Urban Governance

This book engages the reader in exploring the relationships between digital social innovation initiatives and the city. It delivers a fresh, accessible and case-based discussion on the emergence of digitally-enabled social innovation practices in Europe that are redesigning the urban space and challenging the consolidated urban governance processes.

This book adds to the research of urban informality in the Global South with a specific focus on South Africa and Zimbabwe. It addresses the agency and the potential transformative capacity of the phenomenon of urban informality in connection with Southern African cities and towns. It adopts a political economy approach to analyse the evolution of informality in cities and its implications for urban planning.

This book examines the “ethics in relation to city and urbanism” by evaluating the strengths and limitations of rights as a conceptual tool from the comparative East–West perspective in resolving urban controversies (involving conflicts of rights between different classes, different groups within the present generation, present vs future generations, human vs animals, human vs plants and nature), thereby facilitating urban policy-making and good urban governance.

This book offers a compelling account of everyday life, livelihoods, and governance in post-apartheid South Africa among the urban poor and marginalized, anchored in and through a critique of the concept of informality, or living outside of the state, its laws, services, and protection. Using a case study of the Zama Zama, loosely translated from the isiZulu as ‘to hustle, or to strive’ and colloquially used to refer to those working as informal artisanal miners on Johannesburg’s numerous disused and abandoned gold mines, the book documents an ethnography of this community’s everyday lives, struggles, and hopes. It provides an intimate account of a community, its social relations, and its political relationship to the state. The narratives of the Zama Zama are used to raise broader questions about precarity, belonging, and governance in post-apartheid South Africa, and suggest that pervasive informality could risk the country's democratic order.

This book presents international experiences in urban network learning. It is vital for cities to learn as it is necessary to constantly adapt and improve public performance and address complex challenges in a constantly changing environment. It is therefore highly relevant to gain more insight into how cities can learn.