Across sub-Saharan Africa, informal settlement regularization has become a central response to insecure tenure, rapid peri-urban growth, and weak land governance. Yet existing scholarship and policy frameworks continue to assess regularization largely through technical and administrative indicators such as titling, cadastral mapping, planning compliance, investment and land market formalization, while paying limited attention to how these interventions reshape everyday relations between citizens, authority, and urban space. Drawing on Land Governance Theory and qualitative evidence from eight peri-urban settlements in Mbarali District, Tanzania, under the Land Tenure Improvement Project (LTIP), this study examines how regularization reshapes relations between communities, authority, and urban space. Data were generated through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, field observations, and document review. The findings show that regularization extended far beyond land titling. It operated as a process of everyday state formation through which legitimacy, visibility, inclusion, exclusion, and urban belonging were continuously negotiated. While regularization strengthened tenure confidence and encouraged investment in housing and infrastructure, it also intensified bureaucratic dependency, land commodification, social differentiation, and struggles over authority and recognition. Experiences of formalization remained uneven and were shaped by gender relations, class position, political networks, generational inequalities, and residents’ ability to navigate bureaucratic systems. The study further demonstrates that regularization simultaneously expanded state visibility while exposing the unevenness of institutional accountability in peri-urban governance. The study argues that informal settlement regularization should be understood as a deeply political and socially transformative process embedded within broader struggles over citizenship, power, and urban futures in rapidly urbanizing African contexts.
This article explores the economic dimension of street renaming in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Existing literature has focused on the cultural and political dimensions of street renaming, paying little attention to the economic dimension of name changes in fiscally constrained contexts. The study is grounded on the theoretical frameworks from critical toponymy, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Sen’s capability approach. The study utilizes a comparative qualitative document analysis, focusing on Zimbabwe, South Africa, Canada and the United States of America in order to interrogate the economic dimension of street renaming in diverse contexts. The study reveals significant opportunity costs associated with street renaming in financially constrained contexts where citizens are faced with severe capability deprivations. In conclusion, the article proposes a pragmatic framework which seeks to balance symbolic transformation and capability expansion, arguing that the primacy of basic needs satisfaction should be prioritised in resource constrained and crisis-stricken contexts in urban areas.
Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) tools like LEED-ND and BREEAM Communities assume stable governance and formal infrastructure—conditions rarely met in Global South cities. This paper moves beyond critique to propose a Healing-First Analytical Framework that re-sequences urban assessment, placing socio-ecological repair as a prerequisite for sustainability. While previous empirical work applied adapted NSA criteria to evaluate unplanned settlements (Tambal, 2025), this study addresses a theoretical gap: the absence of an analytical model that reimagines assessment’s purpose. Through a diagnostic case study of Burri al-Sharif, an unplanned neighbourhood in Khartoum, - the analysis demonstrates how foundational deficits—insecure tenure, flood vulnerability, inadequate sanitation, fractured governance—render standard benchmarks ethically problematic. Engaging Southern urbanism, decolonial theory, and infrastructure studies, this study conceptualises “healing” as active socio-ecological repair. The framework operationalises restorative justice through two analytical phases: a Healing Phase addressing critical deficits, followed by a Sustainability Phase where conventional sustainability optimisation becomes viable. By reframing assessment as repair rather than performance verification, the paper offers a context-sensitive pathway for urban planning in vulnerable landscapes, contributing a methodological intervention to debates on urban justice in the Global South.
Literature suggests that women are increasingly constituting a large share of international migrants. However, women have remained invisible, excluded from contributing their own share of migratory insights. This study investigates the migration experiences of African women in Durban, South Africa, examining the intricate and multiple realities of their lives. It examines in particular the motivations for their migration as well as the socio-economic challenges they encounter. The study is guided by intersectionality as a theoretical framework, examining how gender, nationality, documentation status, and class jointly shape the experiences of migrant women in urban Durban. Using in-depth interviews with 20 women, the study reveals the systemic hurdles they face and the strategies they adopt to survive in their host country. Migrant women in Durban have to deal with economic exclusion, social marginalization, and restricted access to critical services, yet they refuse to allow these difficulties to define who they are. The narratives of the women paint a powerful picture of resilience amid hardship. These findings highlight the urgent need for focused initiatives that acknowledge the contributions of migrant women and support their integration into urban settings.
Air pollution is an environmental and public health problem in secondary cities; yet residents’ awareness and knowledge of it are rarely empirically assessed. This study assesses Winneba residents' awareness and knowledge of urban air pollution. Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) and Sensory Perception Theory (SPT) were adopted in a phenomenological study involving 20 participants through interviews and field observations. Following COREQ principles and the Braun and Clarke approach, a manual inductive thematic analysis was employed. The findings reveal that residents exhibit strong awareness of air pollution through sensory cues (odour, smoke, and dust). Open burning, dumpsite odour, fish smoking, and dust were the main sources of pollution, determined by location and occupation. Experiential, intergenerational, and formal knowledge shaped residents’ air pollution knowledge in the study context. Beyond the findings, this study proposes sensory environmental literacy (SEL) as a new conceptual model that illustrates how, through repeated sensory experiences interpreted through LEK, residents become aware of environmental risk even without scientific understanding or sophisticated air quality monitoring. Sensory perception provides a base for generating environmental knowledge, which is lacking due to the lack of official monitoring systems. Expanding environmental literacy scholarship, this research contributes to the idea of perceiving the environment not only through formal networks but also through complementary processes of relating sensory perceptions and LEK as sources for building environmental consciousness among residents of less resource-rich, secondary urban cities. Community-based environmental education, participatory governance, and local sanitation infrastructure are needed to supportsustainable urban air quality.
