Academic Literature on Urban Cultural Governance in South Africa
The following academic texts have been produced dealing with issues related to urban cultural governance in South Africa. This is a developing list and to profile work please send information via our contact list.
Building with Ruins and Dreams (2006)
Edgar Pieterse's text Building with Ruins and Dreams: Some Thoughts on Realising Integrated Urban Development in South Africa through Crisis can be found on Urban Studies The paper: "recast(s) crisis as an opportunity... in order to undo the deeply engraved legacies of urban segregation and fragmentation. ...(it proposes, amongst others)... that there are essentially three key conditions for addressing the structural crises of urban fragmentation: vibrant city politics in a radical democratic mode; a substantial ‘epistemic community’ in cities that generate imaginative ideas about alternative futures premised on a set of meta-objectives and concrete intervention strategies for the city; and, sufficient investment capital (private and public) to give economic support and expression to the implementation of concrete programmes and projects in line with the ideas generated by the epistemic community for alternatives."
Legal Perspectives on the Role of Culture in Sustainable Development in South Africa (2010)
A work by legal scholars Rautenbach and Du Plessis found in PER. It "introduces some legal perspectives on the role of culture in sustainable development. ... It is shown that the fluid nature and meaning of "culture" may require a distinction between the role of "culture" per se and the role of "cultural governance" in the sustainable development context. It is suggested that "cultural governance" as a notion may be more distinct and exact than "culture" itself. The more functional notion of "good cultural governance" is preferred as a benchmark in the sustainable development equation, with the implication that cultural governance occurs in accordance with a certain standard... The article is set in the South African context but also invokes some law and policy developments internationally, regionally and sub-regionally to depict how issues of culture have been infiltrating the sustainable development discourse and to distil some of the substantive benchmarks for good cultural governance."
Effecting cultural change from below? A comparison of Cape Town and Bandung's pathways to urban cultural governance (2019)
A work by scholars Nkula-Wenz and Minty in Cultural Trends. The "article compares the cultural governance pathways of two UNESCO “Design Cities” – Bandung and Cape Town ... As postcolonial states are slowly shifting away from a centralized cultural institution model linked to symbolic nation building projects ... travelling cultural policies brought in by foreign agencies and adapted by local epistemic communities have inspired a range of responses that can be broadly described as cultural policy innovation from below ... In turn, (they) examine how different cultural policy approaches have been locally mobilized and reworked in Bandung and Cape Town in response to situated realities and in partnerships between cultural, academic, business and local government actors. (They) argue that comparing the emerging “creative cityness” (Nkula-Wenz, L. 2018 - Worlding Cape Town by design: Encounters with creative cityness) of both cities provides valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges of urban cultural governance in the global South."