culture and sustainable development
in global south cities
Creative City South is a non-profit which profiles storytelling, runs projects and provides consultancy to advance notions around urban cultural governance for sustainable, inclusive, generative and just cities in the Global South. We manage the Local Cultural Governance Network of South Africa and its #Culture2030_ZA campaign.
We are informed by the movement to place culture and sustainability at the heart of local government policies spearheaded by Culture 21 and #Culture2030Goal.
The link between culture and cities are important. Culture speaks to core issues of identity, belonging & representation; simultaneously impacting on the economic, the social, and the spatial. Cities we recognise are culturally shaped and thus it is important to have a cultural lens to urban governance.
With cities in the global south fast becoming home to the majority of people on the planet, we are interesed in what strategies and tactics are being innovated at the urban level to address the twin challenges of sustainability and inclusivity.
“The question may be less how far we have moved along a spectrum from a fragmented to an integrated city...but rather: how are we doing in creating/ dreaming more equitable, more cosmopolitan, more socially just, more liberating, more beautiful, more erotic, more meaningfully productive, more creative cities?”
Durban’s process of developing a cultural policy has stalled. What has prevented it from taking hold and how does this help us understand local cultural policy development in South Africa?