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Cape Town’s new Development Charges Policy for Engineering Services

Davies Reading Room Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The City of Cape Town has recently approved a new Development Charges Policy for Engineering Services.  This policy pins down some vexing questions.   When land use intensifies the municipality has to increase its infrastructure networks to accommodate the increased demand for services.  There is always a cost to the city, but who should cover that cost: the developer or the body of ratepayers as a whole?  How should the municipality calculate that amount?  Should socially beneficial land use changes, like low-income housing have to pay the same as land use changes that are commercially driven?  Should there be a different method of calculating this amount for small or emerging businesses as opposed to big businesses?  Why can’t the costs of extending the infrastructure networks be covered through monthly tariffs for the different services? Nick Graham and Stephen Berrisford have been part of the professional team, headed by AECOM, drafting the new policy for the City of Cape Town.  They are also working on the National Treasury’s process to develop national law and policy on the subject.  They will share their experiences at the ACC’s Brown Bag session and explain the rationale behind the new policy as well as identify some of the implications for the city of the new approach. Nick Graham is a Director at PDG, responsible for the Urban Systems Practice Area. He is an urban geographer and registered professional engineer with Masters degrees in civil engineering, environmental policy and urban geography. Stephen Berrisford is an independent consultant specialising in the legal and policy frameworks governing urban land and development. He is trained as a lawyer and urban planner, with degrees from the Universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. He works primarily in southern and eastern Africa as well as on global initiatives for agencies such as UN-Habitat, Cities Alliance and the World Bank. Stephen is an adjunct associate professor at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was the governance coordinator for the Urban Land Markets Programme Southern Africa (Urban LandMark), a UK aid-funded think tank focused on making urban land markets in southern Africa work better for the poor. Image credit: Barry Christianson

In the skin of the city: the street and its doubles

Davies Reading Room Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

In this presentation, Anthropologist António Tomás (ACC's the 2014 Ray Pahl Fellow) will undertake to provide a layered description of the city of Luanda by engaging with a number of ethnographic vignettes based on his wanderings through the city. "Such a methodology has two sources" says Tomás. "First, I draw on the modernist figure of the flâneur as it was proposed by Charles Baudelaire and theorized by Walter Benjamin. Second, I also draw on the methods for wandering in the city (later on theorized by de Certeau) that was called psycho-geography by the situationists. I use this methodology in reference to the situationists who developed it as a way to ‘deconstruct' Le Corbusian’s modernist ambitions in transforming Paris." This exercise allows Tomás to provide a description not only of the surface of the city (or the city from the surface), but to also find a vantage point to “deconstruct” Luanda's colonial and postcolonial imaginaries. By annalyzing the prevailing practices of anonymous Luandans who give names to streets that disavowal their official designations, he gains a further understanding of the surface of the city that goes beyond its own (modernist) visibility. About the author António Tomás received his doctoral degree in Anthropology from Columbia University, New York. He is the author of a study on the African nationalist Amílcar Cabral titled O Fazedor de Utopias: Uma Biografia de Amílcar (The Maker of Utopias: A Biography of Amilcar Cabral (Lisbon ; Praia , Tinta da China; Spleen, 2007; 2008).  Tomás is the 2014 Ray Pahl Fellow at the African Centre for Cities, working on a book called In the skin of the city: Luanda, or the dialectics of spatial transformation.

Streets can be more than they are: Exploring Open Streets

Davies Reading Room Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

With origins in Bogota Colombia in the mid 1970s, “Open Streets” has become a global movement with increased growth in the past five years.

Complicit masculinity on the African urban periphery

Davies Reading Room Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

In her talk titled "Entrepreneurs and consumers: complicit masculinity on the African urban periphery", Dr Jordanna Matlon will explore the relationship between masculinity and work in the double context of protracted economic and political crisis in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. She draws on participant observation fieldwork and interviews with men in Abidjan’s informal sector from 2008 to 2009, and is supplemented by visual data. Ivoirian men who engage in informal activities overwhelmingly claim that they cannot be viable marriage partners, and are thus incapable of achieving adult masculinity. "I examine two groups of men: political propagandists (orators) and mobile street vendors, to understand how men affirm themselves in the absence of steady and dignifying work", she says. Both groups rejected the wage-earning working ideal as “Francophone” and asserted alternative modalities of economic participation as “Anglophone” men: entrepreneurs or consumers. Orators used ties to President Laurent Gbagbo’s political regime to secure livelihoods and pursue entrepreneurial identities. Vendors bypassed the state and asserted consumerist models of black masculinity from across the African diaspora. I employ “complicit masculinity” to examine how a relationship to capital mediates masculine identity. In doing so I demonstrate how men’s desires to counter gendered socioeconomic exclusion generate consent toneoliberal capitalism. About the speaker Jordanna Matlon is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2012. She uses participant observation, interviews and visual analysis to study the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s informal economy.  More generally, she is interested in questions of race and belonging in Africa and the African diaspora, and the ways “blackness” as a signifier – and in its intersection with gender, class, and national identity – illuminates understandings of popular culture, postcoloniality and neoliberalism in the contemporary city. Jordanna's work has appeared in Antipode, Contexts, Ethnography and Poetics, among other places, and she is currently preparing her book manuscript, tentatively titled “I will be VIP!”: Masculinity, Modernity and Crisis on the Neoliberal Periphery.   Video abstract: http://antipodefoundation.org/2014/02/17/narratives-of-modernity-masculinity-and-citizenship/

Wake up, this is Joburg!!!

Davies Reading Room Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

WAKE UP, THIS IS JOBURG: ORDINARY TO OUTRAGEOUS ETHNOGRAPHIES OF URBAN LIFE, is a series of ten photobooks by Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis about the city we hate to love but do anyway. Wake up, this is Joburg tells the stories of ten ordinary, interesting, odd or outrageous denizens of the city of Johannesburg. The series is published by Fourthwall Books (www.fourthwallbooks.com or www.facebook.com/fourthwallbooks). Note:  A limited number of the four titles will be available for sale at the Brown Bag at R150 each, cash only. Tanya Zack will talk to some of the stories of intersections of particular lives, livelihoods and spaces that make up the first four titles in this series. These are: Skop: S’kop  takes readers into a disused parking garage in the inner city, where cow heads are being chopped. It explores the informal business of chopping cow heads the stories of ‘the butchers and traders and entrepreneurs who have made this business uniquely theirs, speak of the hardships of their work in the meat trade and the occasional rewards of making it on their own. Zola: Under the Mooi Street off-ramp is an overflow rank for taxis waiting between peak hours to ferry people between the inner city and Zola, Soweto. Here entrepreneurs cater all day to the needs of drivers from an array of mobile and stationary stalls, selling food and snacks, socks, window wipers, mobile phone attachments and bumper stickers with messages like ‘You also drive like shit so fuck off’. Tony Dreams in Yellow and Blue: In the nondescript working class suburb of Turffontein, which has always hosted migrants, a restless outsider artist is at work transforming his home into a veritable castle of lights, turrets, murals, manikins and stairways. He is an obsessive collector of ‘waste’, but also an entrepreneur whose property is home to 17 rent-paying households. Inside Out: This is a story of low-end globalisation—of food and other commodities traded and retailed informally across South Africa’s borders by people using the same principles as multinationals, but with no formal credit or banking facilities.   Tanya Zack is a town planner. Her major areas of focus have been in housing research and policy development, community participation and evaluation of large scale development projects. She has worked within local government and as a private consultant, both on policy work and in practical projects. She has a close relationship to Wits University where she obtained a PhD for work on critical pragmatism in planning. Tanya grew up in the inner city suburbs of Johannesburg.Her current interest is in the narratives of entrepreneurs working in the Johannesburg CBD. Image credit: Mark Lewis

Radical Incrementalism & Theories/Practices of Emancipatory Change

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

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.

Density Syndicate Conference

City Hall Darling Street, Cape Town, South Africa

        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

Kapuscinski Development Lecture: Aromar Revi

Lecture Hall 3B, New Snape Building University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

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"               

AAPS 2014 Conference

Lagoon Beach Hotel Lagoon Gate Drive, Milnerton, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

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.

Sanitation politics in Mumbai and Cape Town

Davies Reading Room Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

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.