Generalising about urban governance and the urban poor across most of the globe is unhelpful. Unfortunately, I see far too many current examples of that disease. Latin America is not China and is most certainly not like most of Africa or the Indian subcontinent. A recent paper in this journal...

There are all too few examples of good urban governance in the ‘South’. One city which improved its performance dramatically after 1992 was Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. It joined the ranks of exemplar cities and its former mayors toured the world advertising this ‘miracle’....

Bogota is seemingly a positive example of what restructuring and sensible macroeconomic policy can bring to Latin America. Despite liberalisation and a vast increase in the number of people seeking work, unemployment rates have fallen. Large numbers of new jobs have been created, principally in...

Perhaps in an ideal world, governments would learn from the experiences of others. What has worked well or badly in one place can be repeated or avoided in another. Of course, one place is different from another so that modifications to any policy are usually necessary. When South Africa adopted...

In Mexican cities, somewhere between one-third and one-half of all households rent or share accommodation. Over the years, even though rental housing has been in relative decline, the absolute numbers of tenant households have been increasing. Recently, because home ownership has become...

Given similar levels of economic development and inequality, it seems strange that more effort has not been made by South Africans to learn from the earlier experience of urbanisation in countries such as Brazil, Chile and Colombia. The paper shows that there are problems in drawing comparisons...