Jeptha, Hazel Patricia2025-11-272025-11-272025https://hdl.handle.net/10566/21480The COVID-19 crisis has invited a radical rethinking of how we plan our lives, produce food and work, and how we think and act in the world and across various scales, specifically cities. South Africa has an extremely large vulnerable population consisting of concentrated masses of poverty-stricken citizens living in dense settlements, rural areas, and small towns. The lockdown hit poor communities the hardest, while the rich were able to work from home and stock up on food and essentials. But how have municipalities responded to this challenge in terms of their local economic plans? This mini-thesis is about how Worcester, the capital of the Breede Valley Municipality (BVM) in the Cape Winelands District, dealt with the crisis, how it understood the crisis, and how Local Economic Development (LED) after the COVID-19 period was conceptualised and undertaken. The thesis examines how local economic development was reconfigured to address old and new challenges and if there was a rethink of old ways of doing development and reducing poverty. I also investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected various socio-economic strata in different wards in Worcester specifically Zwelethemba. The data was collected from primary materials (largely municipal documents) interviews with councillors and a small-scale survey of citizens in different wards. My findings are that the municipality has not been able to structurally rethink urban (local) development and has been relatively unsuccessful given its historical legacies of uneven development.enWorcesterCOVID-19rethinkinglocal economic developmentsustainabilityThesis