Shaping the Public Space Discourse with the Global South

Abstract

When I presented The Journal of Public Space at Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, in Quito (2016), during an event at the Urban Library, I made it very clear that the partnership that City Space Architecture had established with UN-Habitat inspired our mission to give voice to unheard countries in order to include them in the discourse on public space. At the beginning of 2022 The Journal of Public Space launched a call for papers inviting scholars, designers, planners, city practitioners, historians and writers to offer critical and innovative contributions to understanding meanings and practices in plural and diverse African spaces, contexts, climates, regional and local scales, and histories. The issue was intended to contribute to the establishment of the Centre on African Public Spaces (CAPS), a project initiated by the City of Johannesburg (South Africa) in collaboration with other African cities, universities and community advocacy groups. As a Pan-African urban lab for public space, CAPS was designed to be a home and resource to a community of urban practitioners and thinkers, students, scholars and civil society activists dedicated to connect, exchange experiences, advance knowledge, share resources, grow expertise and mobilize on a wide range of relevant local, regional and global issues. In response to the call for papers we received 70 submissions. We shortlisted 27 papers for this issue and we invited African scholars to serve as peer reviewers and to support the production of quality contents. The peer review process involved more than 60 African scholars and two African guest editors, for more than one year.