Susan Parnell
Biographic Data
| ID | 185658 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Parnell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Parnell |
| SIGNATURE | PARNELL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5702-1684 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 946 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 65 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Risk and Returns
The nature of research funding shapes knowledge outcomes, especially for urban research that is conducted in multiple sites and over multiple years. Recent unplanned cuts in the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grants, alongside the rupture caused by Covid-19, created ethical and procedural issues for completing the PEAK Urban programme. Building on durable partnerships, setting principles for the reduced fund distribution and adjusting mod…
A new urban narrative for sustainable development
Urban Family Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa
The multi-sectoral nature of urban health is a particular challenge, which urban family planning in sub-Saharan Africa illustrates well. Rapid urbanisation, mainly due to natural population increase in cities rather than rural-urban migration, coincides with a large unmet urban need for contraception, especially in informal settlements. These two phenomena mean urban family planning merits more attention. To what extent are the family planning an…
Bridging the gaps sector to sector and research to policy
There is growing science and policy interest in multi-sectoral action, but bridging the gap between family planning and urban development is challenging. This paper analyses the experience of integrating these sectors in sub-Saharan Africa via building research capacity. Family-planning researchers were supported to link with urban-development actors, one goal being to generate lessons on the process of getting their research into the policy doma…
City Science
Amid widespread enthusiasm for ‘scientific’ approaches to reading and understanding the city, driven by the increasing availability of ‘big data’ and sophisticated tech-driven analytics, we call for greater clarity in the terms and genealogies of the ‘new’ sciences of the urban. We appeal to those observing and participating in the latest manifestations of ‘city science’ to recognize the intellectual and practical inheritance of their urban craft…
The enabling conditions of post-pandemic city government
Seeing Covid-19 through an urban lens
Boundless contamination and progress in Geography
The future of the future city? The new urban sciences and a Peak Urban interdisciplinary disposition
In many domains we see a proliferation of claims made about how we can predict and measure the future city, how we make visible its form and shape its settlement. This paper synthesises contemporary debates in data analytics, anthropology, geography and the history of urban thought to consider the context of such claims making around urban futures and the promise (and promises) of attempts to make visible the urban as a ‘lab’ or ‘observatory’ thr…
Building a global urban science
African dreams
This paper examines African urban infrastructure and service delivery as an entry point for connecting African aspirations with the harsh developmental imperatives of urban management, creating a dialogue between scholarly knowledge and sustainable development policy aspirations. We note a shift to multi-nodal urban governance and highlight the significance of the synthesis of social, economic and ecological values in a normative vision of what a…
Globalization and Sustainable Development
The Metrics of African Urbanization
Urbanization in Africa
Africa, a continent exceptionally rich in biodiversity, is rapidly urbanizing. Africa's urbanization is manifest in the growth of its megacities as well as that of its smaller towns and cities. The conservation planning and practice will increasingly need to account for direct and indirect impacts of the continent's urbanization. The objective of our study is to pinpoint the outstanding challenges and opportunities afforded by the growing cities …
Africa's urban adaptation transition under a 1.5° climate
For cities in sub-Saharan Africa a 1.5 °C increase in global temperature will bring forward the urgency of meeting basic needs in sanitation, drinking water and land-tenure, and underlying governance weaknesses. The challenges of climate sensitive management are exacerbated by rapid population growth, deep and persistent poverty, a trend for resolving risk through relocation (often forced), and emerging new risks, often multi-hazard, for example …
Urban Health Research in Africa
In Africa, urbanization and urban growth are dramatically restructuring the nature of cities. The growing majority of urban dwellers now live in informal conditions that, without access to basic services or public amenities, expose residents to greater health risk, and health-care systems are unable to provide affordable or comprehensive cover. The differential exposure to these urban conditions is compounded by social and economic vulnerability,…
Defining and advancing a systems approach for sustainable cities
Ideas, implementation and indicators
The success of the campaign for a dedicated urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reflected a consensus on the importance of “cities” in sustainable development. The relevance accorded to cities in the SDGs is twofold, reflected both in the specific place-based content of the Urban Goal and the more general concern with the multiple scales at which the SDGs will be monitored will be institutionalized. Divergent views of the city and urban proc…
Translational Global Praxis
Advancing global urbanism depends upon making Africa's cities a more dominant part of the global urban narrative. Constructing a more legitimate research agenda for African cities, however, necessitates a repositioning of conventional modes of research. To achieve intellectual and political traction in what are typical African research conditions-where human needs are great, information is poor, conditions of governance are complex and the realit…
‘From the South’
Co-producing urban knowledge
As an alternative to 'best practice', a City-University partnership in Cape Town has been influencing the development trajectory of the city through the co-production of knowledge by practitioners and academics. The partnership allows for sharing and a deepening of substantive knowledge about Cape Town and also acquisition of tactical knowledge about the regulatory decision-making process in the city. The new networks of knowledge generation tran…
Disaster risk and its reduction
Populations and assets, in African cities, small and large, are among the most vulnerable to disaster risk globally. Climate change and demographic shifts add urgency and uncertainty. This paper outlines priorities for research responding to this challenge. We argue for integrative approaches that can capture multi-hazard risk and include hazards from across the spectrum of everyday to catastrophic, and their interactions. For such approaches to …
Defining a Global Urban Development Agenda
Elite Compacts in Africa
Through reflection on the practical post-apartheid (re)alignment of competing rationalities across the Greater Durban urban region, this essay teases out the interface between traditional and modern settlement management systems, and explores how governance cleavages are being renegotiated and mediated. It is suggested that, in building an integrated method of operating across the fragmented city-regional scale and navigating the competing intere…
The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South
In all the debate on theorizing cities from and for the south, discussions of health remain relatively silent amid the rush to f ind adequate explanatory frameworks for a rapidly changing urban reality. This silence remains despite the fact that the broad canon of urban studies has actually been remarkably prolif ic in responding to Robinson’s (2006: x) assertion that urban theory has ‘excluded many cities and their citizens from their accounts o…
(Re)theorizing Cities from the Global South
The demographic transition of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has shifted the locus of urbanizing populations from the global North to the global South. As the theoretical epicenter of urban scholars and policymakers adjusts to accommodate this transition, some realignment in how ideas are weighted and applied is inevitable. This recalibration, while not necessarily comfortable for those in established positions of intellectual power, is d…
Defining a Global Urban Development Agenda
The 'Right to the City
Under conditions of globalization large cities present unique challenges for poverty reduction and the realization of rights. The urbanization of poverty also underscores the imperative of downscaling the emerging debate about the developmental state to the city scale. The arguments in this article start from the proposition that a universal rights agenda can and should be fulfilled as an alternative to neoliberal aspirations, and that to achieve…
Ideas, implementation and indicators
The success of the campaign for a dedicated urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reflected a consensus on the importance of “cities” in sustainable development. The relevance accorded to cities in the SDGs is twofold, reflected both in the specific place-based content of the Urban Goal and the more general concern with the multiple scales at which the SDGs will be monitored will be institutionalized. Divergent views of the city and urban proc…
Building a global urban science
Defining and advancing a systems approach for sustainable cities
Uniting a Divided City; Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg
Part 1: Ways of Understanding Divided Cities - Introduction to a Divided City * Reverberations from a Divided City * Part 2: The Changing Spatial Structure of the City - Beyond Racial Fordism: Changing Patterns of Social Inequality * Post-Fordist Polarization: The Changing Spatial Order of the City * Part 3: Institutional Responses to Urban Change - Decentralization by Stealth: Democratization or Disempowerment through Developmental Local Governm…
Development and Urban Policy
City development strategies (CDS) have emerged as an important new initiative in international policy and practice. This paper considers their significance by exploring recent initiatives to formulate a city strategy for Johannesburg, South Africa. The Johannesburg CDS emerged out of the local demand for a post- apartheid vision for South African cities as well as a renewed enthusiasm for city-level economic planning within international developm…
Rethinking urban South Africa
Our reflection on past treatment of urban segregation begins with the assertion that the implicit acceptance of ‘race’ as a legitimate and primary category of inquiry has impoverished the understanding of residential segregation in the South African city. The first section of the paper illustrates the prevalence of racially defined empirical urban studies and tries to explain why this categorisation remains unchallenged. In the second section of …
Sub-Saharan African urbanisation and global environmental change
Translational Global Praxis
Advancing global urbanism depends upon making Africa's cities a more dominant part of the global urban narrative. Constructing a more legitimate research agenda for African cities, however, necessitates a repositioning of conventional modes of research. To achieve intellectual and political traction in what are typical African research conditions-where human needs are great, information is poor, conditions of governance are complex and the realit…
Engagement and reconstruction in critical research
In this paper we examine critical engagement in research in order to rethink and reconfigure binaries such as theorizer and practitioner and theory and practice across South and North. We argue that while we welcome the 'moral geographies' literature (and its ideas about 'caring at a distance') as a catalyst for forging more beneficial connections between South and North, we suggest this is not enough. Drawing on South African experiences of crit…
Seeing Covid-19 through an urban lens
Global environmental change
Ongoing urbanisation makes cities a key focus for global environmental change (GEC) research, creating an imperative for a new, city‐scale, research agenda. The vulnerability of urban populations to the multiple stresses of GEC lies at the core of overlapping domains of knowledge that could be better integrated in advancing research. The urban development, global change and disasters literatures are fragmented and reveal fundamental cleavages ove…
Co-producing urban knowledge
As an alternative to 'best practice', a City-University partnership in Cape Town has been influencing the development trajectory of the city through the co-production of knowledge by practitioners and academics. The partnership allows for sharing and a deepening of substantive knowledge about Cape Town and also acquisition of tactical knowledge about the regulatory decision-making process in the city. The new networks of knowledge generation tran…
Creating racial privilege
Town‐planning measures adopted by the infant Union Government were worded in the fashionable new language of international planning and were not explicitly concerned with the regulation of African settlement. Nevertheless, the planning regulations introduced in the 1910s were part of the emerging racial framework of urban government of the South African city. Dr Charles Porter, Johannesburg's first Medical Officer of Health, was a major force beh…
The State of South African Cities a Decade after Democracy
Like other national urban policy documents, the State of the Cities Report 2004 affirms a vision of an inclusive non-racial city in which democracy is stable and development flourishes. But the 2004 report is different from preceding urban policy statements in a number of critical respects, not least that it is not a formal statement of government. In part, the relative autonomy of the Report's sponsor, the South African Cities Network (a quango …
Sanitation, segregation and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act
The future of the future city? The new urban sciences and a Peak Urban interdisciplinary disposition
In many domains we see a proliferation of claims made about how we can predict and measure the future city, how we make visible its form and shape its settlement. This paper synthesises contemporary debates in data analytics, anthropology, geography and the history of urban thought to consider the context of such claims making around urban futures and the promise (and promises) of attempts to make visible the urban as a ‘lab’ or ‘observatory’ thr…
African dreams
This paper examines African urban infrastructure and service delivery as an entry point for connecting African aspirations with the harsh developmental imperatives of urban management, creating a dialogue between scholarly knowledge and sustainable development policy aspirations. We note a shift to multi-nodal urban governance and highlight the significance of the synthesis of social, economic and ecological values in a normative vision of what a…
Boundless contamination and progress in Geography
Disaster risk and its reduction
Populations and assets, in African cities, small and large, are among the most vulnerable to disaster risk globally. Climate change and demographic shifts add urgency and uncertainty. This paper outlines priorities for research responding to this challenge. We argue for integrative approaches that can capture multi-hazard risk and include hazards from across the spectrum of everyday to catastrophic, and their interactions. For such approaches to …
Local government, poverty reduction and inequality in Johannesburg
This paper discusses the difficulties facing the post-apartheid metropolitan government of Johannesburg as it reforms itself, seeking to better respond to the needs of all its citizens, while also attracting new investment. These difficulties include high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as the apartheid legacy of “separate development” with its large backlog of poor quality housing and inadequate basic services, much of it …
Self-help Housing as a Flexible Instrument of State Control in 20th-century South Africa
There is a long and varied usage of self-help housing policy in South Africa, dating from colonial times when Africans were dumped in locations and left to build their own housing, to the present post apartheid reconstruction. The paper documents and periodises the adoption of self-help strategies for housing the African population of South African cities throughout the 20th century. Exploration of the practice of self-help housing practices in J…
Elite Compacts in Africa
Through reflection on the practical post-apartheid (re)alignment of competing rationalities across the Greater Durban urban region, this essay teases out the interface between traditional and modern settlement management systems, and explores how governance cleavages are being renegotiated and mediated. It is suggested that, in building an integrated method of operating across the fragmented city-regional scale and navigating the competing intere…
From Mafeking to Mafikeng
Public Housing as a Device for White Residential Segregation in Johannesburg, 1934–1953
Public housing for whites in South Africa was introduced as an urban-segregation measure in the 1930s. The state's aim in establishing Council housing in Johannesburg is shown to have been the racial division of the residences of working-class people. The white-housing program is assessed and shown to be wanting. It is argued that, particularly in the post-World War II years, housing assistance for whites failed to ensure the racial segregation o…
Church, State and the Shelter of White Working-Class Women in Johannesburg Prior to World War Two
Hostel accommodation for the young white female manufacturing labour-force of Johannesburg was established in the inter- war years. While the state endorsed a policy of providing separate accommodation for single white women it was reticent to fund hostel construction. Intercession by concerned religious groups over the moral purity of urban migrants living in city slums resulted in the early construction of single quarters. Racial occupancy rest…
The privatisation of secondary schooling and the desegregation of central Johannesburg
The privatisation of secondary schooling and the desegregation of central Johannesburg
Race, class, gender and home ownership subsidies in contemporary South Africa
Sanitation, segregation and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act
Creating racial privilege
Town‐planning measures adopted by the infant Union Government were worded in the fashionable new language of international planning and were not explicitly concerned with the regulation of African settlement. Nevertheless, the planning regulations introduced in the 1910s were part of the emerging racial framework of urban government of the South African city. Dr Charles Porter, Johannesburg's first Medical Officer of Health, was a major force beh…
Rethinking urban South Africa
Our reflection on past treatment of urban segregation begins with the assertion that the implicit acceptance of ‘race’ as a legitimate and primary category of inquiry has impoverished the understanding of residential segregation in the South African city. The first section of the paper illustrates the prevalence of racially defined empirical urban studies and tries to explain why this categorisation remains unchallenged. In the second section of …
Housing provision and the need for an urbanisation policy in the New South Africa
Urban land restitution in post-apartheid South Africa
The built environment
South African Cities
perspectives from the ivory tower of urban studies IntroductionThe assertion that the South African city provides a fascinating laboratory for the study of urban culture and form is not new. 1 As a caricature of the social divisions that now plague cities across the "Western" and "non-Western" worlds, the apartheid city experience served as a worst-case scenario of persistent social and economic inequality, perversely making it one of the most in…
Negotiating segregation
1998). Negotiating segregation: pre‐parliamentary debate over the natives (urban areas) act of 1923. African Studies: Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 147-166
The Urban Challenge in Africa
Scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds examine the growth of the largest cities in Africa--their characteristics, their dynamism despite economic crisis, and the results of attempts to manage them. The introductory chapters consider the effects of global forces on Africa and its major cities, revealing that the new phase of globalization has reinforced the continent's marginalization, impoverishment, indebtedness, and lack…
Gender and Aspects of Everyday Urban Life
SUE PARNELL reviews Changing Gender Relations in Southern Africa: Issues of Urban Life edited by MATSELISO MAPETLA, ANITA LARSSON and ANN SCHLYTER
Self-help Housing as a Flexible Instrument of State Control in 20th-century South Africa
There is a long and varied usage of self-help housing policy in South Africa, dating from colonial times when Africans were dumped in locations and left to build their own housing, to the present post apartheid reconstruction. The paper documents and periodises the adoption of self-help strategies for housing the African population of South African cities throughout the 20th century. Exploration of the practice of self-help housing practices in J…
Le paysage des townships à la fin de l'apartheid
Leer el paisaje de los townships en 1994 El paisaje urbano en Africa del Sur se divide entre los townships, «cajas de cerillas» alineadas del lado de la ciudad negra y las alegras y desperdigadas residencias del lado de la ciudad blanca. El ocaso del apartheid comienza a diversificar este paisaje. El batiborrillo de la chabola gana los townships mientras que las parcelaciones para clases medias se intercalan entre ambas ciudades
Local government, poverty reduction and inequality in Johannesburg
This paper discusses the difficulties facing the post-apartheid metropolitan government of Johannesburg as it reforms itself, seeking to better respond to the needs of all its citizens, while also attracting new investment. These difficulties include high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as the apartheid legacy of “separate development” with its large backlog of poor quality housing and inadequate basic services, much of it …
Local government, poverty reduction and inequality in Johannesburg
This paper discusses the difficulties facing the post-apartheid metropolitan government of Johannesburg as it reforms itself, seeking to better respond to the needs of all its citizens, while also attracting new investment. These difficulties include high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as the apartheid legacy of "separate development" with its large backlog of poor quality housing and inadequate basic services, much of it …
The Causes of Unemployment in Post‐apartheid Johannesburg and the Livelihood Strategies of the Poor
Central to the increase in urban poverty in the post‐apartheid period is the rise in unemployment. This provides the point of departure for this paper. The first section shows how Johannesburg and its environs, although constituting the industrial and commercial heartland of South Africa, is a city that has not reached its potential economic development. Having outlined the causes and dimensions of this sluggish economic position, next is conside…
Victims, Villains and Fixers
Urban water supply, sanitation and electricity have been identified as basic needs by the post-apartheid government and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC).This article explores the relationship of Johannesburg's poor to the urban environment and in particular these three key urban services.On the basis of survey data, case studies, textual analysis and in-depth interviews with policy makers and planners, it reviews how poorer ci…
Winning the battles but losing the war
Uniting a Divided City; Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg
Part 1: Ways of Understanding Divided Cities - Introduction to a Divided City * Reverberations from a Divided City * Part 2: The Changing Spatial Structure of the City - Beyond Racial Fordism: Changing Patterns of Social Inequality * Post-Fordist Polarization: The Changing Spatial Order of the City * Part 3: Institutional Responses to Urban Change - Decentralization by Stealth: Democratization or Disempowerment through Developmental Local Governm…
Race, Power and Urban Control
From Johannesburg's origins as a mining camp, the principal and general white discourse of urban segregation for Africans was not questioned. However, no blueprint existed for how to enforce urban segregation prior to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. Contestation over the details of how to manage African shelter in Johannesburg around the time of Union reveals that, despite powerful segregationist legislation and political consensus among t…
Political science (48 works) · Geography (45 works) · Economics (40 works) · Economic growth (38 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (37 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Politics (21 works) · Environmental planning (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Legal Issues in South Africa (18 works)