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\"It is well known that the world is transitioning to an irrevocable urban future whose epicentre has moved into the cities of Asia and Africa. What is less clear is how this will be managed and deployed as a multi-polar world system is being born. The full implications of this challenge cry out to be understood because city building (and retrofitting) cannot but be an undertaking entangled in profound societal and cultural shifts. In this highly original account, renowned urban sociologists AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse offer a call for action based fundamentally on the detail of people's lives. Urban regions are replete with residents who are compelled to come up with innovative ways to maintain or extend livelihoods, whose makeshift character is rarely institutionalized into a fixed set of practices, locales or organizational forms. This novel analytical approach reveals a more complex relationship between people, the state and other agents than has previously been understood. As the authors argue, we need adequate concepts and practices to grasp the composition and intricacy of these shifting efforts to make visible new political possibilities for action and social justice in cities across Asia and Africa\"-- Provided by publisher.

The 'mega-cities' of the developing world are home to over 10 million people each and even smaller cities are experiencing unprecedented population surges. The problems surrounding this influx of people - slums, poverty, unemployment and lack of governance - have been well-documented. This book provides ways on how to deal with these challenges.

Edgar Pieterse offers a critique of the mainstream Brundtland inspired conception of sustainable cities. His alternative conceptual approach presents the critical dimensions of an alternative urban development framework. He looks at how three co-constitutive urban operating systems – infrastructural, economic and spatial – need to be transformed in order to achieve more sustainable lives and livelihoods. He argues that such transformations depend on grounded alternative visions and effective politics.

It is often lamented that South African cities are beset by interminable crises: segregation, inequality, fragmentation, violence, the Aids epidemic and so on. This lament is premised on the assumption that somehow urban challenges must be stabilised, brought under control through analytical or policy tools and then the ideals of urban integration and holism can come to pass. This paper challenges this conception of urban development policy and politics by recasting crisis as an opportunity (temporarily) to align and co-ordinate energies in order to undo the deeply engraved legacies of urban segregation and fragmentation. Concretely, the argument unfolds along three guideposts. In the first section, it is proposed that there are essentially three key conditions for addressing the structural crises of urban fragmentation: vibrant city politics in a radical democratic mode; a substantial 'epistemic community' in cities that generate imaginative ideas about alternative futures premised on a set of meta-objectives and concrete intervention strategies for the city; and, sufficient investment capital (private and public) to give economic support and expression to the implementation of concrete programmes and projects in line with the ideas generated by the epistemic community for alternatives. The second section of the paper elaborates prospective meta-objectives that epistemic communities can work with in order to advance more integrative urban development based on the framework of Ayyun Malik. The third section proposes some tangible interventions to construct socially and politically projects to build alternative futures in the context of Cape Town.

Key policy agendas on shelter and participatory governance are woefully inadequate to address the multi-dimensional crisis of urban life in cities of the global South. This finding was the crux of City Futures, a book I authored regarding mainstream development opinion on the topic (Pieterse 2008). I want to build in this chapter on that work by reacting to a number of crucial mainstream policy developments that have transpired since then and extend earlier arguments about the intersections between development, planning and sustainability (Kamal-Chaoui and Robert 2009, Suzuki et al. 2010, UN-Habitat 2011, UNEP 2011a). I will not use this chapter to critique or respond to new mainstream policy discourses but rather focus on a propositional agenda that can illuminate the intersections between development, planning and sustainability. In my work I usually try to balance critique and proposition because this is the only viable, even if difficult, mode of scholarship that makes sense amid large-scale dysfunction and exclusion (Parnell, Pieterse and Watson 2009).

The post-election period in South Africa has been marked by trials for the NGO sector, in spite of its pivotal role in the anti-apartheid struggle. The article explores certain developments within the NGO sector, and between the NGOs and the government, to present tentative interpretations of these processes. A schematic background to the NGO sector firstly contextualises the problems now confronting these organisations. The second part provides an overview of the internal difficulties which confront NGOs. A description of how relations between the NGO sector and the government are unfolding is complementedby a discussionofNGOs andthe prevailing `funding crises'. The final part is more speculative, postulating the challenges which will confront NGOs in the coming years.

The 'apartheid city' was synonymous with extreme racial segregation and inequality. After the first democratic elections in April 1994, a range of new urban development policies were developed to deconstruct and re-build the apartheid city. These efforts unfolded under a policy discourse of urban integration. Spatial planning featured large in the urban development policy matrix of the South African state at a time when spatial planning was declining in influence in the international context. The thesis focuses on the relevance of spatial planning for addressing three intractable and inter-related features of the apartheid city: racial segregation, land-use fragmentation and inequality. The research sought to explain why by 2001, the urban development agenda was not dismantling the apartheid city, but rather reinforcing its spatial patterns. The theoretical contribution of the research is to show how the policy ideal of urban integration corresponds very closely to planning ideas contained in theories associated with the Compact City and New Urbanism, while procedural aspects are akin to the arguments of Communicative Planning theory. The thesis identifies a hybridised South African approach that found support across a wide spectrum of urban development policies - housing, development planning, transport, local government, environmental management. However, political and institutional frictions between national departments and spheres of government made it virtually impossible to harness the potential synergy that could arise from such policy confluence. The research explored two policy frameworks in close detail: 1) the Urban Development Framework driven by the national Department of Housing; and 2) the Municipal Spatial Development Framework (Muni- SDF) of the City of Cape Town Municipality. The latter policy was explored in terms of its broader institutional setting and through a micro-level study focussed on a land-use dispute. The case study of post-apartheid urban policy was researched through a combination of qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, archival documentary reviews and an analysis of secondary literature. The thesis argues that the normative planning theories employed need to be articulated in a way that accounts for the specificity of the South African postcolonial experience. It is concluded that the policy tenets of urban integration need to be recast in a way that takes explicit account of specific contextual and institutional dynamics and power that shape the contested political dialogue about how best to advance urban integration so that policies can better reduce the urban fragmentation, segregation and inequality that continue to mark and haunt South African cities.