Marius Pieterse

The book Urban Politics of Human Rights edited by Janne E Nijman, Barbara Oomen, Elif Durmus, Sarah Miellet and Lisa Roodenburg has just been published by Routledge and is available open access here. The book considers how human rights are shaped in particular urban political climates. My chapter, “Resisting Marginalisation in the World Class City: … More Publication – book chapter: Resisting Marginalisation in the World Class City

David Everatt from the Wits School of Governance and I have just co-published this article in the Journal of Southern African Studies. It analyses the decline and near collapse of local government in South Africa through a political and legal lens. My contribution to the article centres on the seeming change in judicial approach to … More Publication: “Outsourcing Governance: Local Government and the Future of Democracy in South Africa” (with David Everatt)

I am privileged to have been selected as one of the cohort of 2022/23 research fellows at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Amsterdam, where I am based during my sabbatical from the University of the Witwatersrand from 5 September 2022 until 28 January 2023. During my … More NIAS fellowship: Human rights in the African city

This article, which has just been published (in advance online form) by Cities, considers how, in structuring the interplay between corporations and the local state within contemporary urban governance arrangements, urban law can enhance public values and public accountability. It draws on both urban governance and legal literature and engages examples from cities around the world. You … More Publication: “Corporate Power, Urban Governance and Urban law”

I am currently in Wroclaw, Poland, where yesterday I presented a paper entitled “Upholding public law values in hybrid public/private urban governance” at the annual conference of the International Society of Public Law. The paper is part of my overarching project on the legal dimensions of corporate involvement in hybrid urban governance arrangements, which focuses … More Conference presentation – International Society of Public Law: Upholding public-law values in hybrid public/private urban governance

I visited CLES (NRF chair in Cities, Law and Environmental Sustainability) at NWU in Potchefstroom earlier this year, and had fun recording a podcast for their CLESTalk series. Henrike Saunders and I discussed urban law as an academic discipline and my sense of the urban law research agenda, among other things. You can listen to … More CLESTalk Podcast

The International Human Rights Review just published this article, which is based on the talk I gave earlier this year to the EVICT project. The article traces and considers the implications of the culmination of South African jurisprudence on the rights of access to housing and equitable access to land in the Adonisi decision of the Cape High … More Publication: “Towards a Right to the City? The Slow Convergence of Rights to Housing and Land in South African Constitutional Jurisprudence”

To compliment a paper on regionalism and metropolitan governance in Canada that it had just published, the Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance commissioned a series of short perspectives on legal dimensions of cross-municipal governance of metropolitan regions in different commonwealth systems. My portion of this multi-authored “reflection” is entitled “Through the broken hourglass – Perspectives from … More Publication: “Perspectives on metropolitan governance”

The African School for Decentralisation, co-organised by the Dullah Omar Institute for Constitutional Law, Governance and Human Rights at the University of the Western Cape and the Centre for Federal and Governance Studies at Addis Ababa University, is taking place in cape Town and Stellenbosch this week. It was a pleasure to participate in the … More African School on Decentralisation

The South African Cities Network has just released its 2021 edition of the quinquennial “State of South African Cities Report”, which “applies a governance lens to diagnose progress made towards achievingproductive, inclusive, sustainable and spatially transformed cities”. I’m happy to have been contracted to write the bulk of the chapter entitled “Governing South African Cities” … More South African Cities Network: State of South African Cities Report 2021