Marius Pieterse

My article “A Year of Living Dangerously: Urban Assertiveness, Cooperative Governance and the First Year of Three Coalition-Led Metropolitan Municipalities in South Africa” has just appeared online in Politikon, a highly-acclaimed South African journal of political studies. The article assesses instances of urban assertiveness in a political context of “vertically divided authority”, in three South African … More Publication: “A Year of Living Dangerously: Urban Assertiveness, Cooperative Governance and the First Year of Three Coalition-Led Metropolitan Municipalities in South Africa”

I have been selected as a member of a legislative review panel under the South African National Department of Human Settlements. The panel will assist the Department with reviewing its legislative and policy framework for compliance with, inter alia, the New Urban Agenda, SDG11, the South African Integrated Urban Development Framework and constitutional jurisprudence, on … More Legislative Review Panel: National Department of Human Settlements (South Africa)

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

I spent the day at the amazing Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology. In the morning, I was the guest at an informal workshop with various project staff, discussing legal dimensions of their work in housing, human settlements and urban futures. In the afternoon, I presented a talk entitled “An anatomy and … More Workshop and talk: Urban Futures Centre (Durban, South Africa, 15 August 2018)

I attended and participated in this workshop aimed at local government officials and councillors, held by the North West University (Potchefstroom)’s Faculty of Law and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, in Potchefstroom. I participated in a session entitled “What are (some) of the features of a properly structured municipality?”, delivering a presentation entitled “Urban autonomy and … More Workshop: Institutional Design of Medium-sized Municipalities in South Africa (Potchefstroom, South Africa, 2 August 2018)

This article appears in the latest issue of Verfassung und recht in Ubersee, a German academic journal for constitutional law and politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The article considers the socio-economic rights judgments of the South African Constitutional Court within a broader framework of judgments concerning different aspects of democratic participation in urban … More Publication: “Socio-economic rights adjudication and democratic urban governance: Reassessing the ‘second wave’ jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court”

I participated in this multi-disciplinary workshop held by the Human Rights and Sustainable Development Research Group at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. The workshop aimed to arrive at a multi-disciplinary research agenda and associated funding proposal around the legal dimensions of the right to the city. 

Here follows a piece I wrote for IRGLUS news, reflecting on my attendance of the World Urban Forum: The 9th World Urban Forum, the international community’s premier urban conference, took place in Kuala Lumpur from 7-13 February 2018. The first such forum since the adoption of the New Urban Agenda (‘NUA’) at the similarly prestigious … More World Urban Forum (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 7-13 February 2018)

This article has just appeared online for Urban Studies, “the leading international journal for urban scholarship”. A previous version of the article was presented at a conference entitled “Remote: Rethinking Remoteness and Peripherality” organised by Island Dynamics in Longyearbyen, Svalbard in January of 2017. The article questions the usefulness of the notion of an “urban periphery” … More Publication: “Where is the periphery even? Capturing urban marginality in South African human rights law”

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