Below is an extracted chapter from the book Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South: Towards Safe and Inclusive Cities which explores a wide-ranging set of interventions within different countries of the global south.
As Amita Bhide, Professor and Dean, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, states about the book:
This second book based on research carried out under the Safe and Inclusive Cities initiative focuses its attention on interventions to address the extremely complex, diverse, layered, and often inter-connected forms of violence experienced in cities of the Global South. In a scenario where the state is often implicated as a perpetrator of violence and where social cohesion is frayed with groups pitched against each other, as the chapters illustrate, interventions are bound to be embedded in the complexity of the violence and hence ‘imperfect’. But, there is a lot to be learned from them as works in progress. One point that is clearly made is that safety and inclusion cannot be treated as independent arenas; they are linked. The sheer diversity of forms of interventions discussed here is amazing, ranging from grassroots interventions where the stakes and the roles of women and children in peace-keeping are asserted, to state interventions such as livelihood and safety linking projects such as the Community Work Programme, community upgrading, and policing. Beyond the specifics of the interventions discussed, the value of the book is that it represents an analysis by researchers deeply engaged with their local contexts, and hence insights that are highly nuanced and appreciative of particularities, temporalities, and complexities. If the world must make a definitive movement towards attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals, listening to and reading these fascinating insights is a must for international, national, and local policymakers and all those interested in development dynamics.
VPUU’s work is analyzed in the following chapter Urban upgrading linked to positive social outcomes in Cape Town, South Africa (Richard Matzopoulos, Kim Bloch, Sam Lloyd, Chris Berens, Jonny Myers, and Mary Lou Thompson).
In a nutshell, the researchers used data from three community-based surveys, conducted in Khayelitsha in 2013, 2014, and 2015, to explore the association between the infrastructure developed by VPUU and the following social outcomes: (1) experiencing interpersonal violence; (2) signs and symptoms of depression; (3) satisfaction with neighbourhood infrastructure; (4) involvement in community activities; and (5) social cohesion.
Read the full chapter below.
Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South – Edited for website
You can access the full text of the book Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South: Towards Safe and Inclusive Cities here
