Supporting City Futures by James Duminy and Susan Parnell

Supporting City Futures by James Duminy and Susan Parnell

African Centre for Cities has just published a new book Supporting City Futures: The Cities Support Programme and the Urban Challenge in South Africa by James Duminy and Susan Parnell.

In 2018 the Cities Support Programme (CSP), an initiative of the South African National Treasury, approached ACC to assist with the production of a book on the first phase of the CSP experiment that forms a critical pathway of South Africa’s urban policy processes.

In 2011, CSP was set up within the National Treasury of South Africa, a country often seen as a global policy innovator. It was conceived as an intergovernmental platform for urban support and reform to address South Africa’s national urban challenge in the core metropolitan areas, and to promote inclusive, sustainable, and productive modes of urban and economic growth. Through CSP, the National Treasury has sought to promote the spatial transformation of large South African cities from their current fragmented, exclusive, and low-density forms into more compact and integrated places.

Supporting City Futures captures the emergence, experiences, and lessons of CSP as a particular approach to urban support and reform. The intention of the book is not only to document the specifics of CSP, but also to capture a larger story about the evolution of urban policy and practice in South Africa.

The book will appeal to a range of audiences including policymakers seeking to understand what are the critical urban policy questions and ideas (both at a high level and a more nuanced local level) that they need to engage; Practitioners, by ensuring that work that CSP has done on specific issues or in specific sectors is captured, digested and linked to other parts of the programme in a way that provides a useful resource for practice; and scholars of urban public policy in South Africa, for whom the book will enhance understanding of past and present trajectories of urban policymaking in the South African context.