Antonio Tomas is a research fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala. He received his doctoral degree in Anthropology from Columbia University, in New York.
Convener: Dr. M Brown-Luthango. 20 HEQF credits at level 9. Course outline: Sustainable livelihood, participation, governance, partnerships, development action plans, survey methods.
In the lexicon of American urban policy, community development is a prominent force. This talk, based on an essay co-authored with Stuart Schrader and Emma Shaw Crane, provides a global history of community development. It shows how, in the 1960s, an impending sense of urban crisis, what was perceived to be an "apartheid" of race and income, conjoined with American geopolitical concerns about wars of insurgency in the global South to produce a field of ideas and practices focused on pacification, participation, and poverty. Such programs reveal how the management of poverty is articulated with pacification and punitive regulation, not just at a moment of neoliberalism but also in liberal government and its struggles with racial difference. Community development though was more than a bureaucracy of poverty. Multiple mobilizations and movements sought to challenge racial subjugation. From Alinsky-style direct action to the anti-colonial imaginary of the Black Panther Party, poor people's movements also reshaped urban policy and community development in the turbulent American 1960s. (full paper is available on request, please email Pippin.Anderson@uct.ac.za) About the Speaker: Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair of Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship is concerned with global urbanism, territories of poverty, the politics of postcolonial development. Roy's most recent books include "Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development" and "Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global." ____________________________________________________________________ Ananya Roy's visit to South Africa is enabled by the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University, which invited her to deliver the bi-annual Rusty Bernstein Memorial Lecture on 16 May 2013
Photographer Jodi Bieber’s portrait of a member of the Dube Young Blood Shotokan Karate Club in Soweto introduces the focus of the fourth issue of Cityscapes: Soweto. Is it a viable model of what happens after informality? The question does not propose a simple answer. Soweto’s redevelopment is uneven. There are malls, loft developments, a theatre. More significantly, there are roads and basic services. Change is afoot, but not for all. Cityscapes, a magazine project of the African Centre for Cities edited by Sean O’Toole and Tau Tavengwa, offers an in-depth look at this emergent edge city on the southern periphery of Johannesburg. Also in the new fourth issue: a grouped series of reports, essays and interviews tracing a zigzag path connecting Tel Aviv to Naples to Berlin to Guangzhou, all cities where African migrants are a feature of the urban matrix. There is a speculative logic at work in this grouping. In her conversation with Gautam Bhan in this issue, urban theorist Ananya Roy conjectures, “what does it mean for us to think relationally about the north and south, recognising that these are connected geographies in all sorts of ways?”
The Social Justice Coalition (SJC) is a Khayelitsha based social movement and advocacy group campaigning for improved conditions in informal settlements and the promotion of more inclusive and equitable South African cities. Over the past four years the organisation has moved from responding to xenophobic violence to local government delivery. Along the way, it has learnt important lessons about how best to use people's power across historic divides to promote meaningful and sustainable urban change. Gavin Silber, a founding member and current Deputy General-Secretary of the SJC will reflect on the SJC's trajectory of activism, highlighting the methods, modes, and roles of activism in addressing urban development challenges in Cape Town. In particular, he will focus on the lessons which can be learned from the SJC's notable campaign for improved sanitation.
CC and Children's Institute hosts the Healthy Cities for Children Colloquium: Urbanisation, Urban Planning and Children's Wellbeing on January 20th and 21st.
Urban Informality and Migrant Entrepreneurship The ACC is hosting a workshop on Monday 10th and Tuesday 11th February with its partners in the IDRC-funded Growing Informal Cities Project. The venue is the UCT Graduate School of Business, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town. The workshop will feature presentations and discussion on the subject of “Urban Informality and Migrant Entrepreneurship in Southern African Cities” with a particular focus on Cape Town, Johannesburg, Maputo and Harare. Space is limited so please let us know as soon as possible.: RSVP to Saskia Greyling by end of day on Thursday 6 February to attend. Registration and refreshments are free to UCT staff and students. Attendees have to pay for their own meals. Download programme here
Jo Beall (Director of Education and Society at the British Council) and Sean Fox ( Lecturer in Urban Geography and Global Development at the University of Bristol will participate in a panel discussion to mark the launch of 'Africa's Urban Revolution', a new publication from Zed Books, edited by Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse of the African Centre for Cities. The volume "provides a comprehensive insight into the key issues - demographic, cultural, political, technical, environmental and economic - surrounding African urbanisation". Co-editor Susan Parnell as well as chapter authors Carole Rakodi, Tom Goodfellow, David Simon and Haley Leck will join us at the event. Specially discounted copies of the book will be available for purchase. Drinks and light refreshments will be served Registration is essential as space is limited
Professor Edgar Pieterse will offer a reflection upon the epistemological project that lives at the heart of the African Centre for Cities This reflection is centrally concerned with some fundamental questions: How best can meaningful knowledge about the urban be produced? What should we produce knowledge for? And what do these questions mean for the politics of knowledge production in the global South? Prof Ari Sitas, (Sociology, UCT) will act as discussant
