Marius Pieterse

The South African Cities Studies Conference was held virtually this year, co-hosted by the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University; the Gauteng City-Region Observatory and the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies at the School of Architecture and Planning at … More South African Cities Studies Conference (31 August – 4 September 2020)

This article has just appeared online in Urban Forum (with hardcopy publication to follow). It can be read here. It is the outcome of extensive desk, observation and interview research conducted in the South African towns of Vanderbijlpark and Vereeniging, falling under the Emfuleni local municipality, which suffered a high-profile governance collapse in 2018. In … More Publication: Anatomy of a Crisis: Structural Factors Contributing to the Collapse of Urban Municipal Governance in Emfuleni, South Africa

This chapter appears in Law and the New Urban Agenda, edited by Nestor M Davidson and Geeta Tewari, which has recently been published by Routledge (London and New York, 2020). Law and the New Urban Agenda aims to offer ‘a constructive and critical evaluation of the legal dimensions of the New Urban Agenda’. The chapter … More Publication: Book Chapter: Shifting Paradigms from Between the Lines? Legal Internalizations of the Right to Adequate Housing in South Africa

Today, I was one of the invited speakers at the Urban Law Day webinar organised by UN Habitat jointly with the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London. The theme for the day was “The Post-Covid City: Lessons for the Future in Law and Development”. I delivered a presentation entitled “Rights-clashes, legal … More Urban Law Day Webinar: The Post-COVID City: Lessons for the Future in Law and Development (10 July 2020)

I am currently participating in a virtual Expert Group Meeting on Inclusive Cities co-organised by UN Habitat, the Geneva Human Rights Platform of the Geneva Academy and the Geneva Cities Hub, in coordination with the office of the UN High-Commissioner for Human Rights. The meeting includes focused discussions on human rights mainstreaming within the domains … More UN Habitat, Geneva Human Rights Platform & Geneva Cities Hub Expert Group Meeting on Inclusive Cities (5-6 May 2020)

As member of the South African National Department on Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation’s Policy and Legislative Review Team (POLERT) it is both an honour and a challenge to be tasked with thinking through the legal implications of, and possibilities for, the national human settlements response to the COVID19 pandemic, specifically in overcrowded urban informal … More Legal dimensions of COVID19 response in urban informal settlements

I participated today in the webinar for the launch of the South African Cities Network’s Urban Governance Paper Series. I presented the paper that I contributed to volume 1 of the series, entitled “Components of Rights-based Urban Service Delivery”. You can access the entire volume 1 here.

As part of a team assembled by the NRF SARChI Chair in Cities, Law and Environmental Sustainability (CLES) at NWU Potchefstroom, I have spent a number of months producing commissioned research for the South African Cities Network and the Gauteng Provincial Government, on the legal landscape pertaining to the regulation of township economies in South … More Webinar & Research Project: Law Reform for Unlocking Urban Township Economies

Today, I engaged with the national research team at the South African Human Rights Commission in Johannesburg about setting a research agenda on spatial equity and human rights in South African cities.

I am attending the World Urban Forum in Abu Dhabi where, in my capacity as joint global coordinator of IRGLUS, I organised a networking event entitled “Achieving Spatial Equity through Human Rights and Rule of Law”, in partnership with the UN Habitat Urban Legislation Unit. The event took the form of a panel discussion followed … More World Urban Forum (Abu Dhabi, 8-13 February 2020): Achieving Spatial Equity through Human Rights and Rule of Law