city writing | écritures urbaines | Brett Petzer, PhD Candidate

The Great Reclamation: urban space in the pandemic

29th April 2020 / 6 comments

In a recent Twitter thread, I tried to put down some thoughts about rapid and widespread rise in cities allocating hundreds of kilometres of streets from cars to everything else, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic – link. I’ve pasted it here for now, retaining Twitter format, and will hopefully neaten up and refine this…

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Video: Pedestrian priority at a key Cape Town intersection

1st August 2016 / 0 comments

Below, the first in a series of what I hope will be many videos capturing the experience of Cape Town’s pedestrian and cycling environment from an urban planning standpoint. In this video, you can see how, even on what is arguably Cape Town’s flagship pedestrian route, four motor traffic cycles go by on Buitengracht between…

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Idea: mapping bicycle collisions in Cape Town

31st July 2016 / 2 comments

I would like to establish a Google Map on which all of the cycling collisions (and muggings, and bikejackings) reported in the media can be mapped and tracked. There can be no doubt that such a map (if one doesn’t already exist – please DM me on Twitter or comment here, if so) would start…

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Skeptic City: MCRP

6th March 2015 / 0 comments

Download my report Skeptic City as an example of my academic writing. Skeptic City was a very brief report on Century City, a large planned community fairly near to Cape Town’s Central Business District. My report sought to make the point that the urgent need for any category of new housing in Cape Town – a city…

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Building Africa’s 10 Cities of the Future (part II)

10th July 2014 / 0 comments

Read in full at TheSouthAfrican.com: “The real success of the Africa’s shining new cities will be in demonstrating the value of high-density, sustainable patterns of land use, such that they are widely implemented in Africa’s burgeoning metropolises (Part II).”

The Ten Most Spectacular University Campuses in South Africa

10th July 2014 / 0 comments

Read in full at TheSouthAfrican.com: “South Africa’s universities are among its most beautiful public buildings. Take a tour around Mzansi in mortarboard and robes with our roll call of higher ed beauties.”

The top ten South African museums

10th July 2014 / 0 comments

Read in full at TheSouthAfrican.com: “South Africa’s museums have a difficult but intensely exciting future ahead of them: in a country where history is especially contentious, and where our understanding of apartheid history is still clouded by the motives and power differentials of living people, museums must give all South Africans the tools – the…

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Article: Cape Town’s Anti-Apartheid Urban Plan – NextCity.org (June 2014)

10th July 2014 / 0 comments

The image above is a screenshot from a longer piece I co-wrote with the excellent Rashiq Fataar – read it here (free). The piece contains was built on a more than a dozen interviews with prominent decision-makers and thoughtleaders on the subject of Cape Town’s evolving urbanist vision for itself and its hinterland. The final piece…

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Review: Peter Cox’s Moving People

1st July 2014 / 0 comments

I reviewed Peter Cox’s lively, concise and wise book on sustainable transport, Moving People. An excerpt follows below, with the full article at the African Centre for Cities’ urbanafrica.net. Although published in 2010, Peter Cox’s Moving People: Sustainable Transport Development remains a useful and rewarding read in 2014, despite the rapid growth and constant evolution of sustainable transport…

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Quantifying racial segregation in Cape Town

13th February 2014 / 0 comments

A repost of a short article in FutureCapeTown.com (read here) Adrian Frith has produced a series of maps that give graphic form to what most South Africans already know intimately: that our cities are traversed by invisible frontiers that are tightly policed, that come into being as soon as you’re on the wrong side of them,…

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