scholarly journals Exploring the Water-Nutrient-Food Nexus for an African City Region: Linking the Chivero Lake and Harare City Region, Zimbabwe

Author(s):  
Dillip Kumar Das ◽  
Innocent Chirisa
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Andre Horn

Apartheid left South African city regions with two major challenges: social integration at a city level and spatial integration at a regional level. The task to finds solutions to these problems was left to municipalities, the lowest level of the three trier government system introduced after 1994. This article critically evaluates the success of the post-apartheid municipal government of Pretoria-Tshwane to address the said challenges in the reorganization of the city region over a 25-year period. The paper starts with a reconstruction of the apartheid city to display its socio-spatial contrasts and to define the challenge of integration and compaction. The investigation is based on literature, census information and observation. The main finding is that the progress made with the integration of the city at both scales is being neutralized by demographic trends, choice of association, urban sprawl, uncertain management, the scale of aspirations, unrealistic expectations and, most of all, municipal incapacity. The failure of the local government of Pretoria-Tshwane to achieve the said goals points to the inefficiency of the current approach that obligates municipalities with the complete task to rectify the dichotomies of the apartheid city system within their regions.  It is advocated that additional governmental entities be implemented to support local governments with the planning and re-development of post-apartheid city-regions.


Author(s):  
Felix S. K. Agyemang ◽  
Elisabete Silva ◽  
Sean Fox

The global urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion over the next three decades, and 90% of this growth will occur in African and Asian countries. Urban expansion in these regions is often characterised by ‘informal urbanization’ whereby households self-build without planning permission in contexts of ambiguous, insecure or disputed property rights. Despite the scale of informal urbanization, it has received little attention from scholars working in the domains of urban analytics and city science. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce TI-City, an urban growth model designed to predict the locations, legal status and socio-economic status of future residential developments in an African city. In a bottom-up approach, we use agent-based and cellular automata modelling techniques to predict the geospatial behaviour of key urban development actors, including households, real estate developers and government. We apply the model to the city-region of Accra, Ghana, drawing on local data collection, including a household survey, to parameterise the model. Using a multi-spatial-scale validation technique, we compare TI-City’s ability to simulate historically observed built-up patterns with SLEUTH, a highly popular urban growth model. Results show that TI-City outperforms SLEUTH at each scale, suggesting the model could offer a valuable decision support tool in similar city contexts.


2003 ◽  
Vol 45 (First Serie (1) ◽  
pp. 128-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Docherty ◽  
David Begg

Author(s):  
Mary Anne Beckie ◽  
Leanne Hedberg ◽  
Jessie Radies

In order for local food initiatives (LFIs) to have a transformative effect on the larger food system, greater levels of economic, organizational and physical scale are needed. One way for LFIs to reach the scale necessary to generate a more significant impact is through increased institutional procurement of local foods. But how do people and organizations come together to generate the social infrastructure required to shift food purchasing practices and processes? This field report shares the story of an innovative community of practice consisting of institutional food buyers, large-scale distributors, regional retailers, processors, producers, researchers, municipal and provincial government representatives within the Edmonton city-region that formed for the express purpose of “creating a positive community impact by getting more local foods on more local plates”. In describing the formation and first three years of the Alberta Flavour Learning Lab we examine the unique characteristics of this community of practice that has aided the development of a common framework for learning, understanding and joint action. In addition to the accomplishments to date, we also discuss the challenges faced by the Learning Lab and the strategies used to overcome them.  


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Philip Harrison

Abstract The bulk of the scholarly literature on city-regions and their governance is drawn from contexts where economic and political systems have been stable over an extended period. However, many parts of the world, including all countries in the BRICS, have experienced far-reaching national transformations in the recent past in economic and/or political systems. The national transitions are complex, with a mix of continuity and rupture, while their translation into the scale of the city-region is often indirect. But, these transitions have been significant for the city-region, providing a period of opportunity and institutional fluidity. Studies of the BRICS show that outcomes of transitions are varied but that there are junctures of productive comparison including the ways in which the nature of the transitions create new path dependencies, and way in which interests across territorial scales soon consolidate, producing new rigidities in city-region governance.


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