Browsing by Author "Parnell, Susan"

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    Accounting for the C/city: analyzing Kisumu's fiscal configurations
    (2019) Cirolia, Liza Rose; Parnell, Susan
    Urban public finance is a hidden force shaping cities and their development. This thesis draws attention to the powerful insights which can be gained from studying cities through a fiscal lens. It argues for an interdisciplinary and relational approach which infuses the fiscal study of cities with political and social interpretations of urban dynamics. Accounting for the city through two very different registers, this thesis draws from urban public finance and from critical scholarship on urban infrastructure. The conventional urban public finance literature is largely technical, produced by urban policy and fiscal experts. In contrast, social and political theorization on urban infrastructure provides a critical reading of the technicist approach and contributes to the refinement of key theoretical concepts within urban studies. There are many incommensurabilities between these two scholarly registers. They have different framings of politics, technical knowledge, and the priorities for change. However, there are several shared interests. They are both concerned with urban institutions, urban places, and the necessity for change. These shared interests provide the foundation for a revised approach to the fiscal study of cities. This synthetic approach is spelled out in a series of conceptual and methodological propositions. The first proposition is the device of the C/city, which distinguishes between an urban settlement (the small ccity) and its governing authorities (the big-C City). The C/city device foregrounds the importance of the city, the City, and the fiscal relationships which operate at the intersections between them. The second proposition frames urban public finance not just as a means of financing urban infrastructure but as an infrastructure itself. Drawing from the infrastructure scholarship, the concept of 'configurations’ is deployed creatively to trace fiscal histories, instruments, and relationships. The third proposition is the importance of grounding inquiry in particular places. To address this, the case study method is used. The case method allows for the use of a variety of types of data and analytical tools, grounded in contextualized experiences. The fourth proposition presents Kisumu, a secondary city in Kenya, as an exemplary case for exploring fiscal C/city configurations. Kisumu provides a useful case for wider generalization precisely because it is an ordinary (African) city. Not only is Kisumu on the margins of Western theorization, its unsensational nature also excludes it from dominant discourses on African cities. However, historically, administratively, and politically, Kisumu has many parallels with smaller urban centers in British East Africa and beyond. It provides a fascinating and widely relevant case of the differentiated nature of fiscal decentralization processes and dynamics. There is much which can be learned from Kisumu and its fiscal story. The bulk of this thesis is dedicated to unpacking the Kisumu case. First, there is a focus on the City. This includes tracing the historical development of Kisumu’s urban institutions and unpacking the ways in which the contemporary City shapes and is shaped by public finance. This is followed by a deeper exploration of particular city infrastructures and their fiscal configurations. The fiscal configurations related to property rates, the corporatized water utility company, and transport finance are traced and exposed. The Kisumu case provides a series of valuable insights. First, it demonstrates the potential and limitations of conventional fiscal analysis. The limitations posed by accounting are particularly important in the context of Kisumu, where the C/city has many misalignments. Second, it makes the case for reading public finance as an urban infrastructure. The process of tracing fiscal configurations illuminates the social, political, material and technical dimensions of public finance. Third, it draws attention to the de facto challenges and complexities related to decentralization (and in fact, the unique recentralization which Kenya has undergone). This includes how the sub-national urban state is constructed and deconstructed, over time and in complex ways. Fourth, it foregrounds the fiscal functionaries whose practices shape the everyday operations of the public finance system. These actors shape fiscal configurations. However, they are often hidden in conventional fiscal analyses. Fifth, it reads the practices of fiscal functionaries as a micro-politics of the state. The heterogeneity of the state and multidimensional nature of power are foregrounded. Finally, the case highlights the challenge of urban infrastructure finance in the context of a post-networked city. It shows the necessity of moving beyond common academic and policy tropes related to infrastructure and services. Collectively, these insights provide a compelling case for urban studies to more deeply engage with the fiscal C/city, in Africa and beyond.
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    Combining theoretical concepts and tools: mapping human deprivation in the City of Cape Town
    (2005) Fontaine, Danielle; Parnell, Susan
    [missing pages: 60,77,80,91] Human deprivation represents a contemporary 'paradox of development' that urgently nee4J to be addressed at the city scale. This research explores the argument that confusion over the measurement of human deprivation still exists, despite various development initiatives, in part because of a disconnect between contemporary development discourse and the research tools used to identify and investigate the poor. Development discourse defines human deprivation according to elements of difference, diversity and the dynamic nature of human needs; research tools identify and investigate human needs based on homogeneity, similarity and a fixed status quo. To explore the implications of this disconnect for human deprivation at the city scale, three concepts namely, poverty, chronic poverty and vulnerability, and the practical tools of socio-economic indicators and geographical information systems (GIS) are interrogated and critiqued for their usefulness for mapping human deprivation at the city scale. Poverty, chronic poverty, and vulnerability are three integral concepts of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); they highlight different aspects of deprivation including, amongst others, multiple dimensions, temporality and change, and biophysical risk, respectively. Socio-economic indicators and GIS are tools currently used by various disciplines, research institutions and levels of government in an array of research and practical applications. Socio-economic indicators are a method of converting qualitative data into quantitative data, and GIS can be used to translate these quantitative data into visual representations, thereby revealing spatial distributions. Socio-economic indicators hence provide the ''link" between the theoretical and the visual. Socio-economic indicators and GIS are useful, and in the case of GIS, contingent tools, but do have limitations to their application at the city scale that originate from the availability of appropriate data.
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    A conceptual and empirical investigation into measuring aspects of urban food security in 12 Southern African cities
    (2011) Thomas, Victor Frank; Parnell, Susan
    The issue of urban food security is a critical global issue, especially in Southern Africa. It is of such a pressing nature the United Nations (UN) has made it a Millennium Development Goal (MDG). Without a focus on urban food security the UN MDGs, regional goals and national goals will not be achievable. There is an urgent need to collect evidence and monitor the food security situation at the urban scale in Southern Africa (Crush and Frayne, 2010)...
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    Food production, processing and retailing through the lens of spatial planning legislation and regulations in Zimbabwe: evidence from Epworth
    (2019) Toriro, Percy M; Battersby, Jane; Parnell, Susan
    The thesis investigates whether the Zimbabwe planning regulatory framework engages with urban food systems and whether those regulations and plans are appropriate to the lived experience in African cities particularly focusing on the poor through the lens of food. This is done by examining how food production, processing and retailing have been enhanced, constrained and regulated by urban planning laws and regulations and the administering professionals in the urban settlement of Epworth near Harare in Zimbabwe. Food is a basic need but has not been given prominence in planning discourses. The use of food as a lens through which to examine the appropriateness of planning practice, laws, and the general regulatory framework provides a useful opportunity to consider the impact of planning on livelihoods of the urban poor in the global South. This thesis also provides an opportunity to link the two distinct but complimentary disciplines of urban planning and urban food and contributes to knowledge on contemporary planning and food systems. Treating the two as separate and disconnected fields has created gaps and inconsistencies that manifest themselves in inappropriate regulations and plans thereby causing insecure and risky food systems. Using mixed research methods, the thesis concludes that the legislative framework engages food in a largely inappropriate way for several reasons. Firstly, the legislative framework was adapted from a Western context which differs significantly with that of the global South. Secondly the framework was enacted for a different time and context many years ago unlike the context prevailing now. Thirdly the inappropriateness of the governance framework has been exacerbated by the modernist values held by most planning professionals. A key finding of the thesis is that most planners do not support informal livelihoods; whilst they practice in a largely informal poverty-stricken environment, they aspire for a modern ‘world-class’ city environment. The planners also do not believe that they have a role in food systems planning. Meanwhile, they are busy making decisions that threaten the same food systems. The planning regulatory framework therefore requires amendment of the inappropriate clauses whilst positive clauses should be utilized.
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    A matter of timing: migration and housing access in Metropolitan Johannesburg
    (2002) Beall, Jo; Crankshaw, Owen; Parnell, Susan
    The city of Johannesburg lies at the centre of the largest urban conurbation in sub-Saharan Africa. In the past, this conurbation was known by the clumsy acronym 'PWV', which stood for the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging complex. Today, this urban region has the political status of a province and has been re-named 'Gauteng', a popular local name meaning 'place of gold'. A province that is almost entirely urban, Gauteng is home to 7.3 million people: about one-third of the national urban population of 21.8 million.2 At the last census in 1996, the population of Johannesburg itself was about 2.6 million.3 In the national hierarchy, this placed the city of Johannesburg just after the largest city in South Africa, namely Durban (2.8 million) and marginally ahead of Cape Town (also about 2.6).
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    Professionalisation or polarisation? : economic restructuring and changes in Cape Town's labour market
    (2006) Borel-Saladin, Jacqueline; Parnell, Susan; Crankshaw, Owen
    The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the changes that have occurred in the economy of CapeTown, South Africa over the last half of the 20th century and what the possible effects of this change have been on social inequality. Literature on economic restructuring in cities all over the world provided the framework of ideas within which this analysis was conducted. These works focused on how in many cities. progressive deindustrialisation has led to the loss of middle-income jobs, while growth in the service sector has resulted in greater numbers of high- and low-skill and income jobs. Others argued that most cities economies' were becoming increasingly organised around professional, managerial and technical skills only, and that increased polarisation occurred solely in those cities that were subject to large-scale immigration. The overriding question that emerged from this body of work then was whether the occupational distribution of employment in cities was becoming increasingly polarised or professionalised. Careful examination of population census data on sectoral and occupational changes in the economy of Cape Town showed that the city's working population was becoming increasingly professionalised, and not more polarised. Survey data were also used to dispute the contention that a large unskilled migrant population was a sufficient condition for social polarisation. Theories about the impacts of deindustrialisation and the decline in blue-collar work on unskilledethnic urban minority groups were also discussed. Again, using population census data, it wasshown that the Coloured population had dominated manufacturing employment. Therefore, it wasconcluded that the decline in manufacturing employment would most likely have the greatestnegative impact on Coloured employment levels. This would most likely affect Coloured men most though, as Coloured women were gaining more employment in all the other types of occupations that were growing while blue-collar employment, on which men seemed to rely that much more, was declining. The argument was also made that service sector growth, while leading to increased feminisation of the workforce, also causes women to be segregated into low-skill, low-pay service jobs. However, the data for Cape Town concurred with other author's data that showed that the occupational distributions of both women and men are becoming increasingly professionalised. Some authors argued that the decline in manufacturing jobs and growth in low-skill service sector work favours unskilled women over unskilled men, as the manufacturing sector tended to hire more men and the service sector tends to employ more women. This was shown to be true in the case of Cape Town, with African women dominating unskilled labour by 2001.
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    Race, inequality and urbanisation in the Johannesburg Region, 1946-1996
    (2002) Crankshaw, Owen; Parnell, Susan
    The city of Johannesburg lies at the heart of a sprawling metropolis. This metropolis, which we shall call the Johannesburg region, roughly corresponds with the boundaries of Gauteng Province.1 It stretches from Soshanguve in the north to Vanderbijlpark in the south and from Carletonville in the west to Springs in the east (Fig.1). While Johannesburg is an obvious example of a large city in a poor country that is riddled by social and economic inequality, there is a certain irony in its portrayal as a world city. After all, only five years ago, Johannesburg was the hub of a pariah nation that was the object of one of the most successful international sanctions campaigns. Notwithstanding the impact of the boycott against apartheid, Johannesburg has long served as the major urban centre of southern Africa. It is an unusually cosmopolitan city, with extensive demographic, political, and economic connections with Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, that date back to colonial times (Parnell and Pirie, 1991). Increasingly strong links are now also being forged with Australasia through immigration and sport.
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    Race, inequality and urbanisation in the Johannesburg Region, 1946-1996
    (2002) Crankshaw, Owen; Parnell, Susan
    The city of Johannesburg lies at the heart of a sprawling metropolis. This metropolis, which we shall call the Johannesburg region, roughly corresponds with the boundaries of Gauteng Province.1 It stretches from Soshanguve in the north to Vanderbijlpark in the south and from Carletonville in the west to Springs in the east (Fig.1). While Johannesburg is an obvious example of a large city in a poor country that is riddled by social and economic inequality, there is a certain irony in its portrayal as a world city. After all, only five years ago, Johannesburg was the hub of a pariah nation that was the object of one of the most successful international sanctions campaigns. Notwithstanding the impact of the boycott against apartheid, Johannesburg has long served as the major urban centre of southern Africa. It is an unusually cosmopolitan city, with extensive demographic, political, and economic connections with Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, that date back to colonial times (Parnell and Pirie, 1991). Increasingly strong links are now also being forged with Australasia through immigration and sport.
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    The Academic-Policy Interface in Post-Apartheid Urban Research: Personal Reflections
    (2007) Parnell, Susan
    Ironically, in the North where only a minority of scholars are engaged in applied or policy research, they are navel gazing about what 'the policy turn' implies for geography. Here in South Africa, where consulting, policy or applied research is a ubiquitous feature of geography departments, we have been tardy, or perhaps reluctant, to open the conversation about the implications of the way many of us now work. Nowhere is this more evident than in the broad arena of urban research where the restructuring of local government, massive urbanisation and the uneven growth of the economy has created an insatiable demand for applied work on cities and towns. In this paper I use three general issues raised by our Northern counterparts to open up debate among South African geographers about the drivers of knowledge and the way this might impact on our urban future. The first issue relates to the role of public intellectuals in a society in transition and includes an assessment of the formative versus the evaluative role of intellectuals, as well as discussion on the politics of positionality and who does the policy research. The second issue takes off from here and probes who defines the intellectual and policy agendas. Crucial questions about how knowledge circulates and the role of consultants are highlighted. The third area shifts the debate into the academy and asks about the relevance of geography for urban policy. Drawing from these three pointers the final two sections of the paper make a case for recasting urban geographical scholarship in South Africa to, for example, take issues of scale and the local state more seriously, to move beyond the segregationist frame of the historical geographers and to fill the empirical and conceptual gaps within which the practice of urban government and governmentality actually take place. In conclusion I suggest that to do this it is imperative that we re-bridge the academic policy divide in new and more productive ways than the current covert linkages that exist at present. This means among other things, rethinking the academic value and integrity of policy work, as well addressing the material concerns that reinforce the status quo. This means confronting the place of consultant income for academics, acknowledging that there can be no evidence based policy without government and private sector investment in urban research and overcoming the skills gap in the urban sector.
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    The role of cities in the foreign policy of emerging powers: the cases of Bogotá, Colombia and Johannesburg, South Africa
    (2018) Delgado Caicedo, Jerónimo; Parnell, Susan
    Cities are increasingly important actors in the current International System. Cities fall under the jurisdiction of States where they play a fundamental role in the making and consolidation of emerging powers. In today’s State-centred International System, cities are underexamined in the field of foreign policy, a domain that is exclusively that of national governments. Using the cases of Colombia (Bogotá) and South Africa (Johannesburg), this thesis draws from multilingual sources to examine the role of cities in the foreign policy of emerging powers of the Global South. An interdisciplinary approach indicates that, by drawing together debates across International Relations and Urban Studies literature, there is little to no place for the conceptual and operational cross pollination necessary to engage the increasing importance of cities in the emerging powers of the Global South. The weak interface between cities and States in foreign policy is thus failing to inform local-national government interactions over global positioning and masks critical national actors in the evolution of cities. Through a geopolitical analysis, this thesis engages the conceptual and operational ambiguity around 'emerging powers’ by demonstrating how at both the national and city scale notions of 'power resources’, 'leadership’ and 'international recognition’ are actualised in the emerging powers of Colombia and South Africa. By tracking the ways that Bogotá and Johannesburg operate internationally, cities are, despite the lack of formal acknowledgement or endorsement of the nations’ foreign affairs machinery, shown to be crucial contributors to their countries’ emergence in the world. An analysis of primary sources in both Colombia and South Africa shows a mismatch between the city and the State in foreign policy caused by dynamics occurring both at national and local levels. The constitutional and legal ambiguities on decentralisation and foreign policy found in Colombia and South Africa make it extremely difficult to determine the how far sub-national entities can go in their burgeoning international engagements. The State-centred approach to foreign policy that is found in both countries contributes greatly to a general disregard for the city in international relations. Finally, the thesis reveals how the increased importance of cities in the global agenda and the proliferation of international associations of cities provides emerging cities such as Bogotá or Johannesburg with an alternative space in which to defend their own city interests without the help of the national governments. The thesis concludes by demonstrating that, while it is important that national governments make sure cities have a voice in the International System, changes also need to be made at the domestic level, both in national and local governments, in order to achieve functioning levels of understanding and co-operation between the city and the State in the making and implementation of the foreign policy of emerging powers.
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    Urban climate adaptation as a process of organisational decision making
    (2017) Taylor, Anna; Parnell, Susan
    In a world that is increasingly urbanised, cities are recognised as critical sites for tackling problems of climate change, both by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the impacts of changing climate conditions. Unlike climate change mitigation, adaptation does not have one clear, commonly agreed collective goal. Governing and making decisions on climate adaptation in cities entails contestation over knowledge, values and preferences. Currently, the two dominant conceptualisations of adaptation are as cycles or pathways. Do these models adequately theorise what can be empirically observed in cities as to how climate adaptation is undertaken? Most research on urban climate adaptation emanates from the Global North, where political, scientific, economic and administrative systems are well established and well resourced. There is a dearth of empirical research from cities of the Global South contributing to the development of urban climate adaptation theory. This thesis contributes to addressing this gap in two ways. Firstly, by drawing on both conceptual and methodological resources from the field of organisational studies, notably the streams and rounds models of decision making, organisational ethnography and processual case research. Secondly, by conducting empirical case study research on three processes of city scale climate adaptation in Cape Town, South Africa, a growing city facing many development challenges where the local government began addressing climate adaptation over ten years ago. The three adaptation processes studied are: the preparation and adoption of city-wide sectoral climate adaptation plans; the creation of a City Development Strategy with climate resilience as a core goal; and the inclusion of climate change projections into stormwater masterplans. Data were gathered through interviews, participant observation, focus groups and document review, through embedded research within a formal knowledge co-production partnership between the University of Cape Town and the City of Cape Town government. Processual analysis and applied thematic analysis were used to test models of adaptation and decision making against data from the three case studies. The findings suggest that both the cycles and pathways models of climate adaptation inadequately represent the contested and contingent nature of decision making that prevail within the governance systems of cities such as Cape Town. Based on ethnographic knowledge of how Cape Town's local government undertakes climate adaptation, it is argued that the rounds model of decision making provides conceptual tools to better understand and represent how the process of climate adaptation in cities is undertaken; tools that can be used to enhance the pathways model. The study concludes that progress in adapting cities to a changing climate is currently constrained by both the problems and potential solutions or interventions being too technical for most politicians to deal with and prioritize and too political for most technical and administrative officials to design and implement. It calls for urban climate adaptation to be understood as distributed across a multitude of actors pursuing concurrent, discontinuous processes, and thereby focus needs to be on fostering collaboration and coordination, rather than fixating on single actors, policies, plans or projects.
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    The urban land question : management and access for the urban poor in post apartheid South Africa
    (2011) Mammon, Nisa; Parnell, Susan
    The premise of the thesis is that the developmental use of urban land should be ethical, fair and promote social justice. Using multiple research approaches and mixed methods this thesis examines the urban land question in South Africa and particularly Cape Town where land distribution and ownership are inequitable. The thesis unpacks land redistribution, land tenure reform and land restitution within this context. It is argued that the South African Constitution commits government to protect the property rights of those who currently own property and at the same time redistribute land to those who have been dispossessed and explores what this tension means for urban land redistribution and reform using the freedoms approach developed by Amartya Sen as a conceptual framework and as alternative to the neo-classical model. The main findings of the thesis can be summarized as follows. a) The thesis demonstrates that there is no logical reason why the freedoms approach cannot be extended to include urban land. b) The entitlements and endowments that urban land could bestow on the urban poor are shaped by how the State invests in land through the instruments of land planning and land use management which call for a significant role for the State as custodian of public land to not only make explicit the land asset register under public ownership but also instill trust in the poorer sectors of urban society. c) A two track system of land planning and land use management may be more appropriate in the post apartheid South African city, one stream for market driven land and one for targeted public land programmes that directly address urban poverty provided that the State is able to make strong connections between the philosophical and the technical aspects of land and land use management systems. d) As a two track system is suggested the land use management system requires to be reframed. To facilitate land redistribution and reform in urban areas of South Africa therefore, the thesis suggests that a deliberative and systemic planning approach needs to be adopted that is intervention focused. Only when the State assumes a more critical interventionist role in public land programmes would it be possible to obtain social justice and the principles of the good city in the South African urban context. e) Gaining access to and control over land resources beyond the market is possible but limiting for the majority of the urban poor when land and housing debates are conflated. This conflation results in other land debates being silenced yet these have the potential to offer alternatives to the neo-classical model of land and land use management as well as promote a wider role for public land than just housing.