IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v43y2006i2p285-304.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Building with Ruins and Dreams: Some Thoughts on Realising Integrated Urban Development in South Africa through Crisis

Author

Listed:
  • Edgar Pieterse

    (Isandla Institute, Mandela-Rhodes Building, 150 St George's Mall, Cape Town 8001, South Africa. edgar97@icon.co.za)

Abstract

It is often lamented that South African cities are beset by interminable crises: segregation, inequality, fragmentation, violence, the Aids epidemic and so on. This lament is premised on the assumption that somehow urban challenges must be stabilised, brought under control through analytical or policy tools and then the ideals of urban integration and holism can come to pass. This paper challenges this conception of urban development policy and politics by recasting crisis as an opportunity (temporarily) to align and co-ordinate energies in order to undo the deeply engraved legacies of urban segregation and fragmentation. Concretely, the argument unfolds along three guideposts. In the first section, it is proposed that there are essentially three key conditions for addressing the structural crises of urban fragmentation: vibrant city politics in a radical democratic mode; a substantial 'epistemic community' in cities that generate imaginative ideas about alternative futures premised on a set of meta-objectives and concrete intervention strategies for the city; and, sufficient investment capital (private and public) to give economic support and expression to the implementation of concrete programmes and projects in line with the ideas generated by the epistemic community for alternatives. The second section of the paper elaborates prospective meta-objectives that epistemic communities can work with in order to advance more integrative urban development based on the framework of Ayyun Malik. The third section proposes some tangible interventions to construct socially and politically projects to build alternative futures in the context of Cape Town.

Suggested Citation

  • Edgar Pieterse, 2006. "Building with Ruins and Dreams: Some Thoughts on Realising Integrated Urban Development in South Africa through Crisis," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 43(2), pages 285-304, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:43:y:2006:i:2:p:285-304
    DOI: 10.1080/00420980500404020
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420980500404020
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00420980500404020?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Scott, Allen J. (ed.), 2001. "Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198297994.
    2. Ash Amin, 2002. "Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 34(6), pages 959-980, June.
    3. Moulaert, Frank, 2000. "Globalization and Integrated Area Development in European Cities," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199241132.
    4. Tony Binns & Etienne Nel, 2002. "Devolving Development: Integrated Development Planning and Developmental Local Government in Post-apartheid South Africa," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(8), pages 921-932.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Schensul & Patrick Heller, 2011. "Legacies, Change and Transformation in the Post‐Apartheid City: Towards an Urban Sociological Cartography," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 78-109, January.
    2. John Friedmann, 2007. "Forum 2007," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 38(6), pages 987-998, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Constance Carr & Markus Hesse, 2020. "When Alphabet Inc. Plans Toronto’s Waterfront: New Post-Political Modes of Urban Governance," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 5(1), pages 69-83.
    2. Mace, Alan & Holman, Nancy & Paccoud, Antoine & Sundaresan, Jayaraj, 2015. "Coordinating density; working through conviction, suspicion and pragmatism," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 56768, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Heyns Anri, 2019. "Mining Community Development in South Africa: A Critical Consideration of How the Law and Development Approach the Concept “Community”," The Law and Development Review, De Gruyter, vol. 12(2), pages 561-593, June.
    4. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose & Riccardo Crescenzi, 2008. "Mountains in a flat world: why proximity still matters for the location of economic activity," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 1(3), pages 371-388.
    5. Jennifer Robinson, 2011. "Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 1-23, January.
    6. Bo Liu & Desheng Xue & Yiming Tan, 2019. "Deciphering the Manufacturing Production Space in Global City-Regions of Developing Countries—a Case of Pearl River Delta, China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(23), pages 1-26, December.
    7. Bécares, Laia & Cormack, Donna & Harris, Ricci, 2013. "Ethnic density and area deprivation: Neighbourhood effects on Māori health and racial discrimination in Aotearoa/New Zealand," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 76-82.
    8. Alain Thierstein & Stefan Lüthi, 2012. "Interlocking Firm Networks in the German Knowledge Economy: The Case of the Emerging Mega-city Region of Munich," Chapters, in: Marina van Geenhuizen & Peter Nijkamp (ed.), Creative Knowledge Cities, chapter 13, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    9. Katy Bennett & Allan Cochrane & Giles Mohan & Sarah Neal, 2017. "Negotiating the educational spaces of urban multiculture: Skills, competencies and college life," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(10), pages 2305-2321, August.
    10. Francis Leo Collins & Wardlow Friesen, 2011. "Making the Most of Diversity? The Intercultural City Project and a Rescaled Version of Diversity in Auckland, New Zealand," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 48(14), pages 3067-3085, November.
    11. John Parr, 2015. "The city and the region as contrasts in spatial organization," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 54(3), pages 797-817, May.
    12. HaeRan Shin & Quentin Stevens, 2013. "How Culture and Economy Meet in South Korea: The Politics of Cultural Economy in Culture-led Urban Regeneration," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(5), pages 1707-1723, September.
    13. Evert Meijers & Martijn Burger & Roberto Camagni & Roberta Capello & Andrea Caragliu, 2016. "Static vs. dynamic agglomeration economies. Spatial context and structural evolution behind urban growth," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 95(1), pages 133-158, March.
    14. Anthony Goerzen & Michael Sartor & Kristin Brandl & Stacey Fitzsimmons, 2023. "Widening the lens: Multilevel drivers of firm corporate social performance," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 54(1), pages 42-60, February.
    15. Vicente Romero de à vila Serrano, 2019. "The Intrametropolitan Geography of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS): A Comparative Analysis of Six European and U.S. City-Regions," Economic Development Quarterly, , vol. 33(4), pages 279-295, November.
    16. Torill Nyseth & Abdelillah Hamdouch, 2019. "The Transformative Power of Social Innovation in Urban Planning and Local Development," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(1), pages 1-6.
    17. Karien Dekker & Gideon Bolt, 2005. "Social Cohesion in Post-war Estates in the Netherlands: Differences between Socioeconomic and Ethnic Groups," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 42(13), pages 2447-2470, December.
    18. Maria Budnik & Katrin Grossmann & Christoph Hedtke, 2021. "Migration-Related Conflicts as Drivers of Institutional Change?," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 103-112.
    19. Michael Neuman & Angela Hull, 2009. "The Futures of the City Region," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(6), pages 777-787.
    20. Joe Painter, 2013. "Regional Biopolitics," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(8), pages 1235-1248, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:43:y:2006:i:2:p:285-304. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.