Southern Urban Research Articles

Exploring the street economy in African cities: A review of practices, regulatory policies, and challenges of urban governance in Ghana

ABSTRACT This paper explores the governance and resilience of the urban street economy in Ghanaian cities as a reflection of the operational features of informality in African cities. The paper draws on a comprehensive review of secondary documents to explore the practices, policy regulation, urban governance challenges, and resilience of the street economy in urban Ghana. Findings show that eviction, relocation, harassment, and merchandise confiscation are the orthodox policy measures by city authorities for managing and regulating street vending. Nevertheless, the street economy continuously reproduces and spatially redistributes itself across the urban landscape, exemplifying its resilience despite state intolerance and repression. The paper concludes by recommending that city authorities embrace street vending, and by extension, urban informality, as a part of Southern urbanism and, therefore, develop more inclusive and less hostile policies to regulate such activities.

Infrastructure Transitions in Southern Cities: Organising Urban Service Delivery for Climate and Development

Rapidly growing cities in the Global South are characterised by high levels of vulnerability and informality and are expected to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of a changing climate. The confluence of climate change impacts, inequitable urbanisation processes, and under-development emphasise the need for accelerated urban transitions in Southern cities, yet mainstream theories of urban sustainability transitions have been shown to be insufficient for such contexts. This is particularly relevant with regard to urban infrastructure: While mainstream urban theory tends to regard infrastructure as static, centralised, and heavily engineered, infrastructure configurations in cities of the Global South are often heterogeneous, comprising multiple dynamic social and material flows. Drawing on theory from Southern Urbanism and empirical data of unorthodox infrastructures from 14 cities, this article assesses the potential challenges posed by applying a key transitions framework—namely the Multi-Level Perspective—in Southern contexts. The article closes by suggesting a set of theoretical propositions for future conceptual and empirical research that could advance transitions literature more broadly, and highlights the need for all cities to pursue inclusive service delivery models that are responsive to the complex and shifting landscape of climate impacts.

Stray urbanism: stray donkeys and place-identity in Makhanda, South Africa

The presence of free-roaming livestock in cities is often seen as something that should be regulated, and zoning practices across the world generally attempt to restrict their presence or ensure their absence in urban areas. Apart from the health and safety reasoning behind such regulations, there is also a juxtaposition inherent within the presence of livestock in urban areas. This juxtaposition relates to the rural–urban dichotomy which presupposes that the presence of livestock is a rural characteristic and not an urban one. The present research challenges this dichotomy with the case study of Makhanda, South Africa. It utilises southern Urbanism and the contribution of donkeys to the place-identity of the city to frame this discussion. This paper used an online survey with residents of the city as well as key informant interviews to understand the layers of meaning that exist within local opinions on stray donkeys. It found that donkeys were seen by many as integral to the character or place-identity of the city. They were seen as both positive and negative symbols of the city – illustrating the juxtapositions within urban settlements and urbanism in southern cities. In this way, the case study reiterates the call from southern scholars to contextualise, reconceptualise and reframe urban theory so that is responsive to southern environments and experiences.

Beyond informality: Expanding the scope of Southern smart urbanism

Prasad et al.'s (2023) article, ‘Smart City Planning and the Challenges of Informality in India’, makes an important contribution to understanding the limitations of smart city planning practices in a Southern context. However, whilst informality is a dominant feature of Southern urbanism, the appropriation of smart technologies by those at the margins tells an expanded story of smart urbanism from the bottom up, thereby challenging the underpinning notions of planning and smart urbanism.

“Humanistic” City in the Age of “Capitalocene”

The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the “humanistic” core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. First, we synthesize urban environmentalism debates and their embattled relationship with humanistic concerns; second, we illuminate everyday creative interventions that urban youth themselves are generating in their continual negotiations between individual and social, old and new, vernacular and technical; and third, we deflect the linear projection of a “Capitalocene” future by exhibiting contingent practices of southern urbanism. Accordingly, we propose new ways of reinventing urban environmentalism that see humans as a part of its divergent future landscapes. Our version of humanistic city frames the urban as a provisional space in which youth socialities and sensibilities are seen as emerging potentialities calibrating the pace of spatial transitions.

Middle School Freshmen’s Mental Health in Southern Urban China

Middle School Freshmen’s Mental Health in Southern Urban China

Contracting Whiteness: Charter Authorizing and the Erasure of Blackness in Southern Urban Spaces

This study examines the linkages between charter school board composition, proposed school models, and authorization outcomes in two majority Black cities in the initial years post-state takeover. Findings illuminate how approved applications overlapped with the following factors: majority White boards with affiliations to elite reform networks or non-educational professional backgrounds and “No Excuses” models. Using concepts from The Racial Contract ( Mills, 1997 ), this study evidences how application components work to socio-politically construct a proposed school as legible and show an underexplored mechanism by which power is consolidated during the authorization process in ways that limit local Black political power.

Urban theory of/from the Global South: a systematic review of issues, challenges, and pathways of decolonization

Urban studies in recent decades have acknowledged that the cities of the Global South are epistemically, methodologically, and empirically different. However, the theorizations of Southern cities continue to be considered outside mainstream urban theories. In addition, there remains discrepancies and imbalance in the production of scholarships in southern cities. In addition to Southern urbanism knowledge being predominantly produced in the geographical West, scholars based in the Global South experience growing marginalization as a result of access, affordances, and knowledge production politics. With increasing discussions around the politics of visibility and institutional affiliations, this study aims to systematically map and analyze the dynamics and geography of knowledge production in the field. First, a scientometric review of this study unpacks the plethora of urban theory and related publications that theorizes the Global South and places them according to where and by whom this was published. Second, this study traces the need for urban theory and the production of knowledge following the decolonization agenda to be produced by and for the south. Finally, it closes by addressing the ways forward to progress urban theory and empirics from the south through the production and coproduction of knowledge for and by the south.

Contextualizing Collaborative Planning: Addressing Water Resilience in the Urban Poor Settlements of Ranchi

The research embarks from the standpoint that unequal geographies of service delivery in the Southern city evidence differentiating practices embedded within dominant rational planning practices. It aligns and responds to the call of Southern urban theorists to develop alternative planning practices by anchoring within the socio- spatial specificities of Southern urbanisms. Foregrounding this objective, the research turns to the collaborative planning model and its pragmatic tradition of resisting the subjugating tendencies of instrumental rationality by admitting new ways of knowing and being from the life-world. Drawing upon a multi-actor collaboration that sought to address the circumstance of water insecurity in the urban poor settlements of Ranchi city, the research uses Healy’s (1997) Forum, Arena and Courts as entry points to frame on-ground recursive and collaborative interventions. These include unpacking the context to frame and implement interventions that sought to enhance water security while operationalising supporting actions that aim to sustain the interventions. Within this framing, the paper draws upon the critiques of the collaborative planning model as standpoints for contextual reinterpretation to foreground a) the importance of empowering strategic actors at the bottom of socio-political hierarchies to lead the process; b) conceptualize consensus as a process rather than an end-point recognizing its intrinsic relationship with conflict; and, c) institutionalizing formalized yet flexible processes for consensus-building. Overall the paper argues that collaborative planning with its focus on the particularities of place and on the human capacity to invent, create, and transform presents a viable starting point for resisting the dominating confines of instrumental rationality in significant ways.

Geographies of gender and sexuality I: Engaging the shift towards Southern urbanism

Geographers working on sexuality - and specifically of relevance to this report, scholars working on non-heternormative sexualities - have come to understand the need to engage with the urban South, culminating in acknowledgement of the benefits of engagements with Southern urbanism literature. I summarise how very recent sexualities scholarship is starting to signal direct connections with some of the broader interests of Southern urbanism. Such scholarship, I argue, has more in common with some of the empirical and theoretical interests of Southern urbanism than existing interests of the geographies of sexualities literature. I also consider how such emergent scholarship can potentially enrich interests of the geographies of sexualities literature in new and exciting ways.

Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

Guest Editorial : Urban Youth - Engaging young people and their futures in African cities


 
 
 The twin reality of Africa as the world’s demographically youngest and most rapidly urbanising continent should, by default, make it a hotspot for youth-centred urban research. And yet, the voices of young Africans remain grossly absent in public discourse, policy debates and mainstream research on issues that directly affect them. This lacuna propelled the conceptualisation of this themed volume, entitled Urban Youth – Engaging young people and their futures in African cities. Showcasing submissions that not only push the envelope in terms of conceptual debates but also reflect in unconventional ways on experimental methods of co-production, this volume contributes to contemporary youth scholarship in three ways: firstly, by bringing together empirically rich, theoretically profound and collaborative scholarship from Africa; secondly, by showcasing cities in general and African cities in particular as productive, epistemological and relevant socio- political settings; and thirdly, by highlighting the importance of collaborative, multimodal research with youth that takes seriously their agency, aspirations and lived experiences, as much as the everyday structural challenges they face. To situate the volume, we first look briefly at common representations of young people, and particularly young Africans, within global media and policy discourses. To outline the broader knowledge project this volume connects to, we then discuss a few basic epistemological overlaps between the emerging fields of Global South Youth Studies and Southern urbanism. Introducing the rich array of creative, rigorous, experimental and propositional practices and research- based contributions that make up this themed volume constitutes the heart of this editorial. In conclusion, we argue that to secure our common urban future, it is pivotal to centre the voices of Africa’s youth. For this, creative multimedia approaches to knowledge co- production and representation will be needed, as will robust, multimodal Afro-centric partnerships.
 
 

“People are People in a New Sense”: Race, Markets, Foundations, and Paul K. Edwards’s The Southern Urban Negro as a Consumer

This article uncovers the story behind the first systematic study of the African-American consumer market, Paul K. Edwards’s The Southern Urban Negro as a Consumer (1932). Apparently the work of single researcher working at a small African-American college, Fisk University, The Southern Urban Negro as a Consumer was in fact the product an unlikely intersection of larger developments in early twentieth century America: the growing industry producing market research and ambitious philanthropic foundations that aimed to reform the American South. The book’s purpose was not merely to map an untapped market but to demonstrate that African-Americans were viable consumers, in order to win them a new and improved status in American society.

Southern urbanism: a systematic review of concepts, debates, and future directions

Southern urbanism: a systematic review of concepts, debates, and future directions

CRITICAL URBAN PEDAGOGY: Convites as Sites of Southern Urbanism, Solidarity Construction and Urban Learning

AbstractLearning from the pedagogical potentials of Southern city‐making practices is imperative to foster emancipatory urban learning settings. However, the ways in which urban learning spaces beyond professional settings operate and how Southern urbanism practices constitute new critical pedagogies are poorly understood. We draw on research about urban learning on ‘slum upgrading’ in the city of Medellín (Colombia), a benchmark in dealing in tandem with informality and urban violence, to analyze the pedagogical potentials of convites. Convites are an essential sociospatial mechanism of self‐build settlements rooted in solidarity networks that initiate collective action and celebration through public cooking. This practice of makeshift community kitchens led by women became the backbone of the response to the scarcities caused by the pandemic in self‐built neighborhoods in Latin America. In this article we ask what Southern urbanism and critical pedagogy can learn from convites. We then analyze the ways in which convites combine community kitchens as learning environments, the use of collective storytelling as a learning device, and collective action through networked solidarities. We argue that critical urban pedagogy is a situated pedagogy derived from everyday relations of place, body and materiality infused by memory and articulated by storytelling.

The interplay of riskscapes and objects in unplanned settlements in Monrovia

This paper explores how the concepts of riskscapes and object formation can be incorporated into governance theory to provide an analytical lens for risk governance in the context of a plurality of practices. In this context, the Monrovia Slum Initiative is examined using data from three unplanned settlements. Competing riskscapes are reflected in object formation, and the resulting object of governance. While manifesting the inclinations of dominant actors, governance objects demonstrate the potential to accommodate a range of interests, groups, ideals, and practices. The slum initiative pursues a development-oriented goal that aims to integrate unplanned settlements into the city. But it equally serves as a device to detach or eliminate unplanned settlements from the city. The ‘slum’ as an object and the slum initiative as a tool of governance determine which forms of urbanization are acceptable, which areas are stigmatized, as well as guiding locals' conduct. In this manner, the object alters the riskscape it emerges from. The results indicate that the object formation engendered by the slum initiative and its driving actors remains contested and does not necessarily entail a convergence of riskscapes. Governance tools and objects, therefore, do not consistently represent a uniform grounding. The fruitful integration of riskscapes and object formation in governance theory contributes to the literature on urban risk governance and on southern urbanism by providing a prism for assessing the local construction, spatialization and navigation of risk in settings where both informality and planning are contested and diverse.

Organizing for the Smart African City: Leveraging the urban commons for exerting the right to the city

To accommodate the need for community engagement and place-based approaches in smart city agendas in Africa, we build on the literature on smart cities, southern urbanism and the urban commons to develop a conceptual framework for urban commoning in Africa. We argue that commoning, as an organizing process, establishes institutions for urban commons that account for different urban dwellers’ needs, perspectives and knowledges thereby strengthening inclusion and producing knowledge-intensive smart city development. We explain how the proposed conceptual framework is particularly suited to the African context, as it can mitigate the formal-informal divide and enable marginalized citizens to meaningfully express their right to the city. By enabling citizens’ voice in planning and distributing urban resources, commoning helps redefine local bureaucracies, rendering them more open and inclusive while limiting the enclosure and marketization of cities, which is often a source of contestation in the development of smart cities.

Negative Impact of Amphetamine-Type Stimulant Use on Opioid Agonist Treatment Retention in Ontario, Canada.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate epidemiological trends of co-use patterns of amphetamine-type stimulants and opioids and the impact of co-use patterns on Opioid Agonist Treatment (OAT) retention in Ontario, Canada. The secondary objective was to assess geographical variation in amphetamine-type stimulant use in Northern Rural, Northern Urban, Southern Rural and Southern Urban Areas of Ontario.Methods: A retrospective cohort study on 32,674 adults receiving OAT from ~70 clinics was conducted between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2020, in Ontario, Canada. Patients were divided into four groups base on the proportion of positive urine drug screening results for amphetamine-type stimulants during treatment: group 1 (0–25%), group 2 (25–50%), group 3 (50–75%), and groups 4 (75–100%). A Fractional logistic regression model was used to evaluate differences over time in amphetamine-type stimulant use with urine drug screening results. A Cox Proportional Hazard Ratio model was used to calculate the impact of amphetamine-type stimulant use on retention in OAT and adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics, drug use and clinical factors. Lastly, a logistic regression model was used on a subgroup of patients to assess the impact of geography on amphetamine-type stimulant use in Northern Rural, Northern Urban, Southern Rural and Southern Urban Areas of Ontario.Results: There were significant differences in amphetamine-type stimulant positive urine drug screening results year-over-year from 2015 to 2020. Significant differences were observed between amphetamine-type stimulant groups with regards to sociodemographic, clinical and drug use factors. Compared to those with no amphetamine-type stimulant use, the number of days retained in OAT treatment for amphetamine-type stimulant users was reduced (hazard ratio 1.19; 95% confidence interval = 1.07–1.17; p < 0.001). Lastly, an adjusted logistic regression model showed a significant increase in the likelihood of amphetamine-type stimulant use in Northern Rural regions compared to Southern Urban areas.Conclusion: There was a significant increase in amphetamine-type stimulant use among individuals in OAT from 2014 to 2020, associated with decreased OAT retention. Research is required to determine if tailored strategies specific to individuals in OAT who use amphetamine-type stimulants can improve OAT outcomes.

Facilitators and Barriers to Patient-Delivered Partner Therapy Acceptance for Chlamydia trachomatis Among Young African American Men Who Have Sex With Women in a Southern Urban Epicenter.

Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct) disproportionately affects African American young people living in the Southern United States and can have negative consequences if left untreated. Patient-delivered partner therapy (PDPT) is an evidence-based practice in which individuals diagnosed with Ct can provide treatment directly to their sex partners. However, PDPT acceptance rates need improvement. Although reasons for PDPT acceptance have been explored previously, the facilitators and barriers to expedited partner therapy acceptance among young southern African American men who have sex with women have not yet been examined. Twenty semistructured interviews were conducted as part of a community-based Ct screening and treatment intervention among African American men aged 15 to 25 years who had female sex partners. Participants were asked about why they did or did not accept PDPT for their sex partners. Data were transcribed and analyzed in NVivo qualitative software using an inductive thematic approach. Participants' decision making was multifaceted. Facilitators for PDPT acceptance included being able to cure their partner, convenient access to treatment, believing it was the right thing to do, having a close relationship with a partner, concern for the partner's well-being, and the perceived severity of Ct. Barriers to PDPT acceptance were the belief that a partner did not need treatment, not having a close relationship with the partner, being unable to contact the partner, and fear of conflict. Findings had similarities to other studies, indicating some universal messaging may be warranted alongside culturally tailored interventions for specific patient populations to increase PDPT acceptance. Implications for patient-provider communication are provided.

Urban life in the shadows of infrastructural death: from people as infrastructure to dead labor and back again

ABSTRACT Grounded in the writings of AbdouMaliq Simone and the theoretical project of Southern urbanism, the concept of “people as infrastructure” has radically reframed how we understand and study urban infrastructure as a modality of social practice. This paper begins by appraising the impact that people as infrastructure has had on urban geography and critical infrastructure studies before moving to consider how notions of infrastructural violence can deepen our understanding of the concept’s content and context. In particular, this intervention brings people as infrastructure into dialogue with the Marxist concept of “dead labor” to bridge experiential and structural epistemic readings of infrastructure as human practice and as products of social labor. Doing so, I suggest, provides a novel conceptual and political terrain to: (1) highlight the “living labor” underpinning the production of socio-technical systems; and (2) think through how urban lives and livelihoods may transgress the “infrastructural alienation” generated by capitalist urbanization.