BOOK LAUNCH | Panya Routes by Kim Gurney
Join ACC for the launch of 'Panya Routes', published by Motto Books, which investigates the do-it-yourself, do-it-together working principles of independent art spaces on the continent.
Join ACC for the launch of 'Panya Routes', published by Motto Books, which investigates the do-it-yourself, do-it-together working principles of independent art spaces on the continent.
ACC is delighted to host a panel discussion centred on the newly published What is Critical Urbanisms?. The panel discussion takes place on Tuesday, 27 September from 16:00 to 17:30 and will delve deeper into the book to unpack some of the debates and themes.
Join ACC for the Johannesburg launch of Panya Routes, at the Stokvel Gallery on Saturday, 22 October, at noon.
In 2021 the African Centre for Cities (ACC), an action-oriented research hub based at the University of Cape Town and UNITAC, the result of a partnership between the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), the United Nations Office for Information and Communication Technology (UN OICT), and the City Science Lab @HafenCity University in Hamburg (CSL), initiated a collaborative platform for shared research interests under the banner of the Urban Academy. The collaboration is based on a shared interest in unpacking the intersection of technology, society, and cities to examine democratic decision-making, new models of service delivery, and the future of work. Supported by the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, we are delighted to invite you to the official launch of the Urban Academy on the 6 December 2022 that will be facilitated by Nokukhanya Mncwabe, a human rights consultant who enjoys forming, implementing and pulling apart policies and projects, forging friendships across geographies and disciplines, and being a tourist at home (Africa). WHEN | Tuesday, 6 December 2022 TIME | 15:00-18:00 SAST WHERE | Workshop 17, 32 Kloof Street, Gardens, Cape Town RSVP | Please send an email to africancentreforcities@gmail.com Panel one: Introducing the Urban Academy: Smart Cities, Clever Urbanism In the first panel, partnering directors Edgar Pieterse (ACC) and Gesa Ziemer (UNITAC and City Science Lab) will introduce why thinking about people-centred smartness is important for urban sustainability and justice from their different perspectives. Panel two: RISE Cities: Different approaches to make our cities more resilient, intelligent, sustainable, and equitable This interactive panel hosted by RISE Cities explores innovative urban practices in achieving resilient, intelligent, sustainable and equitable solutions and the role of responsible leadership. We are happy to invite the following to share their perspectives and facilitate their reflections: Resilience – Dr Rudi Kimmie, TSIBA Intelligence – Saidah Nash Carter, Bright Insights Global Sustainability – Murendi Mafumo, Kusini Water Equity – Brian Green, Group 44 Panel three: Young and Online in African Cities: people-centred smartness and urban wellbeing In the third panel we explore tech-enabled ways of making lives in African cities. The following panellists will bring brief reflections into a wider conversation about what it takes to shape research agendas about the role of technology in urban justice. It is also an opportunity to introduce a new collaboration under the Urban Academy, supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung entitled Young and Online in African Cities. Rike Sitas - Introduction: Youth in digital city-making Daanyaal Loofer - From undersea cables to street corners: smart African cities Alicia Fortuin - Platformization and the future of work Neil Hassan - Safe queer digital spaces Liza Cirolia - Techno-ambivalence and socio-technical infrastructure Hilke Berger - A research agenda for the Urban Academy? Space is limited so please RSVP to africancentreforcities@gmail.com with the subject line: Urban Academy RSVP. If you require any further information, please contact rike.sitas@uct.ac.za.
African Centre for Cities is delighted to invite you to the launch of Disrupted Urbanism: Situated Smart Initiatives in African Cities by Prof Nancy Odendaal, Head of Department, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, University of Cape Town (UCT).
African Centre for Cities invites you to the launch of theoriSE: debating the southeastern turn in urban studies, edited by Oren Yiftachel and Nisa Mammon.
On the first UN Science, Technology and Innovation in Africa Day, 2 May 2023the International Science Council together with the African Centre for Cities present webinar aimed at exploring effective ways of accelerating local action towards the implementation of the SDGs in African cities.
UKZN Press, The Book Lounge and the African Centre for Cities invite you to the launch of 'Apartheid Remains' by Sharad Chari. Sharad will be in conversation with Omar Badsha and Caroline Skinner. DATE | Thursday, 18 July 2024 TIME| 17h30 for 18h00 VENUE | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Str, Cape Town RSVP | booklounge@gmail.com About the book: In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilised in various ways – through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty and capital – submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament. Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley; Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER); and author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India. Apartheid Remains is published by UKZN Press.
The African Centre for Cities, University of Georgia Press and The Book Lounge invite you to the launch of High Stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theorizing in Partnership by Sophie Oldfield. Sophie will be in conversation with Shireen Square, Valhalla Park resident and Anna Selmeczi, from the African Centre for Cities. High Stakes, High Hopes tracks the building of urban theorizing in a decade-long urban research and teaching partnership in Cape Town, South Africa. An argument for collaborative urbanism, this book reflects on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution. Oldfield explores how research and assessment were reshaped when framed in neighborhood questions and commitments, and what was reoriented in urban theorizing when community activism and township struggles were recognized as sites of valid knowledge-making. WHEN | Tuesday, 29 October 2024 TIME | 17H30 - 19H00 VENUE | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town Please RSVP here
The African Centre for Cities (ACC), in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen invite you to the public launch of the CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship project. The launch will take place under the theme “Infrastructure’s Transitions”, where the project team will share the project overview, structure and direction. CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship is a four-year research project funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). In the context of a contested energy transition, the project explores claim-making, citizenship, and statecraft in Cape Town, South Africa. The project aims to advance creative and interdisciplinary methods for contributing to thinking related to the politics of infrastructure transitions. Thirty years after the formation of the post-apartheid state, a series of global and national transitions are reconfiguring the energy landscape. We present these transitions not as contextual inevitabilities but as social facts that require critical observation and new modes of sense-making. The event is titled Infrastructure's Transitions as a tribute to Antina von Schnitzler’s influential work, Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid. This seminal book has inspired scholars across various disciplines to see infrastructure as a site where state-society relations and urban futures are substantiated, contested, and performed. WHEN | Thursday, 31 October 2024 TIME | 3PM - 5PM VENUE | Studio 5, Environmental & Geographical Science Bld. UCT Upper Campus Please RSVP here
