Resilience building has become a growing policy agenda, particularly for urban risk management. While much of the resilience agenda has been shaped by policies and discourses from the global North, its applicability for cities of the global South, particularly African cities, has not been sufficiently assessed. Focusing on rights of urban citizens as the object to be made resilient, rather than physical and ecological infrastructures, may help to address many of the root causes that characterize the unacceptable risks that urban residents face on a daily basis. Linked to this idea, we discuss four entry points for grounding a rights and justice orientation for urban resilience. First, notions of resilience must move away from narrow, financially oriented risk analyses. Second, opportunities must be created for "negotiated resilience", to allow for attention to processes that support these goals, as well as for the integration of diverse interests. Third, achieving resilience in ways that do justice to the local realities of diverse urban contexts necessitates taking into account endogenous, locally situated processes, knowledges and norms. And finally, urban resilience needs to be placed within the context of global systems, providing an opportunity for African contributions to help reimagine the role that cities might play in these global financial, political and science processes.

As in many other settings in developing countries, discussions on urban flooding in South Africa tend to focus on informal settlements. There is less attention to poor but formal housing areas, based on the largely untested assumption that the formalization of housing addresses risk. This is at odds with an extensive literature from the housing and developmental sectors that highlights weaknesses in the location and construction of low-income housing, particularly state-subsidized housing. Drawing on research in 10 poor, flood-prone settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, this article explores whether providing housing addresses risk. The results show that flooding remains a challenge in subsidized housing areas and that risk is linked strongly to the buildings themselves. Poorly designed and constructed dwellings perpetuate risk in lowincome areas. While divorced conceptually and practically, disaster risk and housing issues are critically linked, and housing concerns must be factored into discussions on flooding in Cape Town and comparable settings elsewhere.

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