Posts tagged with 'South Africa'
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a day-long roundtable discussion with the five finalists for the WRI Ross Prize Cities, organized by WRI at the Ford Foundation in New York City. The roundtable followed the first-ever award ...
Warwick Junction is a finalist for the WRI Ross Prize for Cities. Warwick Junction’s maze of stalls, arches and bridges can elicit wonder in any first-time visitor to South Africa’s largest marketplace. The area’s nine distinct markets are wedged between ...
When Rani, a mother of five in Khulna, Bangladesh, found that the tea stall outside her home kept flooding, she didn’t wait for a government climate resilience program to swoop in. Like many people in urban communities facing the effects ...
Cities in the global south today face a complex challenge: like all cities, they need to reduce carbon emissions, but they also need to expand access to energy. Around the world, 1.1 billion people currently lack access to electric cooling ...
More than half the global population lacks access to safely managed sanitation services – 4.5 billion people. Every year, more than 340,000 children under the age of five die as a result of this problem. And we’re not solving it ...
Illegal. Criminal. A drag on the economy. These are just a few of the derisive labels that beleaguer urban informal workers, says Martha Chen, co-founder of and senior advisor to Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. Informal workers – ...
While most cities around the world struggle with inequality, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the challenge is compounded by the legacy of apartheid. In the apartheid era, black populations were relocated to the poorly serviced areas far away from job opportunities. ...
Urbanization is changing the face of the planet – for better and for worse. City populations, GDP and investment are increasing exponentially. At the same time, carbon emissions are rising, more and more people are living in slums, and air pollution ...
More and more, cities are acting independently of – or even in direct opposition to – their national governments. This trend is seen, for example, in the group of American “Climate Mayors” that remain committed to the Paris Agreement even ...
This series, supported by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, discusses walking and cycling in cities with a special focus on low- and middle-income countries. Walking and cycling are the dominant modes of transport in African cities, and too often it’s ...
Cape Town is running out of water. After three years of intense drought, South Africa’s second-largest city is just a few months away from “Day Zero,” the day when the city government will shut off water taps for most homes and businesses. The impacts ...
Beyond the technological revolution underway in transport today, gender was an underlying theme of Transforming Transportation this year. Transport is not gender neutral, not matter where you are, said a chorus of experts during the opening panel on day two. “Gender is often a more robust determinant of modal choice than ...
Across the world, it’s becoming clearer that development goals must be urban goals. As their populations and global connections grow, cities account for an ever-growing portion of the global economy. But despite their prominence, cities can’t do it alone. Local ...
By 2050, the global population is expected to soar beyond 9 billion people, 66 percent of whom may live in cities. Accompanying this stunning pace of urbanization will be a complex web of challenges related to consumption, pollution and water and energy stresses. Recently, ...
Edgar Pieterse, an urban scholar and founding director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, says there are two major challenges facing African cities today. First, the majority of urban residents don’t have access to ...
