Edgar Pieterse: Spatial Justice and Sustainable Cities in Africa

Spatial justice and sustainable urban development in Africa are the field of Edgar Pieterse, founder and director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town since 2007 and one of the continent's most influential planners. His starting point is a figure: Africa will double its urban population before 2050 and add hundreds of millions of residents to cities that already fail to provide housing, services or jobs for many of those they have. Pieterse argues that this urbanization cannot be managed with the imported models that have failed for decades, but with a planning that starts from the real, mostly informal city and puts justice at its centre.

City Futures: against neoliberalism and conventional development

In City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development (2008) Pieterse criticised the two dominant responses. The neoliberal one, which bets on competitiveness and large projects and leaves most of the city out. And that of conventional development, which treats informality as a problem to be eradicated through master plans that are never fulfilled. Against both he proposes what he calls radical incrementalism: continuous, cumulative improvements in existing neighbourhoods, water, sanitation, tenure, public space, transport, decided with their residents and aimed at redistributing resources and power, instead of waiting for a total transformation that never comes.

Radical incrementalism and learning from the informal city

With AbdouMaliq Simone he edited Rogue Urbanism (2013) and wrote New Urban Worlds (2017), where both argue that the informal practices, improvisation and networks that sustain life in African cities are urban knowledge rather than lack, and that planning must learn from them. With Susan Parnell he coordinated Africa's Urban Revolution (2014), which gathered the evidence on an urbanization without industrialisation, with mostly informal employment, and on the weakness of local governments without the resources or powers to govern it. Spatial justice, in that context, begins by giving municipalities capacity and by recognising informal neighbourhoods as part of the city.

An African urban agenda: SDG 11 and the New Urban Agenda

Pieterse has taken those ideas into global policy. He took part in the design of Sustainable Development Goal 11 on cities and in the 2016 New Urban Agenda, and has criticised from within the frameworks that demand from African cities data and institutions they do not have. His proposal is an African urban agenda of its own, centred on basic infrastructure as a right, on the informal economy as a base to be strengthened and on youth, who form the majority of the continent's urban population and need jobs and space before skyscrapers.

Cape Town: spatial justice against the legacy of apartheid

His work in Cape Town shows the tensions. The city remains one of the most segregated in the world because of the legacy of apartheid, with poor Black neighbourhoods far from employment centres, and Pieterse has defended public transport, the densification of well-connected corridors and affordable housing in central areas as instruments of spatial justice, against the resistance of affluent neighbourhoods and the slowness of the state. That case illustrates his thesis: without redistributing space, urban sustainability is an empty word.

Pieterse's contribution is to have joined spatial justice, sustainability and realism about the African city in an applicable programme. His radical incrementalism does not give up on transformation but pursues it neighbourhood by neighbourhood, with communities and with the state, and his insistence that Africa produce its own theory and its own urban agenda has changed how the continent takes part in the global debate. The African city of the future, he argues, will be just or it will not be sustainable.