Metropolitan reforms, which include the creation of unified metropolitan governments through municipal mergers and reclassification, are emerging as one strategy to address planning and service delivery challenges in the wake of increasing urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa. Although metropolitanisation adds service area and mandates, well-functioning secondary cities that are part of a two-tier governance system in South Africa are pursuing metropolitanisation. The case of Mangaung, an early instance of secondary city metropolitanisation, is an opportunity to examine the motivations underlying these reforms, the politics involved and their impacts on urban governance. Mangaung’s political and administrative leadership pursued metropolitanisation to jump scale, attain greater political autonomy vis-à-vis other tiers of government, and obtain fiscal and technical resources available only to metropolitan municipalities in South Africa’s urban municipal hierarchy. Metropolitanisation was no panacea for Mangaung’s governance challenges, however, since it did not resolve the underlying weaknesses in municipal capacity or the regional economy, nor did it address the spatial legacies of apartheid that produced a sprawling metropolitan service area. As other South African secondary cities contemplate metropolitanisation, we recommend revising municipal structures and mandates and strengthening administrative capacities and economies in secondary cities.
2018 N Subramanyam. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Les éditeurs suivront les recommandations et les procédures décrites dans le Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors de COPE. Plus précisément, ils travaillent pour s'assurer des plus hautes normes éthiques de la publication, y compris l'identification et la gestion des conflits d'intérêts (pour les éditeurs et pour les auteurs), la juste évaluation des manuscrits et la publication de manuscrits qui répondent aux normes d'excellence de la revue.
This paper investigates how progress towards meeting the sustainable development goal of providing universal and equitable access to drinking water for all is distributed across the spectrum of urban settlements. The study measures how urban local governments (N = 3,547) in a rapidly urbanizing country, India, have increased their coverage of water supply to households between 2001 and 2011. I use theories on multilevel governance of urban services to develop a multilevel linear regression to model the city- and state-level factors associated with growth in water supply coverage. The results show that 68% of cities and towns have recorded water coverage growth, but the extent of this progress is unequally distributed across cities in different states and between cities of different sizes. Small cities and towns, which house over two-thirds of India's urban population, have recorded significantly lower water coverage growth rates as have cities in low-income states. These findings suggest that policies for urban water infrastructure development should focus on smaller cities and towns if we are to achieve spatial equity in access to water for all in an increasingly urban world.
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