Talk by Rashid Seedat, Executive Director of Gauteng City Region Observatory
UCL Urban Laboratory is delighted to invite you to join us for a seminar and presentation from Rashid Seedat, Executive Director of the Gauteng City Region Observatory, titled "Urban governance challenges in times of political crisis: perspectives from the Gauteng City Region Observatory, South Africa".
Talk by Rashid Seedat, Executive Director of Gauteng City Region Observatory
08 Jun 2023, 11:00 – 12:30
Rashid, who is collaborating with us and the University of Witwatersrand School of Architecture and Planning in the MASc Global Urbanism, is also an alumnus of the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, so we are very pleased to welcome him “back” to UCL on this occasion, with a response from Colin Marx, Professor of Urban Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit. Colin’s research interests relate to urban land dynamics in sub-Saharan African cities. Professor Jennifer Robinson (UCL Geography and Co-Director UCL Urban Lab) will chair the session, after a Welcome by the UCL Urban Lab Director, Dr Clare Melhuish.
As South Africa’s thirtieth anniversary of democracy looms in 2024, it is confronted by social, economic, spatial and political crises unprecedented in its post-apartheid history. While these have permeated all spheres of government (national, provincial and local) they have played themselves out dramatically in South Africa’s premier city-region. Gauteng, at 1.5% of the land area generates a third of the country’s GDP, comprises 26% of the population (13 million people) and is home to Johannesburg as the economic powerhouse and Pretoria/Tshwane, the national capital city. Until 2016, the once-dominant African National Congress controlled the Gauteng provincial government with a comfortable majority and ruled every single municipality (bar one of the smallest). In the last few years, the governance landscape has changed profoundly and has led to political instability and acute service delivery crises across the length and breadth of the city-region. The talk will unpack these issues, analyse the causes and posit some broad issues that may change the current course.
Rashid Seedat is the Executive Director of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) in South Africa, a position he has held since June 2021. As the executive head of the GCRO, he is responsible for its management and providing its overall strategic direction. The GCRO is a partnership between the Gauteng Provincial Government, organised local government, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Johannesburg. As a UN-Habitat recognised urban observatory, the GCRO conducts data collection, spatial analysis, policy development and independent research on social, economic, environmental and governance dimensions of the Gauteng city-region.
Between 2011 and May 2021, Rashid was the head of strategic and spatial planning in the Premier’s Office of the Gauteng Provincial Government. Between 2001 and 2011 he headed the Central Strategy Unit in the Mayor’s Office in the City of Johannesburg. Rashid has a long history of involvement in urban struggles in South Africa during the resistance against the apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s. He is Deputy Chairperson of the Steering Committee of UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory Network (GUO-Net); a Special Advisory Committee member of uKESA (Urban Knowledge Exchange Southern Africa); and an Expert Group member of Metropolitanisation in Barcelona. In his private capacity, he is a trustee of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation.
Rashid studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in political studies, higher diploma in development planning and two masters’ degrees, in public management and development planning respectively. He held a visiting fellowship at the (former) Local Government Centre at Warwick University in 1992-93 and completed a certificate course in metropolitan and municipal management at the Development Planning Unit at UCL in 1993.
Further information
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Cost
Free
Open to
All
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Yes