Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire (ed.). (2024). Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities. A View from Post-Apartheid South Africa. London: UCL Press.

The book provides an ethnographic exploration of the challenges faced by South African municipalities to make the urban world a better place. The open access ebook is available from UCL press.

Harrison, Philip & Todes, Alison (2025). The Promise of Planning: Global Aspirations and South African Experience Since 2008. New York & Milton Park: Routledge.

The Promise of Planning explores the experience of planning internationally since the global financial crisis, focusing on South Africa. The book is a response to a decade-plus in which state-led planning has re-emerged as a putative means for achieving developmental goals (as indicated in global initiatives such as the New Urban Agenda) and where planning in South Africa has consolidated in terms of its legal and policy basis. However, the return of planning is happening in an inauspicious context, with economic fragilities, technological shifts, political populism, institutional complexities, and more, threatening to upturn the "new promise of planning."

Meth, Paula, Charlton, Sarah, Goodfellow, Tom & Todes, Alison (eds.). (2024). Living the Urban Periphery. Infrastructure, Everyday Life and Economic Change in African City-Regions. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

The edges of cities are increasingly understood as places of dynamism and change, but there is little research on African urban peripheries and the nature of building, growth, investment and decline that is shaping them. This multi-authored monograph examines African urban peripheries through a dual focus on the logics driving the transformation of these spaces and the experience of living through these changes. As well as exploring the generic dynamics of peripheral change across the continent, it provides rich qualitative insights into the specificity and distinctiveness of a range of peripheral locations. The open access ebook is available from Manchester University Press.