The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are used as an entry point to consider issues and questions surrounding the forms of urban expertise that are required to achieve transformative and sustainable urban development. The article builds on the authors’ experiences as researchers working co-productively with South African municipalities through the African Centre for Cities, an interdisciplinary research hub at the University of Cape Town.
Insights from the literature on urban policy mobilities are deployed alongside those from an emerging literature on
transdisciplinary research and knowledge co-production for global policy implementation. The aims are, first, to identify
emerging kinds of urban expertise that are produced and mobilized by constellations of actors involved in the advancement of global development policies at the city scale and, second, to examine the role of city-university partnerships in producing particular forms of urban expertise to support SDG localization. Locating this work within a longer genealogy of urban governance reform in South Africa, it is shown that the conditions under which effective co-productive relationships can be built and institutionalized are highly context specific and geographically uneven. Understanding and assembling such conditions will enable cities to benefit from the forms of expertise these can engender.

The New Urban Agenda (NUA) and Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise the key role of ‘sub-national entities’, including cities, in achieving sustainable development. However, since these global policy agendas were agreed and signed by national governments, implementing them at the local level requires a process of localisation to fit local realities. This paper analyses the national guidance (or lack of) and the resultant collaborations emerging between various levels of government in the implementation of these agendas in African cities, namely Kisumu, Kenya and Cape Town, South Africa. It argues that effective implementation of the SDGs requires a strong framework for multi-stakeholder engagement and coordination at all levels of governance, which is possible if both top-down and bottom-up approaches are used concurrently and harmonised.

The directive to close the dumpsite in Kisumu, Kenya has made the search for alternative solid waste treatment and disposal technologies urgent. The aim of this research is to support the decision-making process by analyzing multiple socioeconomic and environmental parameters of salient solid waste treatment options. We used multi- criteria analysis to assess and compare anaerobic digestion, sanitary landfill, bioreactor landfill, and incineration. Informed by field observations and interviews, the chosen assessment criteria were economic costs, electricity generation, GHG emissions, land footprint, air pollution, soil and water contamination, and compatibility with recycling efforts. A literature review yielded quantitative and qualitative data that supported the analysis and the ranking of solutions according to performance in each criterion. Our analysis shows that anaerobic digestion is a suitable solution for Kisumu, due to its reduced environmental impacts, production of electricity and fertilizer, suitability to treat the large organic waste stream generated in the city, and compatibility with independent recycling activities. Landfilling represents a cheap solution; however, previous failed initiatives indicate that finding available land close to main waste generators is a challenge. Incineration is costly and requires advanced air quality control equipment and high combustibility of incoming waste, which is not the case for Kisumu, where over 60% of waste stream is organic/wet. Our results and recommendations are targeted for the Kisumu case, but they can be relevant for researchers and policymakers elsewhere, especially in low- and middle-income cities facing similar challenges.

Knowledge exchange between universities and municipalities for sustainable and just cities.

Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is a planned area with land use that has optimal reach of public transport by urban populace it serves. Availability and accessibility of public transport minimizes reliance of use by private users and this is the cardinal rule of TOD Principles have been developed that provide a framework for understanding TOD. Kisumu is used as a case study in exploring these principles and their validity in medium sized African city. The application of these principles in guiding city planning and development highlights how TOD can be an effective driver of sustainable urbanization. The paper presents the concept of TOD and then builds into the case study city: Kisumu. It enables the reader to contextualize the discussions in the subsequent sections. The paper then addresses TOD conceptualization. It looks at the broad categories of TOD that has been demonstrated in Kisumu as a result of the interventions of various actors. It finally looks at the challenges and opportunities that exist for TOD as a planning and development framework.

This is the story of an early episode in the war against a pandemic whose end is not yet in sight. The struggle is certainly global, but its impact is painfully local. It is a close look at the experience of three vulnerable neighborhoods in the southwest of Buenos Aires City whose trajectories were similar in the first decades, but whose most recent experience and especially during the pandemic have been different.

This research report seeks to explain why some villas in Buenos Aires have been able to respond more effectively than others to the challenges of COVID-19. This is a comparative history of the actions that took place between March and October 2020 in Villa 20, Villa 15, and Villa 1-11-14, including public policies carried out by government agencies, especially the Instituto de Vivienda de la Ciudad (IVC) and the Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano y H bitat (MDHyH), and the active collaboration of local organizations. It offers some insights to help understand why the processes unleashed in each of the neighborhoods have had different impacts on the health of their inhabitants.

The Transport and Sustainable Urban Development project represents one of eleven similar projects conducted under the Mistra Urban Futures research strategy: Realising Just Cities. The aim of this project was to develop the collaboration between three of the platforms: GOLIP, KLIP and CTLIP. The three cities involved in the project, Gothenburg, Cape Town, and Kisumu, are all subject to rapid urbanisation and face similar local challenges, such as growing inequalities, degrading infrastructure, insufficient housing, among others, while trying to cope with global challenges such as climate change. The project explored the role that transport plays in creating inequity and injustice, in three very different urban contexts, and the value in taking a ‘transport justice’ approach to analysing transport systems.

A collaborative, co-creative R&D process was developed continuously from the first discussion of the project ideas at the Realising Just Cities (RJC) conference in Gothenburg, in 2016. Important milestones in the implementation of the project were the RJC conferences in Kenya, in 2017, in Cape Town, in 2018, and in Sheffield, in 2019. The methods and tools for co-creation that have been introduced and tested by the representatives from the three platforms—and also by wider groups in their
respective cities—have proven themselves valuable in grappling with an exceptionally daunting challenge that permeates across extremely different contexts. Transdisciplinary co-creation and co-production methods have a bright future as the boundaries between disciplines blur and the complexity of the challenges continues to grow. These tools and approaches are particularly relevant to the transport planning discipline, where there is a growing acknowledgement among scholars that the traditional, mobility-focused approach has created futures with undesired, unintended characteristics. A paradigm shift regarding the fundamental premise of transport planning is being proposed. Accessibility-based planning involves shifting the focus from speed to access, from the system to the user, and from efficiency to equity. In order to examine the potential transition to a transport justice, or accessibility-based, approach to transport planning, this project applies the Multi-Level Perspective—a method from the sustainability transitions field—to the accessibility systems of the three cities. Furthermore, to provide insight into the functioning of these accessibility systems, initiative-based learning was conducted through an examination of planned rail projects in each city in collaboration with practitioners, decision-makers, and stakeholders. In Gothenburg, the policymakers have an advanced understanding of transport justice and accessequity, but the consumers continue to demand suburban housing and car-based mobility opportunities. In Kisumu, the paratransit (informal public transport) system is well-attuned to the differential accessibility needs of the communities that it serves, but it still relies on the infrastructure provided by government entities with very narrow perspectives on mobility. In Cape Town, the disparity in the transition seems to be between policy and implementation. Many of the actors within the transport system are calling for a more equitable distribution of access in the city. However, the budget allocation still favours road infrastructure and BRT (Bus Rapit Transit Systems) expansion over salvaging the rapidly deteriorating rail system and supporting the burgeoning paratransit industry. The differential pace of change by different actors within the accessibility system of each city could
create as much disruption as the landscape challenges like climate change. This study has shown some of the  value of bringing together the fields of urban planning, engineering, and socio-technical transitions to better understand complex urban systems and their related governance challenges.

Some of the key takeaways for using transport to contribute to realizing just cities are:
• A ‘transport justice’ approach starts with accessibility as the primary premise for transport planning and infrastructure investment. A central tenet of this perspective is that there is a minimum level of accessibility that a transport system should provide every user, irrespective of their income, gender, age, spatial location, or any other characteristic. Through this approach, accessibility acts as a proxy for poverty and other forms of injustice.
• Transport interventions that serve those with the lowest access should be prioritised and subsidised in order to raise their accessibility to the minimum level. Similarly, improvements to the transport system that largely benefit people with high levels of accessibility—usually wealthy car owners—should be optional and self-financing.
• The upgrading of the existing and new transportation systems should be planned and implemented in parallel with mixed-use and accessible urban developments, close to transportation nodes, including a multitude of commercial, social, and cultural services.
• The real estate markets should be sufficiently incentivised and regulated to facilitate more equitable access provision, through the facilitation of affordable housing and entrepreneurship around new or existing public transport stations.
• A rail system, with its important capacity to restructure cities, is a key tool in counteracting inequality and access inequity in the long term.