Despite progress on various fronts in realizing South Africa's smart city goals, systemic barriers to inclusion remain, obstructing restorative social justice and perpetuating apartheid-era inequalities. This study investigates how, in the context of more general technological advances, urban segregation, governance and resource distribution intersect to reinforce inequity in the smart cities of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Ekurhuleni. Drawing on interviews with community members, local government officials and urban planners, the study reveals that entrenched spatial segregation continues to restrict access to smart technologies - excluding marginalized voices, favouring affluent areas, and deepening the digital divide and socioeconomic disparities. By outlining how resource allocation shapes outcomes for disadvantaged groups, the study identifies governance strategies that can mitigate these challenges. By providing place-based evidence, it supports more equitable urban development, and calls for policies that give marginalized communities increased access to vital digital and physical infrastructure.
This article examines flood risk as an emergent assemblage rather than a fixed or universally agreed-upon condition. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper traces how flood risk materializes through contingent relations among human actors, hydrological processes, infrastructures, legal categories and competing temporal imaginaries. Rather than treating planners, experts and residents as stable groups with predetermined interpretations, the analysis follows how these provisional formations are continually reconstituted as they align with different visions of urban futures. Planners stabilize a heritage-oriented redevelopment imaginary, while disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) regimes regard the area as a high-risk zone. Squatter residents assemble the riverbanks as an urban sanctuary through everyday practices and selective downplaying of flood events. Foregrounding these relational processes, the article contributes to a temporally attuned understanding of urban risk, demonstrating that flood risk is not an external technical reality but an emergent effect of heterogeneous relations that shape and are shaped by competing futures-in-the-making.
This article examines how climate stress intensifies the housing and settlement deficits of seasonal agricultural workers (SAWs) in Bursa, T & uuml;rkiye, and the implications for housing justice within this agri-food city-region. It advances a twofold agenda: first, to diagnose multi-scalar vulnerabilities linking unit-level shelter deficiencies with settlement-scale siting and infrastructure deficits under heat and flood risks; and, second, to propose a community-informed upgrading framework supported by responsive governance. Drawing on mixed-methods fieldwork conducted in the Yeni & scedil;ehir and Mustafakemalpa & scedil;a districts in 2023, the study integrates in-depth interviews, gender-segregated focus groups and institutional consultations. Findings indicate that poorly ventilated, flood-prone shelters, inadequate sanitation and precarious labour arrangements compound climate risks, disproportionately affecting women and children. In response, the article outlines a phased intervention model combining spatial design measures with rights-based governance approaches. By situating peri-urban SAW settlements within wider city-region governance dynamics, the study offers a transferable framework for climate-resilient housing interventions.
Across the urban global South, flood adaptation is too often framed as a technical exercise, even though the deepest risks are concentrated in informal settlements shaped by long-running social and spatial injustices. This paper reframes flood adaptation as a justice project, asking who is protected, who is displaced and whose knowledge and claims to space shape decisions about risk. Using a qualitative, document-based comparison of 13 informal settlements across Africa, Asia and Latin America, the paper identifies recurring "infrastructures of exclusion", planning by omission and partial participation that stratify resilience. The paper proposes a Justice-Oriented Framework for Flood Adaptation (JOFFA), integrating distributive, procedural, recognitional and spatial justice into operational tools such as equity audits, citizen mapping, justice scorecards and spatial justice dashboards. Grounded in practices from Mukuru, Khayelitsha, Dharavi, Vila Aut & oacute;dromo and nine other sites, the paper advances a seminal agenda for co-produced, justice-driven flood adaptation in the urban global South and beyond.
Urban development increasingly takes the form of expansion at the edge of cities, often resulting in development of locations with greater exposure to natural hazards, as exemplified in Quito, which has experienced one hazard event per 0.8 km2 of recent expansion. Predictive models of hazard impacts are thus important tools in planning, but their use can be limited by institutional technical capacity and data needs. In this paper, we present a trial approach of "just good enough" hazard modelling, using simplified but typical initial conditions and bold but reasonable parameterizations, to allow adequately realistic simulation of hazard events. This trial was run in a two-day participatory workshop with urban development departments of Quito municipality. Rapid participatory modelling proved effective in introducing hazard modelling to those without previous experience, fostering important discussion around hazard impacts and knowledge gaps, and opening broader planning dialogues across stakeholders, which is a critical first step in decision support and policy development.
