Small towns, internationally and in South Africa specifically, are generally experiencing a phase of slow economic decline. The process is not inevitable and as this paper illustrates, with reference to the former South African railway town of Alicedale, towns can be given a new lease of life. The key in this town's revival has been the formation of a strong public-private partnerships, which has partially drawn in the community sector and focused on tourism-based development. The paper details the development process, key challenges experienced, and the results attained; it discusses the degree to which the community has actually benefited and speculates about the value of the Alicedale experience as an example for other small towns.

In recent years, the concept of the global city has become an important expression primarily used to characterise Western cities that have become key nodes for headquarter functions, financial services, information processing, and other activities that have been undertaken to announce their influence as world leaders. However, this paper parallels recent academic moves to look beyond the North and concludes that global cities also exist in the South. It further introduces Cape Town as a contemporary example of one such city that is becoming more worldly in both appearance and outlook. The city's position as an up-and-coming global city can be accredited to a range of comparative advantages and strategic interventions including successful rejuvenation strategies, gentrification of certain neighbourhoods, a rising number of foreign visitors, and the construction of a world-class international convention facility. While it may not be a top-ranked competitor, Cape Town does display global city characteristics such as a growing aggressiveness on the part of urban planners and development practitioners in foreign investment attraction, strategic marketing campaigns, and the hosting of high-profile events that provide valuable lessons for aspiring secondary global cities.

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Artisanal, or small‐scale mining, is widely recognised as a key, but often controversial, survival strategy adopted by low‐income communities in the global South. This paper examines how members of one community in South Africa, that of Indwe, in a desperate effort to create self‐employment, have initiated micro‐level coal‐mining enterprises, which have had the downstream effect of supporting local transportation and brick‐making operations. Government concerns over the legality of these activities overlie the recent depletion of the local resource and the involvement of a mining corporate in the region. In terms of the way forward, the paper explores the uneasy compromise which has emerged between the corporate's social responsibility initiatives and the suspicions of the artisanal miners.

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