Book launch: High Stakes, High Hopes
2024-10-29 17:30 - 19:30 (Africa/Johannesburg) | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town, South Africa
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

Launch: CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship in South Africa
2024-10-31 15:00 - 17:00 | Studio 5, Environmental & Geographical Science Bld, UCT Upper Campus
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
