Marius Pieterse

I have just returned from Potchefstroom, where I participated in an international conference on “Sustainable Development in the Urban Age”. The event, co-hosted by the Konrad Adenhauer Stifftung, NWU, the NRF chair on Cities, Law and Environmental Sustainability (CLES) and the Freie Universitat, Berlin, coincided with CLES’s official launch, which I attended as a fellow of the chair. At the conference, I presented a paper from my research project into urban governance in SADC cities, entitled “To not be left behind: Devolution, urban autonomy and local governance in the cities of SADC”. On Thursday evening 7 March, I also presided over and spoke at the launch of The Globalisation of Urban Governance (Helmut Aust & Anél du Plessis, eds., Routledge, 2019).