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At the global level, there is significant overlap between the "hot spots" of diversity in natural and human systems. Biocultural diversity studies has emerged as an area of synthesis between natural and social scientists, who have begun to look at distribution, composition and threats to the world's diversity. In addition tot providing a new conceptual framework that could build bridges to policy makers, an index of biocultural diversity has been developed as well. This talk will provide a general introduction to this interesting field of study, discuss the development of the indicator, and offer some points for consideration within the framework of governance paradigm research.

Cities have historically played a distinctive role in South Africa’s modern political economy. They constituted central collection points for capital amassed predominantly through mining in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; were instrumental in providing the means to coordinate the rationalist planning and industrialisation characteristic of the apartheid era; and were fundamentally shaped by the policies of racial division of that era. The governing of cities in apartheid South Africa was designed to service the infrastructural, but particularly ideological and spatial requirements of the apartheid state. Urban authority reflected the spatio-administrative ordering of apartheid, consisting of local councils governing each of the four statutorily defined racial groups (i.e. White, Coloured, Indian and black African). Finally, since a key rationale of apartheid planning was the control of the flow of black Africans into cities - the intention of apartheid policy being to contain African settlement in designated rural ‘homelands’ or bantustans - urban policy centred on managing and monitoring Africans’ (and other populations’) movements.