ACCRA, July (ANA) - Sustainable urban development needed to be moved away from national competencies and placed in the hands of cities themselves which best understood the unique and varied requirements of its citizens and environments.
Speaking at the 2018 Sustainable African Cities conference which took place in Accra, Ghana, this week, Professor Edgar Pieterse, the founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and the South African Research Chair in Uran Policy at the National Research Foundation, said that it was time for research and science academies to rethink how research and innovation happens.
"To not necessarily assume that the national scale of the nation-state is the primary level at which we need to organise ourselves, that maybe the time has come for city-based innovation systems to be the motor for our national academies."
Pieterse told the gathering of around 60 experts from all over Africa, and elsewhere around the world, that cities are best-placed to understand their own environments, "given that there is so much variation across cities".
"Regional economies also fundamentally different."
He said that from a fiscal and regulatory point of view, one had to look at how investment could be recalibrated to build a tax base in cities, and how there needed to be city-based regional innovation systems.
He challenged academies and science councils to begin to see if this might be the right time to not only have a national and regional focus but also local ones at the city scale to begin to do the fine grain work.
The conference is being jointly hosted by the Ghana Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, in conjunction with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The conference is also supported by the Network of African Science Academies (Nasac) and the Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf).
- African News Agency (ANA)
