Decent, affordable housing and secure housing tenure remain elusive for Africa’s urban majority. The urban majority is expected to live in self-help housing, reflected in the fact that 62% of African urban dwellers live in urban informal settlements. The inability to access safe, decent, and secure housing, and the reality that Africa’s urban majority is..
Read moreAfrican cities by 2063: Fostering
theologies of urban citizenship
Grounded in a postcolonial, liberationist urban vision, this article lamented the theological and political paralysis of urban denialism that fails African cities and African urban populations. Considering different possible urban trajectories towards 2063 – ranging from floundering to flourishing, implosion to explosion, and apocalyptic disaster to complete rebirth – it then proposed theologies of African..
Read moreConstructing an Urban Theology of Liberation in South Africa Today: A Transdisciplinary Praxis-Approach in the Interface between (Urban) Faith, Politics and Planning
Urban theologising in South Africa has to solidify its intentionality, commitment, rigour, and outcomes if it is to contribute in liberating, constructive and transformative ways to the shape and content of current and future South African cities. This particular contribution articulates the importance of constructing urban theologies of liberation, reiterating the ongoing importance of liberationist..
Read moreEveryone counted, counts! The first homeless count in the City of Tshwane, October 2022 Research report
Every person counts. And everyone counted during the City of Tshwane’s first official homeless count, counts! This is a critical moral, political and theological assertion, and insistence. It is also a critical methodological reminder. Losing one survey form, or miscounting, or messing up data, is miscounting one person’s dignity, importance and information. Without such insistence..
Read moreThe ‘good city’ or ‘post-colonial catch-basins of violent empire’? A contextual theological appraisal of South Africa’s Integrated Urban Development Framework
The Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) was constructed as a ‘new deal’ for South African cities and towns. It outlines a vision with four overarching goals and eight priorities or policy levers meant to overcome the apartheid legacy through comprehensive spatial restructuring and strategic urban–rural linkages. This article is a contextual theological reflection ‘from below’,..
Read more‘Between life and death’: On land, silence and Liberation in the captal city
This article reflects on the unfinished task of liberation – as expressed in issues of land – and drawing from the work of Franz Fanon and the Durban-based social movement Abahlali base Mjondolo. It locates its reflections in four specific sites of struggle in the City of Tshwane, and against the backdrop of the mission..
Read moreHomelessness and Covid-19 in the City
of Tshwane: Doing liberation theology
undercover – A conversation with
Ivan Petrella
Ivan Petrella argues that the goals of liberation theology can sometimes be better served by doing it undercover. This article reflects on responses to homelessness during Covid-19 in the City of Tshwane, describing and reflecting upon itfrom the perspective of a researcher-theologian as well as activist-urbanist. It employed two lenses in its reflection: Petrella’s notion..
Read moreRecovering a Gospel of Love Through Children: Shattering Faith, Knowledge and Justice
This paper seeks to consider the themes of justice, faith and knowledge using the South African context as its backdrop. South Africa provides acontext fraught with a multiplicity of challenges, many of which were inherited from the exceptional injustices which characterised the apartheid era, dating back to the days of British and Dutch colonisation. Since..
Read moreDemythologising social cohesion: Towards a practical
This article considers the topical issue of social cohesion. It seeks to demythologise the issue bringing it into critical conversation with eight related categories. It proposes that a vision of a socially cohesive society should employ all eight categories as parallel and complementary strategies. Secondly, it proposes a practical theological vision of social cohesion that..
Read moreUrban Africa 2050: Imagining Theological Education/Formation for Flourishing African Cities
Africa’s staggering rate of urbanization and the silence of religion or theology in response form the backdrop of this article. Africa’s urban futures, up through 2050, are considered through the lenses of fifteen African cities and theological institutions in these cities. I employ a set of research questions, seeking to contribute theologically to a body..
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