Global South Cities Research Articles

Institutional Capacity Determinants in a Global South City: The Case of Wastewater Utilities in Zacatecas, Mexico

Institutional Capacity Determinants in a Global South City: The Case of Wastewater Utilities in Zacatecas, Mexico

Global South Cities: Borderline International Legal Personality and the Global Economic Order

Global South Cities: Borderline International Legal Personality and the Global Economic Order

Electrifying urban Africa: energy access, city-making and globalisation in Nigeria and Benin

Electricity access has become a crucial issue in global South cities. While demand is growing, conventional grids are failing or insufficient, especially in Africa. Urban dwellers therefore have to develop a wide range of (in)formal infrastructures to meet their daily electricity needs. Building on recent studies on urban electricity in the global South, this paper aims to contribute to the debates on hybrid forms of electricity provision by analysing the diffusion of solar panels and generators in two cities, Ibadan in Nigeria and Cotonou in Benin. Although neighbouring and relatively similar, these two cities illustrate distinct daily electrical lives. In Nigeria, an electricity-exporting country, people face daily power outages. In Benin, a country that depends on Nigeria for its supply, there is electricity but it is difficult to connect to the grid because of connection costs. Based on an empirical study, the article shows that Ibadan’s inhabitants use generators as a complement to a conventional grid that is almost universal but unreliable. In Cotonou, solar energy is an alternative until they can connect to the grid. Generators and solar panels have become the material markers of urban Africa, providing information on inequalities in access to electricity.

Perceptions of Inclusivity and Sustainability in Urban Sanitation in Global South Cities.

Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) calls for sustainable urban sanitation services for all, but the definitions of "inclusion" and "sustainability" within the framework leave room for interpretation. This study aims to provide an initial understanding of how these terms are currently interpreted by a range of sanitation actors in six cities of the Global South. Urban sanitation professionals from private (n = 16), public (n = 28), non-governmental (n = 43), and academic (n = 10) institutions were interviewed using a standardized tool, and data was analyzed to identify themes and trends. Terms such as "everyone" or "for all" shed little light on how to ensure inclusion, though disabled people, women, children, and the poor were all highlighted when probed. Greater specificity of beneficiary groups in policy is likely to enhance their visibility within sanitation service provision. All three pillars of sustainability identified within CWIS were referenced, with different stakeholders focusing more closely on environmental, social, or economic sustainability, based on their organizational goals and interests. Greater collaboration may foster a balanced view across the pillars, with different organizations acting as champions for each one. The findings can facilitate discussions on a shared understanding of multi-stakeholder engagement in achieving inclusive and sustainable sanitation service provision.

Anxious Joburg: the inner lives of a global south city ed. by Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden

Anxious Joburg: the inner lives of a global south city ed. by Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden

Delivery workers and the interplay of digital and mobility (in)justice

On-demand delivery services are experiencing a moment of expansion, which the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to foster. For cities in quarantine, these services allow the supply of food and other primary goods without moving from home, making riders move and access them on behalf of the clients. During a pandemic, working as a rider potentially increases the risks of an already precarious job given the contractual arrangements and the algorithmic control that characterize this gig economy sector. We argue that platforms have generated forms of injustice that are reproduced and amplified by digital platforms encoded in the Global North, which are governed by regulations and optimization criteria that do not dialogue with the precarious reality of Global South cities. Focusing on the case of Santiago de Chile, our analysis draws on the triangulation and complementarity of two instruments: interviews before the COVID-19 pandemic and surveys involving riders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings show that platforms generate specific forms of injustice that affect riders and their mobility in particular. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened such forms of digital injustice, increasing the pressure for constantly working and the exposure of riders to threats such as accidents, criminality and health risks.

Can Environmental Tax Reduce Dilapidated Motor Vehicles Importation and Pollution? Insights from Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania

The influence of tax regime in reducing dilapidated vehicles’ demand and attendant pollution is puzzling global south cities. This article provides an assessment on how environmental tax is or is not curbing down the importation of the Dilapidated Motor Vehicles (DMVs) with a view to reduce vehicular emissions in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A multilevel perspective employing mixed methods of data collection was used to collect qualitative and quantitative data through document review, group discussions, in-depth interviews from selected Members of Parliament, policymakers, government officials, and brand new as well as DMVs dealers. Content, trend and discourse analysis enabled to interpret qualitative data. Findings reveal that taxing importation of DMVs is not significantly reducing air pollution. The side effects of the increased DMVs import in polluting the environment are increasing due to the rise in income levels, population increase and technical challenges of estimating marginal social cost. As DMVs tax was not reflected in the exporter’s cost schedule, the non-inclusion gives a market failure scenario a la Pigou Theorem. Rethinking of an optimal environmental tax remains a complex sociopolitical issue calling for research and policy attention.

Reimagining (informal) housing futures in uncertain times

In an incisive piece in this Journal, Michele Lancione argues that the only way to envision new housing futures is to pay attention to places where housing precarity is lived and felt. We respond to such a discursive call by drawing on a wide-range of particular empirics—from our pedagogical engagement with housing informality in Melbourne to in-situ ethnographic empirical work in Manila and Dhaka—to elaborate three aspects of reimagining informal housing practices: a) informal housing as a site for grounding teaching and learning pedagogy; b) informal housing as a space for reflexive research; and c) informal housing as a mode of futuring. Our reflective insights, which put three cities with vastly different socio-political histories in conversation, also answer a growing call from critical urban scholars to abandon the usual comparison of similar cities and to overcome the division between global North and global South cities, offering ideas that stress mutual learning across this divide.

Dynamic heritage: the case of Havana

This text discusses some practices and theories related to urban planning and architectural design in a UNESCO listed city, promoting a shared approach on the theme of Urban regeneration in Historical contexts. The practices and theories derive from researches and didactic experiences that I have developed with other professors and students in Havana, Cuba. The first one with CUJAE Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverrìa was the international cooperation program PatrIndArch on Water Heritage (2013-15), in which CUJAE Cuba, University of Alicante Spain, University of Padova and University of Ferrara were involved. From this pedagogical experience came the opportunity to program an international Seminar dedicated to “Water, Architecture and Landscape in Europe”, held in November 2014 in Instituto Universitario del Agua y de las Ciencias Ambientales, Universidad de Alicante, where I participated with professors and researchers from the Universities of Ferrara, Padova, Alicante, Coimbra, Bucarest, Valenciennes et Hainaut-Cambrésis, with proceedings published in 2015. This text is mainly derived from the PRIA research program “URB_HE Urban Heritage Conservation as vector of social equity”, in which I participated (2015-17), and which was financed as an “Interdisciplinary research project” by the University of Ferrara under a call for proposals dedicated to defining new international fields of research. This research and pedagogical activity wwas related to the concepts of rehabilitation, regeneration, heritage conservation, which were considered like “moving concepts”. The emblem of this dynamic is the evolution of the concept of heritage: from tangible to intangible, from monuments to cultural landscape. Havana and its territory represent a privileged case study from which to observe not only influences of European and North American culture on the Global South cities, but also original hybridizations deriving from the intertwining of different practices related to urban planning and architectural design in UNESCO cities.

Green Gentrification and Environmental Injustice: A Discussion Based on the New Pinheiros River Program, São Paulo, Brazil

Through the analysis of the New Pinheiros River Program, São Paulo, Brazil, the differences in the solutions presented are considered to implement environmental projects in different territories over the same sub-basin. Vulnerable neighborhoods upstream will receive only basic infrastructure; while Marginal Pinheiros, a rich place, will be contemplated with aditional leisure, sports and cultural equipments. The general aim is to analyze the process of capitalist production of the Pinheiros River depolluting program area, proposed by the São Paulo State government in 2019, as well as green gentrification and creation of environmental injustice. Methodology consists of bibliographic research and analysis of the program's documents and speeches of people in charge. Global South cities have been experimenting environmental injustice as a result of financial capital investments.

Water access in global South cities: The challenges of intermittency and affordability

• Globally water data obscures challenges to universal access to safe, reliable and affordable water in global South cities. • The focus on urban policy to support privatization and corporatization in the water sector has generally not made water in cities more accessible or affordable. • Households without reliable access to municipal piped water service often pay excessive amounts for alternative sources of water. • In the 15 cities studied, many households only receive piped water intermittently and this negatively affects water quality. • In cities, the public sector has an important role to play in ensuring universal access to safe, reliable, and affordable water. The article analyzes water access in cities in the global South. We examine two challenges to water access from the perspective of households: intermittent services and affordability. The article analyzes primary and secondary data from 15 cities and one corresponding informal or low-income settlement in each city in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. In 12 out of 15 cities analyzed, households connected to the municipal piped system received water intermittently, which compromises quality. In the 15 informal settlements studied, seven receive water less than 17 hours a week. Households that lack access to publicly provided water obtain water from alternative sources which can cost up to 52 times as much. In informal and low-income settlements in three cities, Cochabamba, Kampala, and Mzuzu, basic supplies of water appear unaffordable to households with average income. Our analysis points to the need for cities and water utilities to work together to extend the public piped networks, address intermittent services, and ensure adequate supplies of water are affordable. Looking forward it will be increasingly difficult for cities to keep pace with the growing demand for water, hence the urgency to change our collective ethos about water access and improve modalities of provision now.

Assessing the outcomes of implementing natural open space plans in a Global South city

Systematic conservation planning is a scientific method of prioritising scarce resources to minimise the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The approach aims to consider social, economic and political imperatives, and may be used by municipalities to designate their (predominantly) natural open space systems, in the form of a conservation plan. However, the multidimensional outcomes of implementing these conservation plans — in terms of both positive and negative ecological, social, and institutional dimensions — are rarely critically evaluated. We present a practical approach to assess the outcomes of implementing natural open space plans in urban areas, especially for the local (municipal) level where resource challenges may hinder assessment. The approach, drawn from comparisons of existing conservation assessment frameworks, considers the following outcome categories: ecological/natural; social/human; financial (institutional); and management (institutional). The approach is tested on a South African case study, and factors (challenges and opportunities) affecting the outcomes of implementing natural open space plans are identified. The results underscore how ecological outcomes are negatively affected by habitat transformation attributed to urbanisation and inappropriate land use management; and transgressions such as illegal, exploitive land uses. In respect of the social/human outcomes, collaborative partnerships with civil society, and the involvement of champions, are pivotal to implementation success. We found that financial and management institutional constraints contribute to inadequate investment in natural open space planning exacerbated by budget alignment to short and medium-term socio-economic and political priorities. The inter-dependence of the different outcomes emphasises the complexity of social-ecological systems and the need for a holistic assessment. Understanding the factors affecting the outcomes of implementing natural open space plans allows local government to respond to the emerging knowledge of changing ecological and socio-economic conditions, facilitating the institutionalisation of adaptive management approaches, which appreciate the intertwined nature of social-ecological systems. This can, in turn, enhance decision-making processes, and advance conservation outcomes, ecosystem resilience and resulting flows of ecosystem services provided by nature, which are essential for human well-being.

Street vending and co-production: key lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 global pandemic has prompted governments to resort to or allow quasi-formal means to provide basic goods and services to communities that were forced into quarantine. We analyze how grassroots self-help strategies interact with the adaptation mechanisms of formal governance under crisis conditions. Drawing on empirical insights in Manila (Philippines) and Hanoi (Vietnam), we examine the practices that have enabled street vendors in the two metropolises to earn a living and to provide needed services to city residents. We explain how some lessons on co-production practices might inform post-pandemic recovery strategies and future policy-making processes in global South cities.

African agency in transnational city networks: The case of the City of Johannesburg

ABSTRACT Transnational city networks have generally been portrayed as a more inclusive and egalitarian mode of international organizing. However, recent research has questioned these assumptions and highlighted the dynamics of power, domination and control at the heart of the functioning of these networks. These studies have also suggested a North–South power dynamic in global city networks, which seems to deny any significant agency to Global South cities in these networks. In this paper, I seek to qualify this view by analysing the manifestation of agency by an African city in a major transnational city network. I show how, despite finding itself at the bottom of the global city hierarchy, the City of Johannesburg was able to capitalize on the visionary leadership of its Mayor and a favourable domestic political alignment to direct the affairs of the United Cities and Local Governments and in the process shape global discourse on urban development.

Do Cogovernance and CSOs Supplement Municipal Capacity for Service Delivery? An Assessment of Differences in Simple versus Complex Services

AbstractMunicipal governments in the Global South vary in their ability to provide not only complex social services, like environmentally proper solid waste disposal, but even simple services, like trash collection from the streets. This article examines whether variation in service provision outcomes is associated with service-specific municipal administrative capacity, locally embedded civil society organization (CSO) presence, and collaborative governance for local planning and budgeting (or cogovernance). Using a panel dataset of Peruvian municipalities, I find that while all three factors are associated with better outcomes for simple services, only greater public administration capacity is associated with higher service outcomes when the service is more complex. This suggests that CSOs may face some difficulties to supplement the state in the provision of relatively complex services and that local cogovernance venues tend to prioritize more immediate service issues. These findings have policy implications for managing relatively complex services in Global South cities that struggle with service-specific administrative capacity and relatively complex service provision, particularly those with climate change consequences. They convey that strengthening this type of capacity at the office level is crucial to providing increasingly complex services, and supporting community-based CSOs and cogovernance venues may help as a strategy to address simple service delivery.

Power, politics and a poo pump: Contestation over legitimacy, access and benefits of sanitation technology in Kampala

Most literature on sanitation largely follows a developmentalist approach, searching for the right combination of public education, appropriate technology, and partnerships across local and international institutions. Such works are useful, but also can be read as demonstrating the limitations of focusing on the modern infrastructural ideal of uniform, networked services. Studies of household experiences and practices of infrastructure in global south cities have increasingly drawn attention to the heterogeneity of sanitation infrastructure, associated everyday practices and power‐laden relationships. In this study, we analyse the introduction of the gulper pump (a new sanitation technology in Kampala) and the political processes that have shaped its slow and stochastic uptake. Advocates suggest that the gulper might well redress gaps left by the more commonly used technologies, yet procedural concerns led to conflict over the introduction of the gulper. In a wider context of new governance arrangements and infrastructural experimentation, controversy over the gulper contributed to new institutions and imaginaries of what good urban sanitation entails. We emphasize that thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations highlights how social norms and relations, economic gain as well as the state play an important part in both politicizing and legitimizing more heterogeneous urban sanitation services.

Expat anxieties: Risk and safety in Cape Town, South Africa and Santiago de Chile

This article considers ‘expatriate’ discourses about security in Cape Town, South Africa and Santiago de Chile. The cities themselves have reputations as desirable, beautiful, civilised, modern and welcoming, in contrast to lurid ideas about poverty, crime, filth and corruption that often characterise northern imaginings of the developing world. Yet, their locations within sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, respectively, nonetheless mark them out as potential spaces of high risk for migrants from the north. In this article, I am interested in the way in which lifestyle migrants to these cities negotiate fears about risk and safety within their new homes. In order to consider this question, I discuss posts on the online messageboards dedicated to these two cities within the popular InterNations ‘expat forum,’ as well as a series of interviews with people who use the forum. I use these respondents’ discursive constructions of safety, threat, otherness, belonging and the unknowability of the global south city to consider some of the affective underpinnings of this form of privileged migration.

Playful mobilities in the Global South: A study of Pokémon Go play in Rio de Janeiro and Nairobi

Pokémon Go is the most popular location-based game worldwide. As a location-based game, Pokémon Go’s gameplay is connected to networked urban mobility. However, urban mobility differs significantly around the world. Large metropoles in South America and Africa, for example, experience ingrained social, cultural, and economic inequalities. With this in mind, we interviewed Pokémon Go players in two Global South cities, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Nairobi (Kenya), to understand how players navigate urban spaces not only based on gameplay but with broader concerns for safety. Our findings reveal that players negotiate their urban mobilities based on perceptions of risk and safety, choosing how to move around and avoiding areas known for violence and theft. These findings are relevant for understanding the social and political aspects of networked urban spaces as well as for investigating games as venues through which we can understand ordinary life, racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities.

The urban water metabolism of Cape Town: Towards becoming a water sensitive city

To improve its resilience to increasing climatic uncertainty, the City of Cape Town (the City) aims to become a water sensitive city by 2040. To undertake this challenge, a means to measure progress is needed that quantifies the urban water systems at a scale that enables a whole-of-system approach to water management. Using an urban water metabolism framework, we (1) provide a first city-scale quantification of the urban water cycle integrating its natural and anthropogenic flows, and (2) assess alternative water sources (indicated in the New Water Programme) and whether they support the City towards becoming water sensitive. We employ a spatially explicit method with particular consideration to apply this analysis to other African or Global South cities. At the time of study, centralised potable water demand by the City amounted to 325 gigalitres per annum, 99% of which was supplied externally from surface storage, and the remaining ~1% internally from groundwater storage (Atlantis aquifer). Within the City’s boundary, runoff, wastewater effluent and groundwater represent significant internal resources which could, in theory, improve supply efficiency and internalisation as well as hydrological performance. For the practical use of alternative resources throughout the urban landscape, spatially explicit insight is required regarding the seasonality of runoff, local groundwater storage capacity and the quality of water as it is conveyed through the complex urban landscape. We suggest further research to develop metrics of urban water resilience and equity, both of which are important in a Global South context.
 Significance:
 
 This research provides the initial groundwork of quantifying the magnitude of the urban water cycle of the City of Cape Town at an annual timescale, in relation to becoming a water sensitive city. The urban water metabolism framework used in this study provides important insight to assess whole-of-system urban water dynamics and to benchmark progress towards becoming water sensitive. By quantifying the magnitude of flows into and out of the urban system, this research sheds light on the opportunities to improve circularity in the urban water cycle. The spatial approach adopted here provides a platform to interrogate the urban landscape and its role in the urban water cycle. By using data products that are available via national data sets or remote sensing, this approach can be applied to other African or Global South where data is characteristically scarce. Further work is required to establish metrics that can adequately describe urban water resilience and equity.

Urban qualities and residents\u2019 strategies in compact global south cities: the case of Havana

Research and policy argue for more compact cities to respond to sustainable development challenges. However, what actually needs to be made more compact and how, is under examined, particularly in global South cities where north notions of urban qualities are adopted without being questioned. Informed by a qualitative study in informal and compact neighborhoods in Havana, this paper explores which qualities are important to deliver more just cities, and what strategies are developed by residents to strengthen beneficial qualities and address detrimental qualities in contexts of informal urbanization and compactness. It shows how the street, human capital, neighborhood, housing affordability, citizenship and vibrancy are significant compact city qualities neglected in the literature. Finally, the paper shows how diverse strategies are developed by residents to draw upon these qualities, such as self-help urbanism, learning and innovation, economic entrepreneurship, networks of solidarity, economies of reciprocity, local imaginaries and active citizenship.