ority of the local government regarding developmental duties is limited and subject to national and provincial oversight and control, its role of driving development consolidating democracy and effecting the enjoyment of socio-economic rights is evidently essential. The oversight role of the national and provincial government on local government is aimed at strengthening the ability of local government to execute its functions, within the framework of co-operative government prescribed in Chapter 3 of the Constitution.

The oversight role of other tiers of government may not obstruct local government ability or right to exercise their executive and legislative authority or to perform their constitutionally mandated functions. The provincial government can only intervene through the appropriate measures to ensure that obligations are fulfilled. Other than that the municipality retains the authority to structure and manage its administration and budgeting and planning process to give priority to the needs of the community, and to promote the social and economic development of the community. In fulfilling its functions, municipalities are bound by the values and principles governing public administration, articulated in section 195 of the Constitution and echoed by sections 51 and 73 of the Local Government: Municipality Systems Act. Municipalities are bound to be transparent, accountable and development orientated, ensure that services are provided in a fair, impartial, equitably and without bias, that public administration and services provision are responsive to the needs of the city citizens and that service provision should be accessible as well as environmentally and financially sustainable and that public participation in policy making is encouraged. Pieterse submits that the Constitution and the Municipal Systems Act conception of developmental local government clearly echo with the concept of ‘the city’ in the right to the city literature. He asserts that the recognition that local government is by its nature well-placed for community involvement in governance, and that such involvement must structure the shape of both service delivery and spatial planning, reflects the participatory dimensions of the right to the city. Further, local government should also become the medium through which citizens work to achieve their vision of the kind of place in which they wish to live. This is in proportion to the notion that urban citizenship underlie the right to the city and this is grounded in the reality of urban habitation, which entitles