This workshop examines ideas of radical incrementalism across our towns and cities. It seeks to explore theories and practices that can support emancipatory change across urban regions through the power of urban dwellers to challenge poverty, oppression and unjust environments.
The Density Syndicate Think Tank invites you to participate in the presentation of a seven-month project by three multi-disciplinary teams of South African and Dutch designers, city officials and researchers looking at the future of three urban sites in Cape Town. As part of the City Desired Exhibition, project contributors, key City officials and a select number of stakeholders will convene on 3 November 2014 at the City Hall to review and discuss findings. Twenty years after democracy, South African cities remain stubbornly divided, fragmented, inconvenient for the poor and uninspiring. This has manifested in cities made up of a patchwork of disconnected business districts, wealthy neighbourhoods, gated communities and poor townships. In the case of Cape Town, the affluent City Bowl and southern and northern suburbs stand in contrast to large swathes of township and informal areas. Despite considerable deracialisation of lower middle-class suburbs, the townships and informal areas remain profoundly mono-functional, racially homogenous and most vulnerable to a multiplicity of risks. It is uncontested that the current situation is socially, economically and ecologically unsustainable, yet, despite the availability of urban design expertise and policy commitment to transformation, we have very few compelling examples of how we can imagine and build our city differently. In order to explore how to address these challenges, ACC and INTI have worked with the City of Cape Town on a series of three speculative studios. By using the combined design intelligence of Dutch and South African specialists, The Density Syndicate has enabled the exploration of innovative, alternative strategies for the future of Cape Town. The symposium will shed light on the proposed scenarios and will invite key stakeholders from local government, academia and mass media to provide feedback on their appropriateness, viability and desirability. The format provides a platform for authors to exhibit the proposal and for key ‘respondents’ to immediately interrogate proposals and raise questions for debate. Animated deliberations are expected to set the tone for an enlightening symposium. The sites studied by the Density Syndicate are the following: LOTUS PARK Lotus Park is a small informal settlement situated between the Khayelitsha-Cape Town train line and the Lotus River Canal. Lotus Park is adjacent to western forecourt of the Nyanga Junction station. The Lotus Park team focused on: maintaining existing density to avoid any relocation; consider how best to optimise mixed use (economic, social and cultural) planning; taking the Lotus River into account in advancing sustainability planning principles. MAITLAND Voortrekker Road stretches around 15km from Woodstock in central Cape Town, through Maitland, Goodwood, and Parow to Bellville. It is a busy transport corridor between Bellville and the CBD and is lined with a range of small businesses and light industry. Of particular interest to this project is the Maitland stretch of the corridor. There is a significant unrecognised African immigrant population living and running small businesses in the area and offers another kind of opportunity for exploring density and diversity in Cape Town. In particular, it offers an opportunity to explore a different model of urban regeneration to what has unfolded in the Woodstock and Salt River stretches, anchored by creative industries and high-end retail and fine dining. TRUP-PLUS + GREENFIELDS STRIP The TRUP-plus+ site is a greenfield strip that includes the Two Rivers Urban Park and the Athlone Power Station. Situated halfway between the airport and the Cape Town CBD, the decommissioned Athlone Power Station site is uniquely located between three very different suburbs: Pinelands, a predominantly middle class ‘white’ suburb; Athlone, a predominantly ‘coloured’ neighbourhood’; and Langa, a largely poor ‘black’ area. The TRUP-plus+ offers a unique opportunity of experimenting with possibilities of social integration at the nexus of these suburbs. The Density Syndicate held two studios: one in May and one in July 2014. Participants include representatives from: African Centre for Cities (SA); Cape Town Partnership (SA); City of Cape Town Spatial Planning & Urban Design (SA); Community Organisation Resource Centre (SA); dhk urban (SA); Doepel Strijkers (NL); H+N+S Landscape Architects (NL); International New Town Institute (NL); Jakupa architects + urban designers (SA); Land+Civilization Compositions (NL); Provincial Department of Human Settlements (SA); Sustainability Institute (SA); Urban Water Management Research Unit (SA); Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (SA); Witteveen+Bos (NL); Uberbau (GER); NL Architects (NL). Conference Programme will be uploaded soon. Watch this space! The Density Syndicate is a think-tank initiative by the African Centre for Cities (ACC), International New Town Institute (INTI), and in collaboration with the City of Cape Town and Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU). It has been made possible by the City of Cape Town, the Dutch Creative Industries Fund, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Consulate General, Cape Town. It is also a programmatic component for NL@WDC2014, an initiative of the Netherlands Consulate-General in Cape Town. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @ through #DensitySyndicate or #WDC234
Putting the Urban at the Heart of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals The Millennium Development Goals are expiring and need to be replaced with a new set of globally applicable and locally implementable Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. Climate Change negotiations are stalled and need a more determined and pragmatic approach if run-away impacts are to be avoided. It is clear that a different economic, social and human development path must be established to ensure greater sustainability and inclusion of all citizens into productive economic life and well-being. Cities and regions across the world provide the opportunity to do this. Africa and Asia are at the centre of the urban, social and economic transitions that the world will witness over the next two decades. It is important that we see political imaginations and leadership from these geographies that address local, regional and global themes. The lecture will interest policy makers, activists, business leaders, journalists and academics. About the speaker: Aromar Revi is Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) India’s prospective independent national University for Research & Innovation addressing its challenges of urbanisation. He has been a senior advisor to various ministries of the Government of India, and has consulted for a wide range of UN, multilateral, bilateral development and private sector institutions. He is a member of the Leadership Council of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), co-chair of its urban thematic group, and a Fellow of the India China Institute at the New School, New York. A global expert on sustainable urban development, he has co-led a successful international campaign for an urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) as part of the UN’s post-2015 development agenda, which brought the major global urban institutions and over 200 cities and institutions together. He has led over 100 major research, consulting and implementation assignments in India and abroad. He has helped structure, design and review development investments in excess of $8 billion, including housing and urban development plans for two-thirds of India’s 29 states in the 1990s. Besides being part of multiple international projects in 6 countries, he has worked on 3 of the world’s 10 largest cities, and with communities across 25 Indian states. A leading expert on Global Environmental Change especially on Climate Change adaptation and mitigation, he is one of the Coordinating Lead Authors for the Urban Areas section of the IPCC 5th Assessment report (2014), and co-PI of an international Climate Adaptation research programme than spans India and Africa. He is one of South Asia’s leading disaster mitigation and management experts and has led emergency teams to assess, plan and execute recovery and rehabilitation programmes for 10 major earthquake, cyclone, surge and flood events affecting over 5 million people, and serves on the Advisory Board of the UNISDR Scientific & Technical Advisory Group and its Global Assessment of Risk. The Kapuscinski Development Lectures are a series of high-level lectures focused on development-related issues organized jointly by the United Nations Development Programme, the European Community and leading universities and think-tanks. There have been over 50 lectures by top development thinkers since 2009. The lectures honour Ryszard Kapuscinski, the celebrated Polish writer and journalist who covered developing countries. Past lectures have been delivered by, among others, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ashraf Ghani, Jagdish Bhagwati, Helen Clark, Jan Pronk, Jeffrey Sachs, José Antonio Ocampo, Kamal Dervis, Mark Malloch-Brown, Michelle Bachelet and Paul Collier. See: http://kapuscinskilectures.eu The Kapuscinski Development Lecture in Cape Town is a joint initiative of the European Commission, the United Nations Development Programme, the African Centre for Cities, and the University of Cape Town. The project is funded by the European Commission. Please take your seats from 5:45 as the lecture is being streamed live and will start at 6:00 promptly. RSVP maryam.waglay@uct.ac.za using subject line "Kapuscinski Development Lecture"
The Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS) is hosting its fourth all-schools conference in 2014. The conference theme is ‘African Urban Planning and the Global South: Pedagogy, Research, Practice’. The AAPS 2014 Conference will address the central themes and problems of African urbanization. It will focus on developing our understanding of these issues, and how planning curricula can respond to them. While the conference is focused on sub-Saharan Africa, the discussion will be extended to other contexts in the global South. AAPS 2014 will feature keynote presentations from a number of international experts on cities and urbanization in Africa and the global South, including Edgar Pieterse (African Centre for Cities), Oren Yiftachel (Ben-Gurion University) and Colin MacFarlane (Durham University). The conference is aimed at urban planning educators, researchers and practitioners seeking to enhance their knowledge of the contemporary issues and debates surrounding African and Southern cities and urbanization. It will also appeal to other built environment professionals, as well as academics in related disciplines with an interest in urban issues. This is the first time that the AAPS conference will be open to wider attendance. AAPS welcomes submissions from those outside Africa working on urban issues in the global South.
In this talk, Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Silver will reflect on their past work in Mumbai and their new research on the politicisation of sanitation in Cape Town, with particular reference to the ‘poo protests’. Colin will reflect on his work in the politics of sanitation in Mumbai's informal settlements. He will draw out some key processes through which sanitation is organised in Mumbai, and the politics around that, as well highlighting some of the theoretical challenges the research presented for thinking about infrastructure and other strands of urban theory. He will also briefly reflect on emerging work on the politics of sanitation in Cape Town. Their aim is to deepen understanding of how sanitation is politicised in cities, and to contribute to debate and ongoing work on sanitation politics in Cape Town. The objectives are to: examine why and how the ‘poo protests’ emerged in Cape Town; investigate why they took the form that they did; and contextualise the protests in the wider debates about service delivery, urban politics, and social justice in Cape Town. They will conduct the research through interviews with a range of relevant actors including residents, civil society groups, municipal officials, academics and political parties. The research builds on McFarlane’s work in India on the politics of urban sanitation, and Silver’s work on the politics of urban infrastructure in South Africa. These previous research projects examined often ignored everyday experiences of sanitation and infrastructure and used the findings in discussions with municipal officials and civil society groups. Colin McFarlane is an urban geographer whose work focusses on the experience and politics of informal neighbourhoods. This has involved research into the relations between informality, infrastructure and knowledge in urban India and elsewhere. A key part of this has been a focus on the experience and politics of sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, which was part of an Economic and Social Research Council ethnographic project on the everyday cultures and contested politics of sanitation and water in two informal settlements. His current work examines the politicisation of informal neighbourhoods in comparative perspective, including African and South Asian cities.
THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE Speakers: Dr. Martín Ávila (Design for Sustainable Development at Konstfack Art and Design Institute in Stockholm) and Dr. Henrik Ernstson (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town & KTH Environmental Humanities, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm). Based in the emergent practices around speculative design, the seminar will depart from Dr. Martín Ávila’s thesis “Devices” that explored the notion of hospitality and hostility in design ecologies, i.e. the assemblages between human and non-human agents that have emergent properties which we cannot fully control. This will lead into a discussion of the present project “Tactical Symbiotics” to which Dr. Henrik Ernstson is also contributing. The project Tactical Symbiotics searches for tactics that can reinforce the interdependence between cultural and biological variation and diversity through cooperation and/or togetherness between humans and non-humans. Move beyond the comfort zone: three speculative designs During 2014, Dr. Ávila has worked in Argentina and developed three sub-projects called Doomestics, Dispersal Machines, and Spices/Species. These projects are organized around questions such as: What if individual households would become parts of a decentred industry that capitalises on humans’ negative emotions to certain animals? What if agricultural machines would maintain the diversity of local ecosystems, helping birds and insects pollinate and fertilize, while producing food for humans? What if we could develop affection for insects and parasitoids that participate in the lifecycles of domestic plants? The projects are design-driven and uses speculative philosophy to make explicit alternative versions of the present or near future. By focusing on relations between humans and natural-artificial systems, the projects strives to de-centre anthropocentric viewpoints to become a platform from which to provoke a possibility to reimagine everyday life. Doomestics work with the tension established by the ecological need (if we are to maintain biological diversity) to cohabit with beings that are perceived as dangerous, undesirable or disgusting. Among them, spiders, scorpions and bats, to name a few. The project stages a series of products that make these beings visible and integrate them in different ways to everyday urban life. Dispersal Machines proposes interventions in agricultural systems that most humans have no direct relationship to. This project conceives machines that complement, supplement and/or maintain the activities of beings that participate in different natural processes such as the dispersion of seeds or pollen, or the secretion of nutrients to the soil. Spices/Species addresses an intimate level of human relationship with nonhuman beings. This concerns plants eaten as food or used for medicinal purposes and the ecosystem functions they perform through forms of symbioses with, for example, insects and parasitoids. The projects sketch and engage a diversity of responses that range from the intimate, to completely detached human-nonhuman relations. They still have in common that they affect the diversity of, and our relationship to, urban and agro-ecosystems. By confronting us with alternative realities—and alternative emotions, feelings and shivers—the project aims to open up new, and perhaps surprising ethical and moral dimensions to revalue and re-evaluate our present relations with non-humans. The project strives to formulate a different response to our planetary ecological crisis than those strategies that often sort under terms like “ecosystem services” or “natural resources”. One inspiration for the project can be found in how Michel De Certeau spoke of tactics as practices that evade strategies of power. The seminar will present underlying theory and practical design projects. ---- Martín Avila is a Researcher, and Senior Lecturer in Design for Sustainable Development at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. Martin obtained a PhD in design from HDK (School of Design and Crafts) in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has published his thesis entitled Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design (2012). The PhD work was awarded the 2012 prize for design research by the The Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education. Currently working (2013-2016) on a postdoctoral project financed by the Swedish Research Council: Symbiotic tactics. Design interventions for understanding and sensitizing to ecological complexity.
FREE ENTRY Post-apartheid Woodstock is one of the few areas where low-income residents have been able to maintain a foothold close to inner-city work opportunities and cultural amenities. However, the area’s historic cultural fabric and socio-economic diversity are increasingly threatened by soaring property prices that tend to make life for long-term tenants more and more unaffordable. In light of the adverse effects of this process known as ‘gentrification’, we would like you to participate in a dialogue, inspired by the international documentary “Not in my neighbourhood” by Kurt Orderson. This event will also be an opportunity to share stories and personal experiences, as well as to explore alternatives for more inclusive urban development in Woodstock and Cape Town at large. As part of this event we will have: Kurt Orderson – Filmmaker Mohammed Rahim (Rashied) – Woodstock Community Member (respondent to film preview) Jodi Allemeier -Moderator and facilitator
The ACC, SAMP, GCRO, IMRC, Eduardo Mondlane University, Queens University (Canada) and Wilfred Laurier University will be hosting a dissemination workshop at UCT to present the findings from a recent multi-country research project that examined the role of migrant entrepreneurs in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. This dissemination workshop will present the results of the IDRC-funded Growing Informal Cities project, which examined and profiled the role of migrant entrepreneurship in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The project was conducted jointly by the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP), the Gauteng City Regional Observatory (GCRO), Eduardo Mondlane University and the International Migration Research Centre (IMRC). Interviews and surveys were conducted in Cape Town, Harare, Johannesburg and Maputo with migrant entrepreneurs and cross border traders to better understand the linkages between migration, informality, inclusive growth and violence against migrant-owned businesses.
Running from the 10th to the 13th of February 2015 is the second project meeting for the Hungry Cities Partnership, an IDRC/SSHRC (Canada) partnership programme within the International Partnership for Sustainable Societies process. The project is a collaboration between Canadian Universities and universities and organisations in the global south. The University of Cape Town is the IDRC grant holder partnering with university partners in Kingston, Jamaica; Mexico City; Maputo and Nanjing, China. Other partners include the African Population and Health Research Centre in Nairobi and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai. The project aims to promote inclusive growth in the informal food economy of cities of the global south.
ACC is excited to host Prof Faranak Miraftab in the first of our academic Seminar Series for 2015. In this seminar 'Transnational Labor and Place Making in the Rustbelt US: Implications for Theorizing Place and Politics of Place in the Global Era', Prof Miraftab will be presenting from her forthcoming book (2016) entitled Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility. Abstract As a point observation I take an industrial town in rural rustbelt of the United States, and study the rapid social transformation of this space due to transnational labor recruitment by the meat processing industry. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Illinois, Mexico and Togo, I unfold the global production and social reproduction of migrant workers; how they make place globally and locally; and how they renegotiate inter-racial relations to make a former sundown town their new home in Illinois. Focusing on an often overlooked space in urban scholarship of globalization and taken-for-granted processes of global labor mobility, this study recovers voices and stories often hidden, made invisible or left out of the picture, to theorize place and place making relationally and stress the difference that place makes. Spanning urban studies, human geography, immigration and transitional studies, Making a Home in the Heartland makes important intervention in the theorization of urban, production and social reproduction of transnational migrants, politics of place and place making. Biography Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A native of Iran, she did her undergraduate studies at the Tehran University; while in political asylum she earned her Master's degree in Norway and later moved to the US and completed her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary ethnographic work crosses planning, geography and transnational studies and is empirically based in cities of Latin America, Africa and North America. As an urban scholar of globalization she is interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens' struggles to access dignified livelihood. She was named as a 2014-15 University Scholar, a prestigious award bestowed on faculty at the University of Illinois campuses. Her most recent and forthcoming publications include Cities of the Global South Reader (Miraftab and Kudva, Routledge 2014); Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World (eds. Miraftab, Wilson and Salo, Routledge April 2015), and Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility (Miraftab, Indiana University Press, January 2016). Her presentation will draw on the latter, a multi-sited ethnography concerning global production and social reproduction of migrant labor and how this makes for local development in the heartland US.
