Professor Edgar Pieterse is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and leading practitioner-scholar on southern urbanism. His research and teaching explore urban imaginaries, alternative futures, sustainable urban infrastructure, place-making, public cultures, responsive design and adaptive governance systems. He publishes different kinds of text, curate exhibitions, as well as difficult conversations about pressing urban problems.
He is co-curator of Cityscapes—an international publishing platform and studio on urbanism in the global South. He has published two books, City Futures (Zed, 2008) and New Urban Worlds (Polity, 2017, with AbdouMaliq Simone), as well as nine co-edited books, dealing with a wide-ranging set of topics related to contemporary urbanism and place-making. Current research is focussed on a major exhibition—Emergence, as well as exploratory work on the tenets of sustainable infrastructure systems in low-income contexts. This focus is tied into a definitional exploration of city-level innovation ecosystems in Africa.
Edgar also leads the African Mayoral Leadership Initiative (AMALI). He serves on numerous international urban research advisory boards and provides advice to various international agencies. He is Provost of the Norman Foster Institute for Sustainability Cities.