Leveraging the Role of the Urban Planning Profession for One of the Central Policy Challenges of Our Times

Tackling corruption in urban development is a key policy challenge of our time. Activating the professional integrity of the urban planning community is a particularly promising and underexplored response to this challenge, especially in the context of Africa. These are the two key messages that this working paper seeks to advance, referencing some of the most pertinent empirics on urban corruption (section 1), as well as the latest thinking and learning in anti-corruption (section 2). As such, this paper seeks to speak to scholars, practitioners, and activists in both the anti-corruption and urban development fields – two largely disconnected communities that could greatly benefit from a crossdisciplinary conversation on building cities of integrity.
This paper also serves as the backdrop and rationale for “Cities of Integrity”, a new research and action initiative hosted by the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and supported by the UK’s Department for International Development GI-ACE Programme. The paper’s final section (section 3) shows how the urban development and anti-corruption insights described in sections 1 and 2 have directly inspired the design of this initiative. In this section we also preview the three main workstreams to be carried out in 2019/20, which will be further elaborated and reported on in future working papers in this series.