culture and sustainable development
in global south cities
Creative City South is a non-profit which profiles storytelling, runs projects and provides consultancy to advance notions around urban cultural governance for sustainable, inclusive, generative and just cities in the Global South. We manage the Local Cultural Governance Network of South Africa and its #Culture2030_ZA campaign.
We are informed by the movement to place culture and sustainability at the heart of local government policies spearheaded by Culture 21 and #Culture2030Goal.
The link between culture and cities are important. Culture speaks to core issues of identity, belonging & representation; simultaneously impacting on the economic, the social, and the spatial. Cities we recognise are culturally shaped and thus it is important to have a cultural lens to urban governance.
With cities in the global south fast becoming home to the majority of people on the planet, we are interesed in what strategies and tactics are being innovated at the urban level to address the twin challenges of sustainability and inclusivity.
How can culture be best mobilised in neighbourhood development in Johannesburg? A colloquium exploring the importance of a community of practice.
Messages for Newtown: better research, improved engagement with cultural stakeholders and the valuing of culture in city making.
Our guest writers ask: why is there yet another plan trying to solve the problems of The Newtown Cultural Precinct in Johannesburg?
In what ways do temporary, bottom up, urban interventions, birth alternative spaces of cultural production and socialization? The case of the Realengo Flyover Cultural Centre in Rio De Janeiro.
Buenos Aires’s cultural policy builds on its unique cultural assets through a people centred approach which aims to further cultural exchange at a localised level.
What would it take for Durban to mobilise culture more effectively for sustainable city making? What implications does this have for cultural governance frameworks?
Cultural Democracy: a policy shift to foster inclusivity and creativity in South African cities?
Academics in Cape Town explore enlivening an agenda for research on cultural governance for sustainable cities in South Africa, by sharing their work.
A festival to foster creative, collaborative, problem solving, for a more integrated and just Cape Town.
Using creative city initiatives to further cultural and environmental justice agendas in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Can cultural projects targeting at-risk youth effect sustainable socio-economic transformation in cities, and if so how?
Is Cape Town’s diverse, democratic public sphere shrinking and if so in what way? What possibilities do new cultural spaces offer? What actions may be needed to improve the situation?
Name changing of public spaces in resource tense, racialised societies? What are the alternatives for more productive dialogue, towards real transformation?
Can a transformed South African creative economy ecosystem come to being without state investment in industry support bodies?
The Newtown Cultural Precinct project in Johannesburg has been in a slump for many years. Can city planning save it and if so how will it change?
Can working with memory and memorialisation further reconciliation? An examination of projects in Cape Town.
We explore how monuments to conflicted pasts can be turned into opportunities for constructive dialogue and societal change?
Our urban lives and spaces are shaped by our traumas and dreams. How is this expressed in Vietnamese cities? What is the role of our artists and heritage institutions?
Mural Villages as a cultural policy instrument? Exploring the possibilities and the pitfalls: the case of the Tam Thanh fishing village in Tam Ky, Vietnam.
Revaluing Community Arts Centres in South Africa as convivial spaces of learning, sharing, creative expression and identity formulation.
Medellin's transformation, from a city of violence to one of innovation and social dynamism, is the result of concerted and significant investments into cultural programmes and infrastructure since 2004.
A call is made for a research agenda that furthers the use of culture for inclusive and sustainable urban development in South Africa.
Telling the story of the development of the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries Policy 2014 - the only existing municipal cultural policy in Africa.
Africa's first local cultural policy was an exercise in participatory planning, drawing on the optimism of cultural bodies in Cape Town, who had been denied access previously to use their voice.
Exploring the origin of the concept of urban cultural policy, what does it mean, and why is it important ?
A new UNESCO report details how cultural policies can be better reshaped to further the diversity of creative expression, and so foster sustainable development and peace.
What can we learn from the archives of the 1980's, a time of political and cultural resistance globally? We look at the period and a project that commemorated its importance.
Looking at the discourse building, culture initiative, BLAC, and its projects to further dialogue, publishing and advocacy in a divided Cape Town (1998-2003). How have things shifted since?
Plotting the path, and critiquing, the development of South Africa’s post-apartheid cultural policy.
Durban’s process of developing a cultural policy has stalled. What has prevented it from taking hold and how does this help us understand local cultural policy development in South Africa?