Nuno Ferreira da Cruz

One of the most important environmental consequences of rapid urbanisation and the associated growth of human settlements, industries and services, is a rise in the amount of solid waste, meaning a...

This article investigates how urban governance in Kuwait reproduces unsustainable spatial and socio-economic outcomes. We distinguish two dynamics: outcomes the state deliberately sustains, above all the residential segregation of Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis, and outcomes it professes to pursue in its own plans yet persistently fails to deliver, such as curbing sprawl and car dependence or clearing chronic housing shortfalls. Situating governance within a rentier political economy, we treat it not as a neutral mechanism but as a state-spatial strategy through which oil rents are territorialised, with sharply different consequences for citizens and non-citizens. Drawing on interview-based network analysis, we show that authority is highly centralised yet fragmented in delivery and dominated by technocratic agencies, while actors focused on social or mobility concerns remain peripheral. While the government appears to acknowledge the need for reform, Kuwait’s governance regime actively obstructs the city’s ability to shift course, sustaining a path-dependent urban model through institutional exclusion, inertia, and repeated disruption of planning. The article contributes to debates on state capacity, rentier political economy, and urban governance in the Gulf, grounded in both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

A better comprehension of existing governance arrangements, potential reforms, and modernisation pathways is often presented as a fundamental part of statecraft, which, in turn, is a necessary condition for the provision of public goods (such as policies, services, amenities). This chapter translates learnings from the broader field of urban governance to a more focused academic inquiry of urban transport. It presents three distinct approaches to empirically analyse urban transport governance and discusses how this research may inform policy-orientated insights. The first approach introduces more descriptive mapping methods, which position the transport domain within urban governance. The second approach focuses on integrated governance and joined-up policy-making, while the third engages with the socio-structural futures of transport governance networks in cities. Based on these approaches and the insights they produce, the chapter concludes by reflecting on how they may inform policy-orientated research.

This paper investigates urban governance empirically by applying social network analysis methods to data gathered through structured interviews in London and New York. We explore how decisions are made in complex institutional environments inhabited by various types of actors. Owing to the time-consuming data collection and treatment processes, the research zooms in on transport. The comparative approach enabled the detection of different structural features in the governance networks shaping transport strategies in both cities. The perceived relative power, influence, dependence and/or affinity between the actors involved is discussed based on network attributes. The evidence suggests that transport governance in London is more centralised (and, arguably, more technocratic and integrated), in the sense that a few prestigious entities are clearly more prominent. In New York the institutional environment is typified by many checks and balances (and, arguably, more democratic and fragmented), where central actors are less obvious.

Ethiopia’s mass-scale subsidized housing delivery programme has driven the rapid expansion of middle-income, mid-rise settlements on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, requiring the provision of infrastructure to newly developed areas. In the case of the Kotari housing project, established sanitation systems were deemed inappropriate for the site, resulting in the deployment of novel technology, a Membrane Bioreactor (MBR). Such decentralised technologies contribute to the heterogenous infrastructure configurations which characterise Addis Ababa’s sanitation landscape, reflected not only in material configurations but also in how they are governed. In this paper, we use the concept of ‘infrastructure interfaces’ as an analytical device to identify the key material connection points in the system. Working across scales, we scrutinise the governance arrangements at these critical junctures: the household, the block, the condominium, and the city. Our analysis challenges established understandings of infrastructural heterogeneity driven by the private sector, either through financialized elite infrastructures or informal survivalist practices. In Kotari, the state is the driver and the target is the lower middle class. Centring the state in these infrastructure configurations provides nuance to our understanding of how heterogeneity emerges. Our methodological approach accounts for governance at various scales, providing fresh insights into the relationality of infrastructure, particularly the human/technology interface and infrastructural failures. The case shows the importance of transcending binary readings of infrastructure configurations, such as on/off grid, state/private and formal/informal. Future work on the post-network city must go beyond simply denigrating or valorising alternative modes of service delivery.