6 Questions on African Cities with Edgar Pieterse

Professor Pieterse is an urban scholar, writer and creative agent whose interests include the theory and practice of interventions and imaginaries to make the Southern city more just, open and experimental. Edgar is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and holder of the DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Urban Policy. His research and teaching gravitates around urban development politics, everyday culture, publics, responsive design and adaptive governance systems.

He is consulting editor for Cityscapes—an international biannual magazine on urbanism in the global South. His most recent co-edited books are: African Cities Reader III: Land, Property & Value (2015), Africa’s Urban Revolution (2014) and Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (2013). He serves on the Advisory Boards of: Indian Institute for Human Settlements (Bangalore), LSE Cities (London), the Gauteng City-region Observatory (Johannesburg), Open Society Foundation of South Africa, among others. He is co-lead author of the Urban Chapter for the International Panel on Social Progress. He is also the Chairperson of the Cities Alliance Africa Think Tank and the Panel of Experts supporting the Integrated Urban Development Framework of South Africa.

Current research is focussed on the governance of flagship public projects signaling a “turn-around” of fortunes in Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Kigali, Lagos, Luanda and Nairobi, alongside a manuscript that seeks to articulate the everyday and broader processes of urbanisation in Africa and Asia. Lastly, he was co-curator of the African Urbanisation component of the International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam-2016 focussed on the Next Economy.

For more on the World Resources Report, "Toward a More Equal City," visit www.citiesforall.org