Marius Pieterse

This paper, part of the first volume of the South African Cities Network’s Urban Governance Paper Series (edited by Danga Mughogho and published in 2019) is now available online. The paper overviews constitutional standards and supporting legislative and policy frameworks, as well as high-level case law on urban service delivery in South African cities, in … More Publication: "Components of Rights-based Urban Service Delivery"

This op-ed was published by The Conversation Africa today and can be read here.

This academic article, which grew from a working paper produced during my visiting research fellowship at the World Trade Institute in Bern, Switzerland, in late 2017, has just appeared online, ahead of its’ print publication in the Law and Development Review. The article considers the interactions and interdependencies between local government law, urban governance, developmental … More Publication: “Local Government Law, Development and Cross-border Trade in the Global Cities of SADC”

I am in Delhi, where today is the last day of the RC21@Delhi conference impressively titled “In and Beyond the City: Emerging Ontologies, Persistent Challenges and Hopeful Futures”. The conference is organised by the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Urban and Regional Development. An overwhelmingly wide variety of urban studies research is being disseminated … More Conference: RC21@Delhi – In and Beyond the City (Delhi, India, 18-21 September 2019)

This academic article has just appeared in the Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law (2019 vol 13(2), pp. 119-146). It considers the judgments of the South African Constitutional Court that have dealt with instances where South African cities have asserted power against other levels of government, or where their autonomous exercise of power has been … More Publication: “Urban Autonomy in South African Intergovernmental Relations Jurisprudence”

I have just returned from Dublin, where I presented a paper comparing constitutional and legislative dimensions of urban autonomy across different major cities in the SADC, at the fourth City Futures conference, hosted jointly by the European Urban Research Association (EURA) and the Urban Affairs Association (UAA). The theme for the conference was “Creating Just … More Conference: City Futures IV (Dublin, Ireland, 20-22 June 2019)

I am in Helsinki, where I have just attended a two-day urban research conference, organised by the Finnish Urban Planning Society around the theme “The Everyday City”. Participants, ranging from philosophers to urban economists, contemplated the impact of different plans, laws, policies and technologies on the structure of everyday urban lives.