unprecedented degree of public attention and debate, expressed through a range of arguments and symbolic gestures, and local state representatives responded by casting this opposition in terms of ‘countertransformation’. This paper examines the Durban case with a critical analytical perspective that sees acts of place naming through the heuristic frames of ‘text’, ‘arena’, and ‘performance’, drawing attention to the complex spatial and material dynamics that attend acts of symbolic transformation and resistance. It contributes to theoretical discussions surrounding “naming as symbolic resistance”, by arguing that a performative conception of symbolic capital and resistance may aid our understanding of naming processes in contested memorial landscapes.

In this chapter we provide an introduction to the contemporary landscape of published case study research on African urban planning issues, based on a desktop literature review of relevant peer-reviewed journals. In particular, we are interested in the methodological strategies of existing case study research, more than its range of substantive themes and topics. Therefore we address the following questions in relation to the published case study literature: What do authors seek to do through their analysis of a case? Do they seek to contribute to policy and practice, theoretical advancement, or both, and if so, how are inductive, deductive and retroductive strategies employed? Identification of key thematic trends is a lesser priority, although several points are made based on insights emanating from the literature review process.

In this chapter we provide an overview of the key methodological principles and practical elements of the case study method as a mode of research and teaching. We draw extensively upon the work of key proponents of the method, such as Robert Yin (2009; 2012) and Bent Flyvbjerg (2001; 2006; 2011), as well as the outcomes of a workshop series on the case study methodology, hosted by the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS) in 2009 and 2010.1 The insights presented here also owe much to the expertise and practical experience of workshop facilitators Bent Flyvbjerg, Fred Lerise and Jorgen Andreasen. Where possible, we have incorporated and responded to feedback on the difficulties of case study research and teaching provided by AAPS workshop participants. We also refer to chapters within this volume in order to elaborate on aspects of the case study approach.

Ernstson H., Lawhon M. and Duminy J. Conceptual vectors of African urbanism: ‘engaged theory-making’ and ‘platforms of engagement’, Regional Studies. With increasing urbanization in the global South, and Africa in particular, scholars have called attention to the limited explanatory capacity of existing theory. Ananya Roy suggests developing conceptual vectors based on regional histories and contexts. Two such vectors with relevance beyond Africa are identified and developed in this paper. The developmentalist focus of African urban work provides insights into challenges of linking academic theory with progressive changes in practice, what is called here ‘engaged theory-making’; and conditions of informality enable ‘platforms of engagement’ – particular modes of organizing towards radical incremental change. The strengths of African research are highlighted, critical questions are raised and further work is encouraged.

In this timely Handbook, seventeen renowned contributors from Asia, the Americas and Europe provide chapters that deal with some of the most intriguing and important aspects of research methodologies on cities and urban economies.