Related scholarly and research interests include: urban and planning theory; planning history; political economy and world systems; urban governance, governmentality, and democracy; African urbanism, with a focus on history and politics in South Africa; local government law and planning law; spatial politics and equitable development; participatory methods, oral history, and social justice. Geographically, Stefan is focused on South Africa, the United States, and Mexico. His research examines world-historical and political-economy dimensions of urbanization in specific geographies created by the apartheid South African government: the peri-urban township, the Bantustan, and large-scale agro-industrial farming. In contemporary contexts, Stefan seeks to analyze public-private arrangements, governance, “zones of exception,” and racialized/gendered labor in global comparative contexts.
Some of Stefan’s current, ongoing research projects include:
A proposed major mixed-methods investigation into former Bantustans in South Africa investigating urban governance from the perspectives of migrant civil servants and residents in both former Bantustan capital cities and peri-urban townships (planned dissertation topic);
An inquiry into whether and how Specialized Agrarian Industrial Districts, or SAIDs, might supplant or ameliorate international divisions of capital and labor and their associated outputs in regional clusters;
An examination of Johannesburg, South Africa’s Ponte City Tower as physical embodiment of changing governing regimes and resident re-appropriation from apartheid to post-apartheid liberal democracy;
An historical examination of Jane Jacobs’ professional engagement with philanthropy and foundations’ urban development programs, in ways that both shaped/informed her work and the field of urban grantmaking, drawing on comprehensive archival analysis at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC);
An examination of “special districts” in Colorado in comparison with municipal governments, drawing on theoretical and empirical methods; An examination of public-private arrangements, governance, “zones of exception,” and racialized/gendered labor, drawing on Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in former South African Bantustans;
An examination of ‘muscle memories’ of violence using a theoretical framework of genre knowledge and the empirical case of South Africa’s COVID response; An engagement with the photography of South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and his work on securitization in Johannesburg;
An archival, geospatial, and quantitative inquiry into the scope and nature of violence in Tancítaro, Michoacán, México; and
A proposed, mixed-methods investigation into the recombinant spatial form of the former Bantustan in South Africa, and how layered legacies of ‘Bantustanization’ shape urban governance outcomes today.
