Abstracti jur_954 146..162Under 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.
This paper explores one possible argument for how to respond to the epistemic troubles in the production of knowledge about urban Africa. The problem I have in mind is the preponderance of policy-oriented research on the development challenges and absences of African cities, as opposed to a more rounded theorisation of urban life (urbanism) or cityness. The paper starts by recounting the challenge thrown out by Jennifer Robinson and Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall to take African 'cityness' or 'worldliness' seriously in our engagement with the African city. This starting point leads on to an exploration of what cityness can mean, given the overdetermining effect of violence in African social life, in no small measure a consequence of the colonial era of terror and exploitation, but also now remade and reembedded in enduring inequalities that mark everyday life. In my reading, this issue looms so large in the contemporary city that I found it impossible, within the constraints of this essay, to explore in detail other dimensions of urban sociality. As a result, I simply assert that, in the absence of a deep philosophical understanding of the social, it is almost impossible to hold on to a liberal humanist moral project of the kind which frequently underpins policy prescriptions to improve the quality of life, livelihoods, governance and social fabric in African cities. Put differently, here, I am interested to define what it could mean to explore the African urban without a humanist (philosophical) safety net, yet committed to an ethical project of 'becoming' and human flourishing. Thus, in the final instance I turn to some speculative reflections on what promise this line of argument may hold for a more policy-focused research agenda in a move to bring policy and philosophical debates into closer articulation.
Advancing global urbanism depends upon making Africa's cities a more dominant part of the global urban narrative. Constructing a more legitimate research agenda for African cities, however, necessitates a repositioning of conventional modes of research. To achieve intellectual and political traction in what are typical African research conditions-where human needs are great, information is poor, conditions of governance are complex and the reality is changeable--we reflect on the experiences of the African Centre for Cities where (alongside conventional use of theory, methods and data) a translational mode of working has been adopted. The notion of translational urban research praxis captures more than the idea of applied research or even co-production, and encompasses integrating the research conception, design, execution, application and reflection--and conceiving of this set of activities as a singular research/practice process that is by its nature deeply political and locationally embedded. In this way we suggest that African urbanism can be both usefully illuminated by global theories and methods, and can simultaneously be constitutive of the reform of the ideas through which cities generally are understood.
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