Books and Book Chapters (Geography & Environmental Studies)
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Item Urban agriculture for environmentally just cities: the case ofurban community gardens in Cape Town, South Africa(Routledge, 2025) Shade, Mohamed Deen; Kanosvamhira, Tinashe PCities in the global South confront a multitude of environmental challenges, including air pollution, waste management issues, and biodiversity loss. Addressing these issues is vital for the welfare of residents in rapidly urbanising cities. Urban agriculture emerges as a proposed solution with the potential to mitigate some of these environmental challenges. There is a lack of research exploring the relationship between urban agriculture and environmental justice in the global South, particularly in marginalised neighbourhoods that bear the brunt of environmental injustice. To fill this research gap, the study examines how community gardens contribute to advancing environmental justice in low-income neighbourhoods of Cape Town, South Africa. To achieve this goal, a mixed-methods approach is adopted. Remote sensing techniques are utilised to compare land surface temperature values of selected gardens in Cape Flats with other suburbs in Cape Town. Additionally, semi-structured interviews and observations are conducted in 34 urban community gardens, purposively selected, to delve into how these gardens can address environmental injustices in the areas. The research findings uncover an unequal distribution of green spaces between wealthier and less affluent neighbourhoods in Cape Town. While the current benefits of gardening may not be widespread, the results indicate that urban community gardens offer numerous advantages, such as environmental education, promotion of agro-ecological practices, and the utilisation of land for green purposes. As repositories of knowledge promoting environmental justice, urban community gardens require institutional support aligned with their objectives to foster a fairer and more sustainable urban future.Item Living with xenophobia: Zimbabwean informal enterprise in South Africa(Southern African Migration Programme, 2017) Crush, Jonathan; Tawodzera, Godfrey; Tevera, DanielSouth Africa�s crisis of xenophobia is defined by the discrimination and intolerance to which migrants are exposed on a daily basis. A major target of the country�s extreme xenophobia � defined as a heightened form of xenophobia in which hostility and opposition to those perceived as outsiders and foreigners is expressed through violent acts � is the businesses run by migrants and refugees in the informal sector. Attitudinal surveys clearly show that South Africans differentiate migrants by national origin and that Zimbabweans are amongst the most disliked. Zimbabweans are certainly not the only small-business owners to have become victims of extreme xenophobia.Item Small town tourism in South Africa(Springer International Publishing, 2018) Donaldson, RonnieThis book investigates small town tourism development in South Africa taking into account the most common strategies: branding, promotion, festivals and theming. The contents of the book resonate with the intersection of the power elite and their impacts on small town tourism. Because the book focuses on small town geographies in South Africa, the literature on small town tourism in the country is reviewed in Chapter 2 to provide a contextual background. Each subsequent chapter begins with an overview of international literature to give the conceptual context of the case studies each chapter explores. In Chapter 3 the concept of small town tourism branding is illustrated by an exploration of the Richmond book town. In Chapter 4 the branding theme is probed further in an investigation of two winners of the Kw�la Town of the Year competition namely Fouriesburg and De Rust. Chapter 5 documents the branding of Sedgefield through its proclamation as Africa�s first Cittaslow (slow town), a process driven by the local power elite to the exclusion of town�s poor who have no understanding of the intentions of the Cittaslow movement and its potential benefits for the town. Chapter 6 is a case study of Greyton�s tourism-led rural gentrification by which a small town has transformed in three decades to become a sought after place of residence for elite inmigrants so making the town a jewel tourism destination while reinforcing racial segregation. Because festivals and events - creations of the wealthy - have made significant financial contributions to small towns, Chapter 7 considers festivals and events as strategies to market and brand small towns in a particular way.Item Que(e)rying Cape Town: touring Africa�s gay capital with the pink map(Centre for Geographical Studies: Lisbon, 2013) Rink, Bradley M.Since 1999, Cape Town�s Pink Map has attempted to provide local and international visitors alike with a cartographic representation of the city�s queer landscape. This paper engages with the archive provided by more than a decade of the Map to trace the outlines of this �pink� discourse while contributing to debates on the promotion of �pink� tourism and the nature of South African queer communities. This paper will demonstrate that, in addition to being a commercial publication that locates gay- and gay friendly leisure venues, services, and shopping, the Pink Map also engages particular tropes of the body and gender to inscribe sexual and consumer citizenship in the city of Cape Town with specific emphasis on the urban quarter known as De Waterkant. The analysis will show how the journey one takes while holding the Pink Map is illustrative of events taking place on the urban landscape that the Map depicts. In the final analysis, this paper reveals how the Pink Map serves as an archive of a limited notion of queer visibility, new modes of consumption, the queer tourist gaze and the embodied shaping of destination space.