This book is the first to consider the roles, challenges and governance responses of secondary cities in southern Africa to changing circumstances. Among the challenges are governance under conditions of resource scarcity, managing informality, the effects and responses to climate change and the changing roles of the cities within the national space economy. It fills the gap in the literature on secondary cities with original case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The authors are all African scholars, working and living in the region with intimate knowledge of the settings they describe. The book is critical as it includes such regional case studies of different secondary cities in Southern Africa but also because of it’s multidisciplinarity: it contains substantive and pertinent issues such as climate change, disaster management, local economic development, and basic services delivery. It considers diverse environments, yet with similar challenges that could provide useful policy and governance proposals for other cities.

This book delves into the critical issue of ensuring the long-term financial viability of local governments in the diverse region of Southern Africa. Across Southern Africa, cities and communities are facing a multitude of challenges, from rapid urbanization and infrastructure challenges to social inequality and environmental degradation. In this thought-provoking book, the authors explore the intricate relationship between financial sustainability and the pursuit of sustainable cities and communities through different lenses. Drawing on extensive research and case studies from various countries in the region, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the financial realities faced by local governments. It examines the factors influencing revenue generation, expenditure management, and fiscal governance, shedding light on the complexities of financial decision-making in the context of limited resources and pressing development needs. Furthermore, it offers practical insights and actionable recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, and academics. It explores innovative approaches to revenue diversification, efficient expenditure allocation, and effective fiscal management, with the ultimate aim of fostering sustainable development, social services delivery, and environmentally sustainable infrastructure in Southern African cities and communities. This is an essential resource for anyone interested in understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with financial sustainability in the context of urbanisation and sustainable development in greater Africa. It serves as a guide and inspiration for building financially resilient local governments that can support the aspirations and well-being of their citizens while contributing to the broader vision of sustainable cities and communities.

Documents the dynamics of local government transformation and captures the key themes of the debates about policy options, lessons and key strategic decisions. This text is suitable for government officials, students, researchers, specialists, community leaders, businesses and the general reader.

This edited collection from across the African continent offers a diverse set of analytical accounts that engage with the urban governance dynamics, drivers and impacts of a wide variety of housing initiatives. These include insights into the relationships between parties and actors undertaking developments, or whose housing activities impact on the city. The book illustrates issues of power distribution, the visions or agendas motivating these actions, and the instruments used to advance them. It considers the rise of mega housing projects; private sector driven residential developments; unobtrusive transformations of existing building stock, establishment and upgrading of informal settlements; and state driven low cost housing schemes. It surfaces the contestation, collaborations and conflicts as well as the power relations that operate within cities and which are made visible on cityscapes. Housing and human settlement scholars as well as those interested in urban politics and governance dynamics in the global south and across the African continent will find much to appreciate in this volume.

As Africa urbanises and the focus of poverty shifts to urban centres, there is an imperative to address poverty in African cities. This is particularly the case in smaller cities, which are often the most rapidly urbanising, but the least able to cope with this growth. This book argues that an examination of the food system and food security provides a valuable lens to interrogate urban poverty. Chapters examine the linkages between poverty, urban food systems and local governance with a focus on case studies from three smaller or secondary cities in Africa: Kisumu (Kenya), Kitwe (Zambia) and Epworth (Zimbabwe). The book makes a wider contribution to debates on urban studies and urban governance in Africa through analysis of the causes and consequences of the paucity of urban-scale data for decision makers, and by presenting potential methodological innovations to address this paucity. As the global development agenda is increasingly focusing on urban issues, most notably the urban goal of the new Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, the work is timely. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315191195, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The book provides a global perspective of local government response towards the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of a sample of countries in all continents. It examines the responses of local government, as well as the responses local government developed in articulation with other tiers of government and with civil society organizations, and explores the social, economic and policy impacts of the pandemic. The book offers an innovative contribution on the role of local government during the pandemic and discusses lessons for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic had a global impact on public health, in the well-being of citizens, in the economy, on civic life, in the provision of public services, and in the governance of cities and other human settlements, although in an uneven form across countries, cities and local communities. Cities and local governments have been acting decisively to apply the policy measures defined at national level to the specific local conditions. COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of the crisis response infrastructures and policies at both national and local levels in these countries as well as in many others across the world. But it also exposed much broader and deeper weaknesses that result from how societies are organized, namely the insecure life a substantial proportion of citizens have, as a result of economic and social policies followed in previous decades, which accentuated the impacts of the lockdown measures on employment, income, housing, among a myriad of other social dimensions. Besides the analysis of how governments, and local government, responded to the public health issues raised by the spread of the virus, the book deals also with the diversity of responses local governments have adopted and implemented in the countries, regions, cities and metropolitan areas. The analysis of these policy responses indicates that previously unthinkable policies can surprisingly be implemented at both national and local levels.

Local governments encounter many problems, and although there is not one panacea that works internationally, this book argues that there are mechanisms to improve local situations. By drawing on case studies from the developing world, the authors review best practices in good governance.

Countries across Africa are rapidly transitioning from rural to urban societies. The UN projects that 60% of people living in Africa will be in urban areas by 2050, with the urban population on the continent tripling over the next 50 years. The challenge of building inclusive and sustainable cities in the context of rapid urbanization is arguably the critical development issue of the 21st Century and creating food secure cities is key to promoting health, prosperity, equity, and ecological sustainability. The expansion of Africa’s urban population is taking place largely in secondary cities: these are broadly defined as cities with fewer than half a million people that are not national political or economic centres. The implications of secondary urbanization have recently been described by the Cities Alliance as “a real knowledge gap”, requiring much additional research not least because it poses new intellectual challenges for academic researchers and governance challenges for policy-makers. International researchers coming from multiple points of view including food studies, urban studies, and sustainability studies, are starting to heed the call for further research into the implications for food security of rapidly growing secondary cities in Africa. This book will combine this research and feature comparable case studies, intersecting trends, and shed light on broad concepts including governance, sustainability, health, economic development, and inclusivity. This is an open access book.

The book explores and discusses some of the changes, challenges and opportunities confronting local governance in the context of the new urban paradigm associated with the HABITAT III New Urban Agenda, a 20-year strategy for sustainable urbanization, adopted in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador. The chapters included in the book address public policy issues from different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, written by authors from different academic disciplines within the broad area of social sciences (Geography, Political Science, Public Administration, Spatial Planning, Law, Regional Science, among other fields), and offer an inter-disciplinary vision of these issues. The chapters are written by members of the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Geography of Governance.