Susan Parnell

Uniting a Divided City : Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg

Part 1: Ways of Understanding Divided Cities - Introduction to a Divided City * Reverberations from a Divided City * Part 2: The Changing Spatial Structure of the City - Beyond Racial Fordism: Changing Patterns of Social Inequality * Post-Fordist Polarization: The Changing Spatial Order of the City * Part 3: Institutional Responses to Urban Change - Decentralization by Stealth: Democratization or Disempowerment through Developmental Local Government? * the Politics of Fiscal Austerity in Creating Equitable City Government * Part 4: Living in a Divided City - the Inner-city Challenge: Locating Partners for Urban Regeneration * Participatory Planning and Informal Settlement Upgrading in Diepsloot * Housing and Service Consumption in Soweto * the People Behind the Walls: Insecurity, Identity and gated Communities * Conclusion: Lessons from a Uniting City * Notes * References * Index

Rethinking urban South Africa

Our reflection on past treatment of urban segregation begins with the assertion that the implicit acceptance of ‘race’ as a legitimate and primary category of inquiry has impoverished the understanding of residential segregation in the South African city. The first section of the paper illustrates the prevalence of racially defined empirical urban studies and tries to explain why this categorisation remains unchallenged. In the second section of the paper we demonstrate that where efforts are made to explain the emergence of a racialised urban structure, inappropriate or inadequate points of reference are involved. Particular attention is given to the use of the race/class debate, feminist perspectives on urban policy, the literature on white supremacy and the city, and in the work on ‘race’. The final section of the paper suggests an alternative approach to exploring urban segregation. Specifically, we pose the questions: what were urban administrators in the early part of the twentieth century to do and...

Local government, poverty reduction and inequality in Johannesburg

This paper discusses the difficulties facing the post-apartheid metropolitan government of Johannesburg as it reforms itself, seeking to better respond to the needs of all its citizens, while also attracting new investment. These difficulties include high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as the apartheid legacy of “separate development” with its large backlog of poor quality housing and inadequate basic services, much of it concentrated in former “black townships” and peripheral informal settlements. Limited budgets and overloaded bureaucracy have limited the scale, quality and speed of delivery. Meanwhile, the need for organizational change and for good fiscal performance compete for attention and resources with poverty reduction and with the need for a more integrated, cross-sectoral poverty reduction policy. The paper ends with a discussion of how the principal challenges facing Johannesburg are also challenges for contemporary urban governance in many other cities.

Development and Urban Policy: Johannesburg's City Development Strategy:

City development strategies (CDS) have emerged as an important new initiative in international policy and practice. This paper considers their significance by exploring recent initiatives to formulate a city strategy for Johannesburg, South Africa. The Johannesburg CDS emerged out of the local demand for a post-apartheid vision for South African cities as well as a renewed enthusiasm for city-level economic planning within international development agencies and consultancies. As with CDSs in other resource-stretched cities, in order to address the distinctive challenges of their highly unequal city, Johannesburgs policy-makers had to draw on ideas which transcend conventional divisions between poverty relief and urban growth strategies. The Joburg CDS process provides an important basis for overcoming longstanding divisions between accounts of wealthier Western cities and poorer cities in developing country contexts. Johannesburgs distinctive challenges, stretching from accommodating cutting-edge global economic activities to supporting basic service delivery in informal settlements, highlights the paucity of existing urban policy discourses-which offer few ready-made solutions for any city, but especially not to those faced with significant structural inequities. Attending to strategic challenges in cities that have limited resources, it is suggested, could provoke new agendas and insights for city managers and urban scholars everywhere. Here, we explore the tensions between the policy agendas of economic growth and development, and the policy processes of participation and formal institutional politics.

The State of South African Cities a Decade after Democracy

Like other national urban policy documents, the State of the Cities Report 2004 affirms a vision of an inclusive non-racial city in which democracy is stable and development flourishes. But the 2004 report is different from preceding urban policy statements in a number of critical respects, not least that it is not a formal statement of government. In part, the relative autonomy of the Reports sponsor, the South African Cities Network (a quango of state and non-state affiliates), explains its divergent analytical point of departure in the assessment of the state of the cities 10 years after democracy. The 2004 report is premised on the notion that changing the racial pattern of inequality hinges on systematic responses to the material forces, demographic, economic, environmental and institutional, that shaped the inherited apartheid city form. The 2004 report is also different from earlier government policy positions in that it argues that urban development is not just a site of national reconstruction and development, but that the urban question lies at the heart of achieving the national vision of a productive, democratic and non-racial society based on a vision of sustainable human settlements.

Socioeconomic deprivation and asthma prevalence and severity in young adolescents

This study used the international study of asthma and allergies in childhood (ISAAC) to investigate the association between asthma and socioeconomic deprivation among young adolescents in Cape Town, South Africa. The completed ISAAC written and video questionnaires of 4,706 13–14-yr-old school pupils were used. The prevalence of asthma symptoms was analysed by a local index of socioeconomic deprivation, based on residential location and defined on a 10-category scale from least to most deprived. Linear trends were examined visually and the prevalence odds ratio was used to summarize overall trends. In general, the least socioeconomically deprived pupils reported higher prevalences of asthma symptoms “ever” and “in the last 12 months”. In contrast, the most socioeconomically deprived pupils reported higher asthma-symptom occurrence monthly or more frequently in the previous 12 months. A subgroup of pupils from low-income areas commuting to better-off schools showed the highest symptom prevalences. The findings are consistent with a model in which an increase in the incidence of asthma is driven by factors associated with improved social circumstances, whereas severity is determined by factors associated with poverty. The impact of social mobility on asthma, including reporting of symptoms, deserves closer study.

Victims, Villains and Fixers: The Urban Environment and Johannesburg's Poor

Urban water supply, sanitation and electricity have been identified as basic needs by the post-apartheid government and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC). This article explores the relationship of Johannesburgs poor to the urban environment and, in particular, these three key urban services. On the basis of survey data, case studies, textual analysis and in-depth interviews with policy makers and planners, it reviews how poorer citizens were, for a long time, seen as victims under apartheid urban planning. During the rent boycotts that characterised urban struggle politics during the era of late apartheid in Johannesburg, they were often represented as villains. This perception persisted well into the post-apartheid period, where refusing to pay for services was seen as tantamount to a lack of patriotism. Today, Johannesburgs poorer citizens are increasingly being seen as fixers. The GJMC in its policy document, iGoli 2002, is committed to establishing the commercial viability of service delivery. Cost recovery is seen as important for solving the tension that exists between maintaining established service levels (in historically white areas) and extending services to new and historically under-serviced (mainly black) areas. We conclude that there are opportunities to address urban poverty, inequality and environmental management in an integrated way. However, these are predicated on the GJMC and its advisers understanding the ways in which pro-poor and social justice strategies interface with urban services and the urban environment.

A Global Outlook on Urbanization

This volume is based on the argument that, just as it is no longer possible to construct sound ecological science without explicit attention to urbanization as a key driver of global ecological change (Chaps. 3, 11, and 26), cities can no longer be uncoupled from a full understanding of their ecological foundations. The populations and economies of urban areas rely on hinterlands for resources, but there is a disconnect between using resources for the city on the one hand and preserving or conserving ecosystem services that are outside of the city on the other (Chaps. 2 and 3). While it is recognized that cities and their urban dwellers will need to begin to take greater responsibility for stewardship of Earth’s resources (Seitzinger et al. 2012), urban sustainability efforts often are prone to localism, thus failing to take into account the need to conserve resources elsewhere (Seto et al. 2012a).

Creating racial privilege: the origins of South African public health and town planning legislation

Town‐planning measures adopted by the infant Union Government were worded in the fashionable new language of international planning and were not explicitly concerned with the regulation of African settlement. Nevertheless, the planning regulations introduced in the 1910s were part of the emerging racial framework of urban government of the South African city. Dr Charles Porter, Johannesburgs first Medical Officer of Health, was a major force behind the introduction of British planning ideas to white South Africa. The inclusion of town‐planning clauses in the 1919 Public Health Act and the 1920 Housing Act were aimed at entrenching urban privileges for whites. By establishing colonial city management standards in selected areas of the city, the position of urban Africans was marginalised. Moreover, the passage of public health and town‐planning laws which prevented overcrowding and rent racketeering and enabled slum rehousing, offered state assistance to unskilled whites. The social and political problems...

Ideas, implementation and indicators: epistemologies of the post-2015 urban agenda

The success of the campaign for a dedicated urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reflected a consensus on the importance of “cities” in sustainable development. The relevance accorded to cities in the SDGs is twofold, reflected both in the specific place-based content of the Urban Goal and the more general concern with the multiple scales at which the SDGs will be monitored will be institutionalized. Divergent views of the city and urban processes, suppressed within the Urban Goal, are, however, likely to become more explicit as attention shifts to implementation. Acknowledging the different theoretical traditions used to legitimize the new urban agenda is an overdue task. As this agenda develops post-2015, the adequacy of these forms of urban theory will become more contested around, among other concerns, the possibilities and limits of place-based policy, advocacy and activism; and ways of monitoring and evaluating processes of urban transformation along multiple axes of development.