Foodification and neighbourhood change in Hazelwood, Pretoria

During the past three decades, China has experienced tremendous changes in urbanization, from 18% in 1980 to 52% in 2014, resulting in a net increase of over 400 million in the urban population (Zhejiang Statistical Bureau, 2015). In this transition process, China’s cities have also been undergoing a series of difficulties and challenges, including the declining downtown, environment deterioration, social imbalance, urban poverty, housing shortage, social stratification, land shortage and an aging society. Changes at the community level can be seen as the response to urban and rural social and institutional changes. This is because the residential community is not only the focus of daily life and social activities, but also produces profound and comprehensive interaction with city re-structuring and growth (See Chapter one and two). As a result, studies of the detailed characteristics of urban changes at community-level have become the crucial perspective for understanding the internal logic of urban changes, whether they be social, economic or administrative. Therefore, the research aim is To analyse the characteristics of socio-economic changes at the neighbourhood level in Ningbo from the 1980s to the 2010s, to clarify the mechanisms of neighborhood changes in transitional China for supporting better development. The thesis draws upon an evidence base comprising personal observation, completed questionnaires from 156 residents (locals, students and migrants), and interviews of 120 local residents, migrants, members of Community Committee and Village Committee, civil servants and researchers, together with evidence drawn from Ningbo Yearbook, the 2010 census, and statistical data from Ningbo Statistical Bureau. Based on the appraisal framework designed by means of a literature review of sustainable development and community studies, from the perspective of local residents and migrant workers, it analysed the characteristics of social, economic and administrative changes at the neighbourhood level from three cases of the downtown, urban fringe and suburb of Ningbo from the 1980s to the 2010s. The final part of this research summarized the general characteristics of communities and neighbourhood changes in transitional China, and discussed the mechanisms of the changes from the perspective of institutional changes and urbanization, as well as the motivations of migrants’ social mobility. The research found that the market mechanisms and power involved in social and economic changes are the main causes of community and neighbourhood change in transitional China. However, this does not mean governments totally withdrawing from the process, but their role has changed from the “manipulation of power” to being the “mediation of the stakeholders’ conflicts” and “encouraging participation”. Therefore, it can be called the “dual-track approach”, with everything happening gradually as part of a process of reform, initiated and directed by the state.

Editors' Introduction Shirley Brooks and Bill Freund This special issue of Transformation focuses on the changes that are occurring in the post-apartheid South African city, exploring both the continuities and disjunctures from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Cities are important drivers of economic growth as well as key sites of social change. They are a focus of interest for geographers and other social scientists attempting to understand the dynamic forces shaping South African cities both in their own terms, and in the context of cities in other parts of the 'developed' and 'developing' world. Cities are locales for ambitious plans to address social inequality while promoting economic development, particularly in the wake of institutionalised discrimination and segregation under apartheid, yet as Mabin points out, the results are often a 'broad failure of policy and planning to shift the conditions of life in the cities'. 'Fragmentation' is a recurring metaphor, one chosen to represent urban change in South Africa in a recent collection (Harrison et al 2003) reviewed in these pages (Mabin, this issue). Does this term have much or any meaning, and is it an appropriate tag to place on complexity? The papers presented here provide a variety of perspectives on this and other debates about post-apartheid urban transition. They also show the richness of the considerable literature on urban space, urban struggles and urban change which has characterised the last decade. This issue began with an offer by Alan Mabin to produce a translated version of a special issue on South African political geography by an Italian journal. It took on its own life but we do publish a couple of the pieces that were originally offered to us and only otherwise exist in Italian. Interested South Africans may be surprised to learn that urban issues in this region have been taken up and debated by scholars in Italy, France, Germany, Britain and the USA amongst other countries. Bénit and Gervais-Lambony's paper begins the debate by locating South [End Page i] Africa's cities in the contemporary moment, one characterised by the word 'globalisation', with all the meanings that might (or might not) inhere in that word. It is certainly the perception of city governments that globalisation is a script, dictated from the outside and unavoidable, to which South African cities must respond. This has a set of impacts that are carefully outlined by the authors. In particular, this script writes certain visible spaces within the city - the 'shop windows' - into the performance of global competitiveness, while writing other spaces - 'the back of the shop' - out of the play altogether. So much for a vision of achieving social justice for the poor: cities' images as attractive locations for global capital must be maintained, even at the expense of most of their citizens. If this is a bleak view, Zarina Patel's article does suggest that some success has been achieved in improving living environments through the implementation of sustainable development strategies such as Local Agenda 21 in South African cities, projects showcased at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. She highlights 'informal political activity leading to environmental change' that can be identified in South African cities, while at the same time noting that real political will is often lacking and institutional change needed. She is not very happy with the sustainable development paradigm, however. Instead she proposes a landscape approach that brings urban populations and their interface with the physical environment directly onto the centre stage in a less prescriptive way. It is useful however to move away from the present moment to view South African cities in the context of a broader sweep of history. This ambitious task is attempted by Alan Mabin, who sets post-apartheid change (which he argues has occurred in often unexpected ways) against the backdrop of South African urban history, in particular the history of urban segregation and all that that policy implied for cities. In charting changing forms of segregation in South African cities, Mabin tackles the controversial concept of 'fragmentation' and tries to assess its validity in the context of both apartheid-induced changes such as forced removal to...

This article examines suburban neighbourhood trajectories from 1970 to 2010 in the 100 most populous metropolitan areas in the US within the context of discussions around suburban decline and reinvestment. A weighted composite index of neighbourhood change indicators was used to identify the relative status of urban and suburban neighbourhoods. Index values were ranked by metropolitan area, and neighbourhoods were assigned to a corresponding quartile. The quartiles formed a status trajectory sequence, categorised as Reduced, Reduced with recovery, Stable or Improved. Neighbourhood trajectories were compared across city and suburb as well as across prewar, postwar, and modern suburban types. Despite increased discussion around suburban decline and suburban poverty, suburban neighbourhoods maintained a higher status than the city, were more likely to recover from reduced status and had higher frequencies of status improvement. The majority of suburban neighbourhoods occupied the highest status ranking in all decades. Stability was the most common trajectory for suburbs, and stable suburban neighbourhoods were higher status than stable urban neighbourhoods. The findings highlight geographies of neighbourhood inequalities and contribute to our understanding of regional and suburban neighbourhood change dynamics.

Cities, and therefore neighborhoods, are under constant change. Neighborhood changes may affect residents’ health in multiple ways. The Heart Healthy Hoods (HHH) project studies the association between neighborhood and residents’ health. Focusing on a middle–low-socioeconomic neighborhood in Madrid (Spain), our aim was to describe qualitatively its residents’ perceptions on the urban changes and their impacts on health. We designed a qualitative study using 16 semi-structured interviews including adult residents and professionals living or working in the area. Firstly, we described the perceived main social and neighborhood changes. Secondly, we studied how these neighborhood changes connected to residents’ health perceptions. Perceived major social changes were new demographic composition, new socio–cultural values and economic changes. Residents’ negative health perceptions were the reduction of social relationships, increase of stress and labor precariousness. Positive health perceptions were the creation of supportive links, assimilation of self-care activities and the change in traditional roles. Neighborhood changes yielded both negative and positive effects on residents’ health. These effects would be the result of the interrelation of different elements such as the existence or absence of social ties, family responsibilities, time availability, economic resources and access and awareness to health-promoting programs. These qualitative research results provide important insight into crafting urban health policies that may ultimately improve health outcomes in communities undergoing change.

Sustainable neighbourhood development is a global urban planning policy concern for the 21 st century. In the global South, these concerns persist alongside increasing population and poverty levels in cities. In South Africa’s established former apartheid neighbourhoods, the challenges of creating sustainable neighbourhoods from the current post-colonial neighbourhood are unclear and contradictory. Former largely mono-functional suburban neighbourhoods of the apartheid period are undergoing changes in form, function and demography. Using the case of Berea suburban neighbourhood in the metropolitan city of eThekwini (Durban), the article explores the responsiveness of orthodox land-use planning to sustainable neighbourhood change from 1994. It focuses on a historical review of orthodox planning vis-a-vis recent policy and land-use change dynamics in the Berea. Data used include a content analysis of the Berea General Plans from 1857, Town Planning Schemes and related documents, purposively selected interviews, observations, GIS mapping of planning applications, and analysis based on South African demographic census data from 2001 to 2011. The article concludes that former largely monofunctional orthodox suburban neighbourhood planning is insufficiently responsive to heterogeneity trends on the Berea. Keywords: Informality, neighbourhood change, orthodox planning, planning policy, physical form and function, sustainable neighbourhood planning

Creative industries have been used globally as a lever for economic development and urban regeneration. Despite the benefits of creative industries to stimulate urban regeneration, widespread criticism points to the negative impacts of socioeconomic polarisation and gentrification in urban environments. There is evidence of a growing creative economy in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa’s two largest cities. Over the past two decades, both cities have embarked on various urban regeneration initiatives. Inner city Cape Town in particular shows evidence of the use of creative industries as a tool for widespread regeneration. In Johannesburg, the majority of creative industries are located in its northern suburbs; however, in recent years there is evidence of creative clusters emerging in central Johannesburg. This chapter reviews research and debates on creative industries in Woodstock (Cape Town) and Maboneng (Johannesburg), and illustrates the impacts of creative industries on neighbourhood change in the South African urban context.

Introduction David W. Smith Chapter 1. Restructuring the Local State in South Africa: Regional Service Councils, Redistribution and Legitimacy Anthony Lemon Chapter 2 Reform in South Africa and Modernization of the South African City David Sion Chapter 3 Some Alternative Scenarios for the South African City in the Era of Late Apartheid Keith Beavon Chapter 4 Urbanization and Urban Social Change in Zimbabwe David W. Smith Chapter 5 Some Issues in Urban Development and Planning in Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe Carole Rakodi Chapter 6 Rural Development Policy, Regional Development Planning and Decentralization in Botswana Paul van Hoof Chapter 7 Technology Adoption and Post-Independence Transportation of the Small-Scale Farming Sector in Zimbabwe Lovemore Zinyama

Bill Freund and Vishnu Padayachee, eds. (D)urban Vortex: South African City in Transition. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2002. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Inc., Portland, Ore. x + 345 pp. Maps. Notes. References. Index. $34.50. Paper. Social scientists tend to accept data as they are conventionally offered, and hence to analyze developing and transitional societies at a national level. The exceptions are usually short studies of particular aspects of a region, and of course the myriad studies that use micro-data sets from a particular region but without any true sense of a region's uniqueness. (D)urbtm Vortex, in contrast, stands out as a comprehensive effort to place a single metropolitan area in a global setting. The volume provides a political history of the city, an examination of regional government planning efforts, discussions of the economy and financial setting, analysis of political change and labor markets, and a section on meeting basic needs and the provision of urban services. It consists of an introductory overview followed by eleven thematic chapters and represents the updated product of a 1998 conference on Durban's urban development. The book is striking for its breadth of coverage, and the editors are to be commended for successfully welding together a diverse set of papers. They and the authors also merit recognition for even-handedness: This is not a story of saints and devils, nor does it veer toward either unvarnished optimism or gloomy pessimism. Rather, what emerges is a picture of a major metropolitan area struggling to cope with the end of apartheid, both in terms of political control, and perhaps more critically, of social control by government over the region's population. The challenges include regional government consolidation, profound economic changes, and complex relations between regional and national government, with plans for the port's development forming the central issue. In short, Durban is undergoing epochal change rather than a simple transition. (D)urban Vortex ably captures the nuances of this change. Three chapters on politics give an excellent sense of the tensions underlying the racial shift in power, in union and community-based initiatives, and in the region's growing awareness of environmental issues. These are followed by a section on public services and on the emergence of informal sector activities, especially in trading and food distribution. …

The accumulation of books and articles published on the topic of how South Africa's cities have changed (or have not changed) over the past ten years is testimony of how urban specialist are trying to make sense of a very complex period in the urban reconstruction process during transition (for example refer to Seekings', 2003, review essay of five books published on the topic). Insofar as urban change is concerned, one is constantly reminded that "the more things change the more they remain the same" (Dewar, 1999: 91), that the city is now more divided than what it was during apartheid (Watson, 2002), and the ways in which cities have not been changing (Seekings, 2003). Reminders that macro economic policies have directly influenced a form of neo-apartheid where class has replaced race (Beall et al., 2002) and that our cities are being shaped into taking on a neo-apartheid urban form (Beavon, 2000) leaves one questioning what positive impact, if any, the myriad of urban policies formulated during transition, had on changing previously disadvantaged peoples livelihoods. Of particularly relevance from the literature is the policy emphasis during political transition that has been geared towards the undoing of the apartheid spatial legacy of urban settlements. The contestafion over space in South African cities has undergone a number of periods of intensity since political transformation swept through South Africa since the 1990s. These have had a complex mesh of spatial outcomes impacting on inner cities (Dewar, 2004, Donaldson et al., 2002, Rogerson, 2001; 2002; Rogerson and Rogerson, 1995) former white suburbs (Ballard, 2004; Christopher, 2001; Horn et al., 2003, Visser, 2002) and vacant and derelict land beating the scars of past injustices (Dewar, 2001; Xulu and Maharaj, 2004). The historical legacies of the built environment now opens up new uses and new meanings of place that impacts on established sense of place as perceived (re-imagined, reinterpreted) and lived by residents. Public govemance, policy and planning in liaison with invisible spatial

Neighbourhoods in urban and suburban areas experienced changes in terms of physical, social, economic, and demographics. Neighbourhood Hardship Index (NHI) had been used to measure neighbourhood socio-economic condition, using various census variables. Suburban neighbourhoods which underwent a change lead to stratification into striving outer suburbs and declining inner suburbs. The context of this study was suburban neighbourhoods in Buffalo Metropolitan Area (BMA), New York. This paper aimed at highlighting spatial variability of neighbourhood change in innerand outer-suburban neighbourhoods of BMA between 2010-2015. This study examined factors that significantly contribute to neighbourhood change. Also, this study examined whether there a difference in the change of neighbourhood hardship index between innerand outer-suburban neighbourhoods. Composite NHI was developed from economic, demographic, and housing variables. Neighbourhood change was measured by comparing the composite NHI 2010 with that of 2015. The findings depicted a variation of change in hardships index across suburban neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods with higher hardship index were primarily located in inner suburbs. Policy implications call for concerted efforts to tackle the decline in the economy, education, demography to promote equity across neighbourhoods in suburban areas.

Thirty years since publication of David Harvey's Social Justice and the City is an appropriate time for a review of social justice and the South African city. The issue is complicated by questions of definition what qualifies as ‘the city’ or ‘urban’ in this context. Alternative theoretical perspectives have proliferated over the past thirty years, but they share common concerns with the distribution of means of well-being and the structures involved. The social injustice of apartheid was easy to demonstrate, from various theoretical perspectives. While the end of apartheid promised a more just society, gross inequalities are being perpetuated in the post-apartheid city and in society at large. The present trajectory is indefensible morally; in this respect, South Africa may be a microcosm of the world at large. Social justice in the (South African) city requires fundamental changes in political economy and its moral foundations, not only in this country but globally.

Comprehending the South African city—and cities beyond—requires an understanding of the form and functioning of the urban environment, in addition to the ways in which urban dwellers shape city spaces into places of meaning, intention and belonging. This chapter introduces readers to the processes and outcomes of shaping urban space in the form of enclaves and urban quarters. Beginning with a discussion of the history of enclave development and the process of ‘quartering’ urban space, this chapter explores three typologies of enclave and quartered development in the context of South Africa, namely: ethnic/racial; residential; and creative/cultural. While apartheid spatial planning serves as a precursor to enclave development in cities, this chapter traces the continuing deployment of enclaves and urban quarters as a means of materially and discursively shaping urban space and the experience of cities. Using a case study of the urban enclave of De Waterkant, Cape Town, this chapter explores the development and outcomes of enclaves and quarters, while it also provides a conceptual lens through which neighbourhood change more broadly can be understood. At the same time, this chapter provides a framework for investigating and understanding the relationships that urban dwellers create with such structures. In the 21st century, urban quarters constitute an important catalyst in the regeneration and commodification of urban space, while the resulting enclaves and quarters reflect the shifting identities of the city while also embodying new forms of regeneration, inclusion and exclusion that characterise cities in the era of globalisation. Understood in recent literature through a lens of leisure and consumption, a more nuanced analysis of urban enclaves and quarters offers multiple representations of South African and other cities.

Why South African cities are different? Comparing Johannesburg’s Rea Vaya bus rapid transit system with its Latin American siblings

This article is based on field research in two South African host cities of the Men’s Football World Cup 2010 (eThekwini and Johannesburg). The discussed work is part of the research project “Festivalisation” of Urban Governance: The Production of Socio-Spatial Control in the Context of the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. In the context of mega-events, impacts and changes on urban development can vary on a spectrum of festivalisation between opposing poles, either “driven by the event”, or on the other hand where existing configurations of actors and established policies are “driving the event”. By drawing on a theoretical framework which is inspired by an analytical understanding of urban governance, our assumptions are that (a) different configurations of governance promote different ways of handling the challenges associated to the hosting and (b) that different types of “festivalisation” have different consequences and effects for the lived realities of the residents at a local level. The latter is an arena in which urban governance policies are translated, adapted, renegotiated or rejected. We argue that the bringing together of both spheres (local and metropolitan) provides a profound understanding of the process of mega-event implementation and its relation to urban social sustainability.

Studying together, living apart: Emerging geographies of school attendance in post-apartheid Cape Town