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Falling Walls Conference: How Urban Studies Envision the New Era of the Metropolis

Room 3.33, Centlivres Building, Upper Campus, UCT Berlin , Germany

African Centre for Cities Director Prof Edgar Pieterse will be one of the speakers at the Falling Walls Conference, 8 to 9 November 2017, Berlin. His talk is entitled How Urban Studies Envision the New Era of the Metropolis.   The Falling Walls Conference is an annual global gathering of forward thinking individuals from 80 countries organised by the Falling Walls Foundation. Each year on 9 November – the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – 20 of the world’s leading scientists are invited to Berlin to present their current breakthrough research. The aim of the Conference is to: identify trends, opportunities and solutions for global challenges and discover international breakthrough research. connect outstanding researchers from different disciplines and support the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas internationally. build bridges between business, politics, academia and the arts. promote the latest scientific findings among a broader audience. inspire people to break down walls in science and society. In 15-minute-talks, researchers from all disciplines present their work in front of 700 international guests. During the breaks, the Falling Walls Forum becomes the place for high-level Q&A where the audience can ask questions and engage in discussions. A new peer-learning platform, Falling Walls Connect, gives the audience the opportunity to contribute their knowledge and expertise to fellow participants. The Conference is broadcasted online via free livestream. All presentations are available in the Falling Walls Library. Get the full programme here. 

Soft Infrastructure: Recalibrating Aesthetics, Economies, And Urban Epistemologies

Humanities Graduate Centre Seminar Room, South West Engineering Building, East Campus, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

The African Academy for Urban Diversity; a joint initiative of the African Centre for Migration & Society; the African Centre for Cities; and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity invites you to a special public lecture by Dr Mpho Matsipa (Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). A city like Johannesburg offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. By exploring black cultural practices, like braiding, as both ontology and epistemology, the lecture will explore how such practices recalibrate local economies, infrastructures, and aesthetic codes, and thus might co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city and its architecture. However, can such soft infrastructures sufficiently disrupt the grand narrative of African cities in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting colonial and colonizing cartographies of African urban environment? Biography Dr Mpho Matsipa is a researcher at the Wits City Institute. After completing her professional degree in Architecture at the University of Cape Town, with a distinction in design, Mpho was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and later, a Carnegie Grant as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her PhD in Architecture, from the University of California, Berkeley, is titled The Order of Appearances explored the entangled geographies of urban informality, urban redevelopment and the politics of race, gender and aesthetics in Johannesburg’s inner city. Mpho has written critical essays and reviews on public art, culture and space for Art South Africa, the Architectural Review and Thesis 11 (forthcoming). Mpho has worked as an architect and she has been shortlisted in two prestigious national design competitions. She has curated several exhibitions, including of the South Africa Pavilion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2008).She has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture and associate research scholar at Columbia GSAPP and Curator of Studio-X Johannesburg –  an experimental public platform on architecture and the city sponsored by Columbia University. She is currently co-curating a pan-African architecture exhibition at the Architecture Museum in Munich titled “African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp Exhibition”, that will open in April 2018. For more information and to RSVP: info@migration.org.za Date:    Thursday 9 November 2017 Time:    16:00 to 17:30 Venue:  Humanities Graduate Centre Seminar Room, South West Engineering Building, East Campus, University of the Witwatersrand

Mistra Urban Futures Annual International Conference 2017

Imperial Hotel Kisumu Kisumu, Kenya

Mistra Urban Futures Annual International Conference takes place from 13 to 15 November 2017 in Kisumu, Kenya under the banner "Realising Just Cities - Learning Through Comparison". The rapidly growing number of people moving into cities all over the world also present a challenge of unprecedented size. It is crucial to find ways to make urbanisation a source for wealth, health and sustainability – which is shared. Mistra Urban Futures arranges yearly a conference about Realising Just Cities. Keynote speakers include: Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, Visiting Researcher at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a Global Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington DC. Member of Mistra Urban Futures Board. Edgar Pieterse, South African Research Chair in Urban Policy & Director of African Centre for Cities. For more information click here.

Science and Cocktails: Can We Move Beyond the Divided City?

The Orbit Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Is urban segregation simply a fact of contemporary life? Are the shopping mall and gated community to blame for new forms of urban division? What role does the real estate market play in reproducing urban patterns? Is middle-class suburbia deracializing or not? Does public investment in housing and social amenities worsen or improve urban divides? Do BRT systems help or hinder urban integration? Who, if anyone, can make a difference in altering spacial patterns of the city? It is arguable that South African cities are more divided today compared to 1994. How can this be? Why are we seemingly unable to shift the contours of division and live differently? Edgar Pieterse will review the drivers of contemporary urban divides and explore the reasons why policy after policy since 1994 say the “right” things but achieve the opposite outcome. He will place his discussion in the context of the nature of both public and private investments into South African cities and illustrate the talk with data and policy experiments in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Pieterse will conclude by putting forward what some of the preconditions for genuine urban transformation might be. Date: 28 November 2018 Time: Doors open at 18:30, no admittance after 20:00. Venue: The Orbit, Braamfontein, Johannesburg Entrance to the event: R20. No registration is necessary but guests are strongly encouraged to arrive early. Dinner is served from 18:00. Guests wishing to have dinner before the event should book in advance with The Orbit and arrive by 18:30. (Last orders for dinner at 19:15 to make it to the event). Directions to the venue.

R20

ACC NOTRUC Seminar Series: Producing water scarcity in São Paulo, Brazil: The 2014 Water Crisis and the Binding Politics of Infrastructure

Studio 1 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

The last instalment of the annual ACC NOTRUC Seminar Series is presented by Dr Nate Millington on Producing water scarcity in São Paulo, Brazil: The 2014 Water Crisis and the Binding  Politics of Infrastructure at 15:00 in Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town. ABSTRACT In 2014, political intransigence combined with a severe drought to push São Paulo, Brazil, to the edge of a profound water crisis. In this paper, I consider the response to the crisis on behalf of the state government, focusing on both the way that the crisis was narrated as well as responded to. I consider the suite of actions taken to cope with scarcity, focusing specifically on the state’s employment of pressure reductions in the water pipes as opposed to a formal rationing. I argue that despite the state government’s claims that only a small minority was going without water, the reality was that residents of the urban periphery were facing consistent water shortages. I argue that these shortages are representative of a form of infrastructural politics, in which the seemingly most technically viable solutions to the crisis exacerbated inequality due to the inequity that is built into the city’s hydrological infrastructure itself. I conclude by thinking of the city’s crisis as indicative of the changing nature of daily life in contemporary cities in the wake of climate change at both the local and global scale. More on the full seminar series here. More on the NOTRUC programme here.

Friction in the Creative City: The Case of Bandung, Indonesia

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Science, Upper Campus, UCT,, Cape Town, South Africa

Join the African Centre for Cities for a Brownbag session on 29 January 2018 from 12:45 to 14:00 by Christiaan De Beukelaer on "Friction in the Creative City: The Case of Bandung, Indonesia" hosted in Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town. Since the foundation of the Bandung Creative City Forum (BCCF) in 2008, the city of Bandung, capital of West Java has started referring to itself as an ‘emerging creative city’. Because of the significant role BCCF, a civil society organisation, played in developing this strategy, Bandung relied far less on top-down, consultant-driven strategies than most ‘creative cities’. While their largely bottom-up engagement with the ‘creative city script’ was well-received, the practical execution of their ideas poses challenges in terms of negotiating priorities and strategies. The implementation became more complex and complicated when Ridwan Kamil, BCCF’s first director, was elected Mayor in 2013. The ensuing tensions concealed two important questions: What is the creative city? How to execute creative city strategies? Rather than engaging with these unspoken questions, Bandung has become a creative city of many definitions and strategies, while maintaining its singular brand. I explain the ensuing ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005) in two overlapping ways. First, I contrast two notions of the creative city by building on the work of geographer Oli Mould. His book Urban Subversion and the Creative City distinguishes the uppercase ‘Creative City’ (the mainstream understanding of the term) – and the lowercase ‘creative city’ (the more grounded, subversive understanding of the term). Second, I build on the work of geographer Jamie Peck, who critiques the global flow of ‘policy-fixes’ as being prone to becoming ‘fast policy’ (often captured in buzzwords), which inevitably collides with ‘slow policy’ of existing bureaucracies and power structures.   More on the speaker and respondent: Christiaan De Beukelaer is a Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the University of Melbourne. He obtained a PhD from the University of Leeds and holds degrees in development studies (MSc, Leuven), cultural studies (MA, Leuven), and musicology (BA, Amsterdam). He won the 2012 Cultural Policy Research Award, which resulted in the book Developing Cultural Industries: Learning From the Palimpsest of Practice (European Cultural Foundation, 2015). He co-edited the book Globalization, Culture, and development: The UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, with Miikka Pyykkönen and JP Singh), and a special issue on Cultural Policy for Sustainable Development for the International Journal of Cultural Policy (2017, 23(2), with Anita Kangas and Nancy Duxbury). He is now working on the book Global Cultural Economy (co-authored with Kim-Marie Spence, forthcoming with Routledge). Laura Nkula-Wenz is an urban geographer with a keen interest in postcolonial urban theory, African urbanism and culture. Her research focuses on the transformation of urban governance and the construction of local political agency, as well as the diverse relationships between cultural production and urban change. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Münster/Germany, where she also completed a degree in Human Geography, Communication Studies and Political Science. Laura recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pôle de recherche pour l'organisation et la diffusion de l'information géographique (Prodig) in Paris and currently works on the Critical Urbanism Masters at the African Centre for Cities (UCT, in cooperation with the University of Basel).

African Centre for Cities International Urban Conference 2018

University of Cape Town Upper Campus, Cape Town , Western Cape, South Africa

To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the establishment of the African Centre for Cities, we are hosting the ACC International Urban Conference from 1 to 3 February 2018, at the University of Cape Town.

One Table Two Elephants

Neville Alexander Lecture Theatre 1A Upper Campus, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Western Cape, South Africa

Please join us for the screening of the film ONE TABLE TWO ELEPHANTS (84 minutes, work in progress) at the ACC International Urban Conference 2018 in Cape Town. WHEN: Friday 2 Feb 2018, 13:00-15:00, and Saturday 3 Feb 2018, 13:00-15:00 WHERE: Neville Alexander Lecture Theatre 1A, Upper Campus, UCT (venue lies between the New Lecture Theatre and Leslie Social Science building) The film is based on work in Cape Town by Jacob von Heland and ACC-based researcher Henrik Ernstson. These two screenings have been especially organised for the ACC IUC 2018 delegates and UCT film students. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A with Henrik Ernstson. RSVP not needed. Synopsis ONE TABLE TWO ELEPHANTS is a film about bushmen bboys, a flower kingdom and the ghost of a princess. Entering the city through it's plants and wetlands, the many-layered, painful and liberating history of the city emerges as we see how biologists, hip hoppers, and wetland activists each searches for ways to craft symbols of unity and cohesion. But this is a fraught and difficult task. Perhaps not even desirable. Plants, aliens, memories and ghosts keep troubling efforts of weaving stories about this place called Cape Town. Situated and grounded in lived experiences across a range of groups, this film follows different ways of knowing and tries to be a vehicle toward difficult yet urgently needed conversations about how race, nature and the city are intertwined in our postcolonial world where history is ever present in subtle and direct ways. Based on years of research in Cape Town, this ‘cinematic ethnography’ is directed towards a wider audience, from the general public to students and scholars as it brings texture to understand a city like Cape Town, while providing ample possibilities to translate what is happening “there” to conversations about your own city and surroundings. Created by: Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. Photography (DOP): Johan von Reybekiel. Sound: Jonathan Chiles. Production coordination: Jessica Rattle and Nceba Mangesi.

ACC BROWNBAG Future Foreshore: are affordable housing and lowered freeways possible?

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

Join ACC on Thursday, 8 March at 13:00 for the first in a series of Brownbag seminars. The hot topic of discussion is the winning bid for the redevelopment of the Foreshore Freeway Precinct, Cape Town. SPEAKERS Lisa Kane Kane is a Honorary Research Associate with the Centre for Transport Studies at UCT and co-founder and board member of Open Streets, Cape Town. Her PhD thesis considered the history and politics of engineering of the Foreshore freeway projects from its initiation to the 1980s, and how that period has informed current thinking around road engineering in South Africa. Rob McGaffin McGaffin is a town planner and land economist.  He has worked as town planner with the City of Cape Town and the Gauteng Department of Economic Development, and in property finance at several financial institutions. He was a Mistra Urban Futures Researcher with the ACC. He lectures in the Department of Construction Economics and Management at the University of Cape Town and is a founding member of the UCT - Nedbank Urban Real Estate Research Unit. CHAIR Vanessa Watson WHEN: Thursday, 8 March 2018 TIME: 13:00 to 14:30 VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town

ACC Brown Bag: Taken for a Ride by Matteo Rizzo

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Science, Upper Campus, UCT,, Cape Town, South Africa

Join ACC on Tuesday, 17 April at 13:00 in Studio 3 in the Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building on Upper Campus for the second talk in a series of Brown-bag seminars. Matteo Rizzo will be discussing themes emerging from his latest book Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis.  How does public transport work in an African city under neoliberalism? Who has the power to influence its changing shape over time? What does it mean to be a precarious and informal worker in the private minibuses that provide such transport in Dar es Salaam? These are some of the main questions that inform Rizzo's in-depth case study of Dar es Salaam’s public transport system over more than forty years. According to the author Taken for a Ride "is an interdisciplinary political economy of public transport, exposing the limitations of market fundamentalist and postcolonial approaches to the study of economic informality, the urban experience in developing countries, and their failure to locate the agency of the urban poor within their economic and political structures. It is both a contribution to and a call for the contextualized study of neoliberalism." Matteo Rizzo is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. Matteo has degrees in Political Sciences from "Orientale"(Naples, Italy)  and Development Studies and History from SOAS (MSc and PhD), where he also completed an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship. Matteo has taught at the LSE, at the African Studies Centre in Oxford and in Cambridge, where he was a Smuts Research Fellow in African Studies at the Centre of African Studies. Matteo is a member of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy and works on public transport for the International Transport Workers Federation. Taken for a Ride will be available for purchase at the Brown-bag session for a special price at only R250. Please bring along cash if you wish to purchase the book.