Publication of book on BRICS city governance by Phil Harrison

The Gauteng City-Region Observatory is proud to be associated with a new published book, Governing Complex City-Regions in the Twenty-First Century: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The book was authored by Prof Phil Harrison, the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, and published by Wits Press in November 2023. GCRO supported the project in various ways, most recently as part of a project entitled International comparative city-region governance.

The book provides a comparative study of the complex governance challenges confronting city-regions in each of the BRICS countries. It traces how governance approaches emerge from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors, working in diverse contexts of political settlement and culture.

The scale and pace of urban change in the recent past has been disorienting. As individual cities evolve into complex urban agglomerations, scholars battle to find adequate vocabularies for contemporary urban processes while practitioners search for meaningful governance responses. Governing Complex City-Regions in the Twenty-first Century explores the ongoing evolution of metropolitan governance as diverse urban agents grapple with the dilemmas of collective action across multi-layered and fragmented institutions, in contexts where there are also manifold centres of influence and decision-making.

Whereas much of the existing literature is founded on the settled urban contexts of Western Europe and North America this book draws on the experiences of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The author shows that governance approaches are rarely designed but emerge, rather, from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors working within diverse contexts of political settlement and political culture. Intended for students, academics and professionals, the book does not offer packaged solutions or easy answers to the challenges of urban governance, but it does show the value of comparative study in inspiring new thought and perspectives, which could lead to improved governance practice within South African contexts.