Paper short abstract:

Following recent scholarship on global policy mobilities and urban learning, and based on an in-depth case study, the paper considers how certain intermediary organizations have come to shape local government’s thinking about and practical implementation of crime prevention strategies in Cape Town.

Paper long abstract:

When South Africa crowned its transition to democracy with a new constitution in 1997, a key promise of this new legal dispensation was to ensure a safe and secure life for all residents. However, given the various ways in which the systematic terrors of colonialism and apartheid have profoundly inscribed themselves into the country's social and spatial fabric, fostering in its wake high levels of disproportionately violent crime particularly in the country's major cities, this promise still begs to be realised. In turn, the proposed paper investigates the multivariate production of urban safety in postapartheid cities by focusing on the shifting regime of security governance in Cape Town. It considers the influential role certain intermediary organizations have come to occupy in shaping local government's programmatic thinking about and practical implementation of crime prevention strategies. Drawing on an in-depth empirical study of the Violence Prevention Through Urban Upgrading Initiative (VPUU), the paper traces why and how the urban development paradigm of 'crime prevention through environmental design' was able to gain critical traction in local urban governance circles, even beyond the immediate safety and security portfolio. In following recent scholarship that casts 'the city as a machine for learning' (McFarlane 2010) and highlights the growing importance of understanding global urban policy mobilities (and mobilizers) in the production of seemingly local political responses, the paper critically comments on the possibilities of as well as limits to inter- and intra-urban learning and what this means for contemporary urban governance arrangements in African cities.