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Theorizing Urbanization: the Universal and the Particular in Question

Studio 3 ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The African Centre for Cities is pleased to announce it's first Special Lecture for 2017. We will be hosting Prof Kevin Cox, who will be presenting a lecture on 'Theorizing Urbanization: The Universal and the Particular in Question'. Abstract Over the last twenty-five years or so urban studies has witnessed increasing skepticism towards universalizing claims and a greater interest in the particularizing. Recent arguments for a view from the global South exemplify this. This raises the question of what the relationship between universalizing and particularizing tendencies might be. This is explored firstly through an exploration of how the two might be reconciled. Two case studies then follow. One focuses on the ‘view from the South’ controversy; and the other on the politics of urban development in the US and in Western Europe and a subsequent trans-Atlantic divide. Bio KEVIN R. COX, is Emeritus Distinguished University Professor of Geography at the Ohio State University. His major research interests include the politics of urban and regional development, geographic thought and South Africa. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which are The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception (2016) and Making Human Geography (2014.) He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two awards from the Association of American Geographers, including one for distinguished scholarship. More information can be found on his website, Unfashionable Geographies, at https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/.  

What must be our urban question? Reflections on Contemporary Urban Knowledge from Delhi

Studio 3 ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

ACC is delighted to be hosting Gautam Bhan from the Indian Institute of Human Settlements who will be giving a seminar as part of our socio-spatial transformations seminar series. The seminar is entitled 'What must be our urban question? Reflections on Contemporary Urban Knowledge from Delhi'. About The fact of urbanization no longer needs assertion. Today, our problem is of an excess of speech. What do we talk about when we talk about the urban? Cities? Built Form? Economic Agglomerations? Violence? Modernity? Democracy? Nature? Infrastructure? Transport? As each of us – citizens, theorists, practitioners, policy makers – seeks to grasp the urban, we find ourselves navigating multiple and often competing visions of cities that seek to be smart, inclusive, resilient, sustainable, world-class, ordinary, and global all at once.  This talk reflects on how we must think of the urban in the moment of its emergence. It asks: what are the knowledge systems, cultures and practices that we need to in order live, survive and intervene into our city-regions?  It does so at a moment when the urban question is once again up for global debate, challenged to cross disciplines, offer knowledge for urgent and transformative practice to address a maddening diversity of issues from inequality to sustainability. It does so, in line with new theoretical thinking from the “south,” by beginning and rooting from place, asking questions of urban theory and practice from one its most challenging sites: the city of New Delhi. In doing so, it also takes on the task of imagining what a decolonisation of urban studies can look like. Bio Gautam Bhan has a BA from Amherst College and an MA from the University of Chicago in urban sociology. He has worked as a Research Fellow at the Society for Applied Studies, New Delhi, where is his first work was on gender and access to health in informal urban settlements and later focused on urban poverty in Indian cities and particularly on questions of eviction, resettlement and poverty within urban development. He is the author of Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi and most recently of This is Not the City I Once Knew: Evictions, Urban Citizenship and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi (Environment & Urbanisation, Vol. 21 (1), 2009). He is also a columnist with the Indian Express, one of India’s leading English language newspapers, where he writes on urbanisation and urban issues in India. His ongoing research at Berkeley focuses on the changing politics of citizenship and poverty in post-liberalisation Indian cities. He was awarded the prestigious Berkeley Fellowship for 2008-2012 to support his doctoral studies. He is also currently a 2009 IDRF fellow of the Social Science Research Council, New York.

Luxified skies: How vertical urban housing became an elite preserve

Studio 3 ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The African Centre for Cities and the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics are pleased to co-host a Special Lecture by Prof Stephen Graham entitled 'Luxified skies: How vertical urban housing became an elite preserve'. Abstract This talk is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality’—so central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the superrich. Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities. Bio Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He has an interdisciplinary background linking human geography, urbanism and the sociology of technology. Since the early 1990s Prof. Graham has used this foundation to develop critical perspectives addressing how cities are being transformed through remarkable changes in infrastructure, mobility, digital media, surveillance, security, militarism and verticality. His books include Splintering Urbanism; Telecommunications and the City (both with Simon Marvin); the Cybercities Reader; Cities, War and Terrorism; Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail; and Infrastructural Lives (with Colin McFarlane). Prof Graham’s 2011 book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism was nominated for the Orwell Prize in political writing and was the Guardian’s book of the week. His new book - Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers (Verso) – was published in November 2016. Another Guardian book of the week, it was in the books of the year lists of both the FT and the Observer.

Neighbourhoods, NIMBYists and nobodies: the local politics of the Corridors of Freedom

African Centre for Cities UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

Venue:  Seminar Room 3, African Centre for Cities RSVP: Mercy Brown-Luthango at mercy.brown-luthango@uct.ac.za In 2013, Johannesburg’s former mayor, Parks Tau, announced the ambitious Corridors of Freedom plan to ‘restitch’ Johannesburg through a process of transit-oriented development led by the BRT and supported by a range of interventions intended to densify housing, stimulate economic opportunities, and develop mixed use activities. While the plan envisions large-scale transformation through long-term infrastructure investments, the implementation of the COF has had an immediate and substantial impact at a local level. The various responses of Johannesburg communities have revealed localized governance dynamics and complex relationships with the City and the state, speaking to significant socio-spatial politics in the city. Based on a survey and key informant interviews the seminar reflects on community organization (or lack thereof); the role of individual and organizational intermediaries; and tactics of engagement with the state. It focuses on three case studies in Johannesburg: Orange Grove and Norwood – a mixed middle class and low-income node on the Louis Botha Corridor; Westbury and Coronationville – a historically coloured area on Empire-Perth Corridor struggling with gang violence, drug abuse and high levels of unemployment; and Marlboro South – an informal community living in reterritorialised industrial buildings adjacent to the historic township of Alexandra. We argue that the Corridors of Freedom project has had a substantial impact on local politics and has revealed significant social and spatial community dynamics across Johannesburg. This seminar forms part of a research partnership between the AFD, City of Johannesburg and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. About The Speakers Margot Rubin is a senior researcher and faculty member in the University of the Witwatersrand (South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning) in Johannesburg. Since 2002, she has worked as a researcher, and policy and development consultant focusing on housing and urban development issues, and has contributed to a number of research reports on behalf of the National Department of Housing, the Johannesburg Development Agency, SRK Engineering, World Bank, Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality and Urban LandMark. Her PhD in Urban Planning and Politics interrogates the role of the legal system in urban governance and its effect on the distribution of scarce resources and larger questions around democracy. She also holds a Masters in Urban Geography from the University of Pretoria, an Honours degree in Geography and Environmental Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography and Philosophy. Of late, Margot has been writing about inner city regeneration, housing policy and is currently engaged in work around mega housing projects and issues of gender and the city. Alli Appelbaum is researcher at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) who holds a Masters in Regional and Urban Planning Studies (with distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Urban History (in the first class) and a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and History (with distinction), both from the University of Cape Town. Her research interests are broad, meeting at the intersection of History, Geography, Urban Studies and Gender Studies. They include African urbanisms, discourse analysis, LGBT+ and gender issues, urban poverty reduction, informal trading, gated communities and urban governance. She is passionate about research that has impacts both within and beyond academia. At SA&CP she is the project manager for the AFD-funded Corridors of Freedom project, in which she is working with a team of researchers to aid the City of Johannesburg in their ambitious plan to ‘restitch’ Johannesburg, level apartheid spatial inequality and forge a more public-transport-oriented city. Before joining SA&CP, Alli worked in consulting and the NGO sector. She received a Commonwealth Scholarship through the Canon Collins Trust in 2014 to study for her Masters at LSE and she was a member of the South Africa Washington International Programme in 2012. She was recognised by the Mail & Guardian as one of South Africa’s ‘Top 200 Young South Africans’ in 2016.

Socio-Spatial Transformation Seminar Series: TOD in Cape Town

Studio 3 ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The next seminar in the ACC’s Socio-Spatial Transformation Seminar Series will take a closer look at the City of Cape Town’s plans for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD).

Annual PhD Seminar Series: Understanding Capitalism in Unequal Geographies

Seminar Room 1, EGS Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town University of Cape Town, Cape Town , Western Cape, South Africa

The third iteration of the annual PhD seminar series presented by ACC's Notations on Theories of Radical Urban Change project (NOTRUC), lead by Henrik Ernstson and Edgar Pieterse, on Democratic Practices focuses on "Understanding Capitalis in Unequal Geographies". The seminar series is based on reading political philosophy with and against southern urbanism. It seeks to make an intervention in how we think about the emergent city and urbanization of the global south; to seek out and make explicit its emancipatory potential, which often gets hidden or silenced, either by overly dogmatic “Northern” frameworks, “developmentalist” techno-managerial approaches; or a sense of defeat that an emancipatory horizon is not any longer possible.In 2017 the series focuses on capitalism and its wider structuration of cities, bodies and subjectivities. It seeks to understand how classic Marxist critique and its extension into intersectional analysis can be thought with and against southern/postcolonial urban geographies to make visible contemporary struggles against exploitation.Key questions:  How does capitalism function in and through its differences across time, space, and social location? How does capitalism interact with and structure gender, race, and sexuality? How does this play out, manifest and structure urban spaces and extended geographies of the south? What spaces, discourses and collectivities can a critique of capitalism help to make visible as locations to struggle against interconnected assemblages and dispositifs of oppression? Lecturers:Dr. Andrés Henao Castro, University of Massachusetts, Boston Dr. Ashley Bohrer, Hamilton College, New York City Dr. Henrik Ernstson, KTH and University of Cape Town Read more here 

Free

ACC NOTRUC Seminar Series: Reflection is Part of Rehabilitation: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation

African Centre for Cities UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

The third seminar in the annual ACC NOTRUC Seminar Series is presented by Koni Benson on Reflection is Part of Rehabilitation: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation at 15:00 in Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town. ABSTRACT In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes: “To accept one’s past- one’s history- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is, learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” This paper looks at the dynamics of invention and uses of history in the politics of a land occupation in Tafelsig, Mitchell’s Plain, where, in May 2011, over 5000 backyard shack dwellers occupied land to set up shacks on an empty field adjacent to the Kaptiensklip train station.  From an initial 5,000 people the group dwindled to about 30 families who continued to defend their right to erect structures under which to sleep. The city offered them temporary relocation to Blikkiesdorp, a dumping ground, miles away from their families and support networks. What ensued was a round of court cases and appeals and, eventual eviction. What started as a document to record the brutality of the Anti-Land Invasion Unit became a co-authored book, Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation written by Faeza Meyer and Koni Benson.   The quote in the title of this paper comes from this book which creatively tracked 545 days of occupation, and raises questions about housing struggles, activism, situated solidarity, racism, writing, and feminist collaborative methodologies of approaching African history.  The paper today will present a draft of a new introduction to the book, with the aim of sparking a conversation about Baldwin’s proposition of not inventing but of reflecting and using hard ‘truths’ about the past in the present, in this case, building and engaging struggles against ongoing segregation and criminalization of landlessness in Cape Town.   More on the full seminar series here. More on the NOTRUC programme here.