Project Listing

The Governing the Just Urban Transition project explores the coping strategies of businesses in low-income areas to better understand the opportunities for co-produced paths out of crisis towards a just urban transition.

The African Universities Hub for Human Rights (AUH) is an initiative of the Politics and Urban Governance Research Group (PUG) at the University of the Western Cape. It was launched in 2023 to be a space for activists who defend human rights and democracy (HRDs) in Africa, to incubate ideas and reflect on their work. It acts as a conduit between African universities and civil society to advance the work of expanding democratic space and the ecosystem for protecting Human Rights Defenders (HRDs).

This study explores local perspectives of urban crisis representation and response across four ‘disorderly’ urban areas (two in South Africa and two in Colombia). Through privileging the lived experiences of marginalised populations and employing a novel comparative storytelling methodology, the project interrogates the relationship between crisis framings and ensuing responses, alongside the notion of crisis itself, in support of more effective urban crisis response.

This research focusses on an emerging off-grid sanitation option in the form of container-based sanitation (CBS) across four city contexts

Universities have the potential to play a multifaceted role in relation to the protection of human rights.

The Off-Grid Cities project focuses on how urban elites are seceding from state provided infrastructure networks in favour of private hybrid and off-grid technologies.

From social infrastructure to pandemic resilience?: Learning from and with low-income urban communities.

A diverse set of views from Cape Town’s residents from all social demographic area