In this article, which has just appeared open access in the Utrecht Law Review’s first edition of 2024, Angela van der Berg and I assess the resilience of the legal frameworks for urban governance during the Covid-19 pandemic, as experienced in cities in the Netherlands and South Africa, against the characteristics of “adaptive law”. Angela … More Publication: “Governing Urban Crisis through Adaptive Urban Law: Lessons from City Responses to COVID-19 in the Netherlands and South Africa”

Today, the University of Stellenbosch, the Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung and UN Habitat co-hosted an Urban Law Day in Stellenbosch, with a rich programme interrogating various aspects of the judicial function in the making, enforcement and oversight of urban law. I spoke in the session on judicial remedies, presenting my current work on socio-economic rights review standards and … More Urban Law Day: The Role of the Judiciary in Pushing the Legal Frontiers for City-level Transition and Sustainability

Today I participated in a virtual workshop exploring a research agenda on the right to the city, jointly hosted by the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the University of Oslo and the Centre for Human Rights Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai. I presented on how the right to the city is crystallising in the … More Virtual workshop: The right to the city

This op-ed, which summarises some of my research on private sector involvement in urban governance in South Africa, was published by Daily Maverick on 29 November 2023. You can read it here.

Just out online (and open access) in the Journal of Law and Society, this article is the main output resulting from my September 2022-January 2023 research fellowship in Amsterdam, at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). As per its abstract, the article “considers the use of human rights … More Publication: “‘Human Rights Cities’ in Africa? Rights as Resources for Urban Governance in the Global South”

On Thursday 28 September 2023, I delivered a public lecture at the School of Law of the University of the Witwatersrand, to discuss the results of my NRF-funded research on the legal regulation of South African business’ involvement in urban governance. I focused in the talk on how devolution of powers to local government shapes … More Public lecture: Legal dimensions of corporate involvement in urban governance

Happy to report that this article has just appeared online in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. It considers how the weddedness of urban governance systems to a hierarchical and exclusionary conception of property, which also underlies South African common law, straitjackets state attempts to govern land conflicts and problematic spatial practices in … More Publication: “Property’s Shadow: Governing Land and Plurality in Durban, South Africa” (with Thomas Coggin)

I have just returned from Budapest, where I attended the IGU Commission on Geography of Governance’s international conference on paradigm shifts in local governance, which took place from 4-6 September 2023. I presented a paper entitled “Legal dimensions of private sector involvement in resilient urban governance: Navigating dual crises of Covid-19 and drought in Nelson … More Conference participation: Paradigm shifts in local and urban governance

The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law is doing a special issue on urban constitutionalism and rule of law, to which I’m happy to be contributing “Rule of law through the ‘urban turn’ in South African constitutionalism”. The special issue follows on a great workshop on rule of law and cities held at Tilburg … More Publication: “Rule of Law through the ‘Urban Turn’ in South African Constitutionalism”

I am currently on a short invited scholarly visit to the Faculty of Law at Freie Universitat Berlin, where next week I will deliver a guest lecture on the relevance of the norms in the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights in and for African cities. You can read more about the talk, or … More Research visit and guest lecture: Freie Universitat Berlin