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Overcoming water scarcity for good?

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

Dr Suraya Scheba is an ACC research fellow who will be sharing a paper entitled, 'Overcoming water scarcity for good: querying the adoption of desalination technology in the Knysna Local Municipality of South Africa'. Abstract In this paper I aim to query the Ecological Modernisation vision of green growth by focusing on the emblematic case of desalination technology as the solution to the threat of water scarcity. I focus the study on a drought crisis, which resulted in the adoption of desalination in the Eden District Municipality (EDM) of South Africa. Focusing on the towns of Sedgefield and Knysna, in the Knysna Local Municipality (KLM) of the EDM, I ask the questions of ‘what, how, by whom, why and to what end was desalination adopted?’. This interrogation is characterised by two movements, firstly tracing the emergence and form of the crisis - solution consensus; and secondly reading this against an examination of the historical material relations constituting both crisis and solution. The paper is informed by research that was carried out over a period of 11 months, from October 2011 to August 2012, during which I undertook 91 semi-structured interviews, extensive document analysis and participant observation. The twin analytical movement described above is undertaken in five parts. Firstly, I show that the dominant representation of 'drought crisis' insisted upon the indisputability of drought as a threat posed by an externalised nature. Next, in examining the historical materiality of drought I counter this narrative by showing the drought crisis to be a socio-natural assemblage, rather than an externalised threatening nature. This is a vital finding, showing that the support for the adoption of desalination technology as a necessary response to 'nature's crisis', pivoted on the maintenance of an ideological fiction. In the third part of the paper, moving on to an examination of the solution, it emerges that an essential element supporting desalination adoption was the employment of exceptional disaster and environmental legislation, enabling the urgent release of disaster funding to ensure water security for economic growth. This section also argues that the maintenance of the dominant crisis narrative served to produce a market opportunity for the desalination industry. In the remaining two parts of the paper I evaluate the 'promise' of the desalination techno-fix. Through focusing on the conditionality placed on disaster funding and its impact on project assembly, I argue that the mechanisms and logic through which the solution consensus emerged had a direct bearing on project assembly and consequent problems and costs emerging out of the desalination solution from the outset. In sum, the paper demonstrates that the adopted E.M. logic was a false promise that served to intensify the penetration of nature by capital, and resulted in a deeper movement into crisis by moving the problems around as opposed to resolving them. Bio Suraya completed her PhD in geography at the University of Manchester (UK). Her doctoral work examined the Ecological Modernisation vision of green growth by focusing on the emblematic case of desalination technology as the solution to the threat of water scarcity. The study was focused on a drought crisis, which resulted in the adoption of desalination in the Eden District Municipality (EDM) of South Africa, focusing specifically on the towns of Sedgefield and Knysna, in the Knysna Local Municipality (KLM) of the EDM. Since May 2015 she works as a post-doctoral research fellow at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of the Cape Town. In this capacity, she forms part of a research team concerned with exploring theories and practices of emancipatory change. At one level, her focus is on leading an in-depth study on Informality, urban poverty and inequality in the low-income community of Delft, Cape Town. This study forms part of a larger multi-sited research project, positioned within a collaborative initiative between a handful of South African Research Chairs working on strategies to overcome poverty and inequality. At another level she will participate in workshops and discussions, drawing on both grounded findings and theoretical debates, to build empirically-informed theory and policy related to questions of transformative change.

DALI project (DFID land based financing)

Seminar Room 1 Environmental & Geographical Sciences Building, UCT Upper Campus

Ian Palmer and Stephen Berrisford will share an overview of the key findings of the DFID land based financing project, focussing on land value capture and infrastructure finance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Overview: The rapid growth of African Cities brings with it a burgeoning demand for infrastructure. But the finance available to cities to build this infrastructure is constrained. Therefore opportunities offered by land-based financing are most important. A team based at the African Centre for Cities has recently completed a significant research project on this topic for the UK Department for International Development.  The findings from this research will provide the primary input for this brownbag session, which will deal with the nature of urban infrastructure, the institutions involved in providing infrastructure, an overview of capital financing options and specific opportunities for using land-based finance. It will also touch on the role of property developers in providing and/or financing infrastructure, the role of cities in raising finance associated with property developments and associated policy considerations.  Findings from case studies conducted in Ethiopia, Kenya and Zimbabwe will also be reflected in the presentation. Bios: Stephen Berrisford is an independent consultant working in the field of urban planning law and policy in Southern Africa. He holds BA LLB and MCRP degrees from UCT and an MPhil in Land Economy from the University of Cambridge. Prior to establishing Stephen Berrisford Consulting in 2000 he held the post of Director: Land Development Facilitation at the national Department of Land Affairs and before that worked in the planning departments of the Cape Town and Johannesburg municipalities. During 2010 he was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield. His clients include the major international development agencies as well as all three spheres of government in South Africa. Stephen’s work focuses on the identification of practical and just legal solutions to the challenges of rapid urban growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has regularly published academic articles and book chapters since 1996 and has presented papers at a wide range of international conferences. Ian Palmer is a founding partner of Palmer Development Group (PDG). PDG is a leading consultancy in South Africa in the field of municipal services policy, research, strategy and management. He has 37 years experience in the fields of civil engineering and development. Over the last 25 years, 19 of which he has been the managing partner and then managing director of PDG, he has been the team leader on over 100 projects in the realm of public sector service delivery including the fields of: municipal services planning, municipal finance, inter-governmental relations, water and sanitation, housing, roads and public transport. He has degrees in civil engineering, economics and environmental engineering. Ian is also an Adjunct Professor at UCT attached to the African Centre for Cities.

Contested Cartographies: Remapping Cape Town

Seminar Room 1 Environmental & Geographical Sciences Building, UCT Upper Campus

In this brown bag, Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk will introduce a working concept for new ways of understanding Cape Town. Overview: This concept presentation considers the mapping, naming, routing, disambiguations, planning, and compartmentalising of contemporary Cape Town. Using as a basis the idea of an atlas containing multiple maps of the city, this project considers expansions, degradings, mergings and rendings that have transformed the city over time not only from a spatial perspective, but also culturally. How are people ‘emplaced’ in the city? What does the city look like to people based upon their distinct cultural belongings? What lies beneath our feet and flies above our heads? This concept is both multi- and trans-disciplinary, bringing together social scientists working in urban studies, activists, artists, and writers to re-think the way the city looks to those who live in it, to lift the map off the surface of the page and re-form it. About the speaker: Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Film and Media Studies, and director of the African Cinema Unit at the University of Cape Town. He has published widely on the filmmaker Terrence Malick (the subject of his PhD), as well as South African film, wildlife documentary and literary fiction. He is currently working on early South African cinema and film cultures in South Africa. As Director of the African Cinema Unit, he teaches in the MA in African Cinema and is also involved in developing postgraduate scholarship in African and South African screen studies. He is also a member of the Environmental Humanities South research program at the University of Cape Town. In 2013, he received a Distinguished Teacher’s Award from the University of Cape Town, and in 2014 a National Excellence in Teaching award from the Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association of South Africa. He is a fanatical birder and registered at lasser with the South African Bird Atlas project. One day he would like to see a Wandering Albatross.  

Food and transnational gastronomic culture amongst Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town and The Hague

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

In this seminar, post-doctoral fellow at the African Centre for Cities, Dr Henrietta M Nyamnjoh will present a paper entitled, 'This Christmas I go ‘touch’ some fufu and eru”: Food and transnational gastronomic culture amongst Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town and The Hague'. Abstract Migrants’ relation to ethnic food and their experiences of migration are dynamic processes, experienced in a multiplicity of ways. This paper focuses on how mobility and migration are fast influencing the global food cultures and how increasingly foods are windows into the ways migrants live, think, and identify themselves. Foods are part of migrants’ cultural, historical and even emotional repertoires. Based on ethnographic research amongst Cameroonian migrants in Cape Town and The Netherlands, I explore how migrants travel with their gastronomic culture and/or improvise in the absence of ethnic foods. In the Netherlands, whilst migrants have found ‘home-away-from-home’ through the many shops that sell food from home they still manage to create transnational food chains/links when visiting home. While in Cape Town, despite these shops the absence of certain foods has prompted migrants to improvise and complement their foods, it has also given rise to specialised restaurants that provide Cameroonian cuisine. Through this ethnography I maintain that gastronomic culture can be thought of as a strong bond that affirms migrants’ Cameroonian-ness and keeps them attached to the home country. I question too the extent to which mobility and transnationality reconfigure food experiences amongst migrant communities and argue for multiple understandings of how migrants relate to food to the exclusion of their everyday experience. Bio Henrietta Nyamnjoh is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at African Centre for Cities and Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town. Her research focus is on migration, transnational studies, migrants and urban transformation and religion. She recently completed a study on the use of Information and Communication Technologies amongst Cameroonian migrants in South Africa, The Netherlands and Cameroon. The study (Bridging Mobilities: ICTs appropriation by Cameroonians in South Africa and The Netherlands) seeks to understand migrants’ appropriation of the new Information and Communication Technologies to link home and host country and the wider migrant community. She is also the author of “We Get Nothing from Fishing” Fishing for Boat Opportunities Amongst Senegalese Fisher Migrants (2010). She is currently working on transnational families and emotions amongst Cameroonians in Cape Town.

Adapting to Climate Change – Lessons From South African cities

Alliance Française 155 Loop Street, Cape Town, South Africa

South Africa will be severely hit by climate change. Projections show that temperatures will rise by 3° to 6°C in some parts of the country. Already water-scarce, South Africa will see a drastic change in its rainfall patterns, with most of the country becoming drier. The rise in sea-level will at the same time threaten the development of coastal cities.   Adapting to climate change is thus a necessity. It is also an opportunity to engage a truly sustainable development model – one robust enough to work in a changing environment and inclusive enough to accommodate the poorest and most vulnerable. It is particularly true of cities – some of whom have already developed ambitious strategies   As France is gearing up to host the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in December 2015, AFD invites you to a conference on « Adapting to climate change – Lessons from South African cities ».   The event will be opened by Her Excellency, Mrs Elisabeth Barbier, Ambassador of France to South Africa. Mrs Kobie Brand, Regional Director for Africa at ICLEI, Mrs Helen Davies, Head of Environmental Policy and Planning at City of Cape Town, and Mrs Anna Taylor, Researcher at UCT, will take part in the debate, which will be moderated by Mrs Martha Stein-Sochas, AFD Regional Director for Southern Africa.

BROWN BAG POSTPONED: Dwelling on the edge of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Seminar Room 1 Environmental & Geographical Sciences Building, UCT Upper Campus

PLEASE NOTE THIS BROWN BAG HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE AS UCT STUDENTS ARE PROTESTING FOR FAIR FEES. In this brown bag, Dr Rick Miller will be giving a talk on informal settlements in Mongolia. Overview This talk will begin by introducing informal settlement in Ulaanbaatar - the ‘ger districts’. I will start by noting how Mongolia’s forms of informality are unique, with the actual housing type of the ger being an accepted and even valorized emblem of domesticity, and the ger district settlement pattern itself  pre-dating much of the core, fixed structures of the city.  But Mongolia-specific characteristics aside, the issues of informal settlement in Ulaanbaatar may still provide a more generalizable model for extending urbanization in other cities struggling to house their citizenry, particularly for recalibrating legal regimes for making informality part of a solution to housing. Bio Rick Miller’s approach to studying informal settlements across cities of the developing world is informed by his training as both an architect and a social scientist.  Rick is a travelling faculty member of the School for International Training program on Cities in the 21st Century and a lecturer in the Department of Geography at UCLA, from which he received his PhD.

Harare Academy of Inspiration

Moholo Live House 42 Ncumo Road, Harare, Khayelitsha, Cape Town

The Harare Academy of Inspiration, one of the seven projects ACC is supporting as part of Public Art and the Power of Place, is running a daily programme of events at the Moholo Live House in Harare, Khayelitsha. Please see the programme for details or contact the curators Brenda Skelenge 073-9401556 trendingkhalture@gmail.com Valeria Geselev 071-5501427 yallashoola@gmail.com Naz Ping 084-7688199 naz.s@posteo.de

Informal Settlement as Complex Adaptive Assemblage

Seminar Room 1 Environmental & Geographical Sciences Building, UCT Upper Campus

The ACC is delighted to be hosting Prof Kim Dovey who will be presenting a paper entitled 'Informal Settlement as Complex Adaptive Assemblage'. Abstract Informal urbanism, from informal settlements to economies and street markets, is integral to cities of the global South – economically, socially, environmentally and aesthetically. This paper seeks to unfold and re-think this informal/formal conception using two interconnected theoretical frameworks. First is assemblage theory derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in which a series of twofold concepts such as rhizomic/tree and smooth/striated resonate with the informal/formal construct. Second is theory on complex adaptive systems, in which dynamic and unpredictable patterns of self-organisation emerge with certain levels of resilience or vulnerability. These approaches are drawn together into the concept of a complex adaptive assemblage, illustrated with brief snapshots of urban informality drawn from Southeast Asian cities. The research challenge is to develop multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar methodologies to explore the ways in which informality is linked to squatting, corruption and poverty on the one hand, and to growth, productivity and creativity on the other. Bio Kim Dovey is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on social issues in architecture, urban design and planning.  Books include 'Framing Places' (Routledge, 2008), 'Fluid City' (UNSW Press 2005), ‘Becoming Places’ and the forthcoming ‘Urban Design Thinking’ (Bloomsbury).  He leads research projects on informal settlements, transit-oriented development and creative clusters.

MEAN STREETS book launch

Book Lounge 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The ACC is proud to be associated with the publication of a major new title in southern African studies. Mean Streets: Migration, Xenophobia and Informality in South Africa, edited by ACC partners Jonathan Crush, Abel Chikanda and Caroline Skinner, demonstrates powerfully that some of the most resourceful entrepreneurs in the South African informal economy are migrants and refugees. Yet far from being lauded, they take their life into their hands when they trade on South Africa’s “mean streets”. Thirteen chapters draw attention to the positive economic contributions which migrants make to their adopted country. The book includes studies of: the creation of agglomeration economies in Jeppe and Ivory Park in Johannesburg; guanxi networks of Chinese entrepreneurs; competition and cooperation among Somali shop owners; cross-border informal traders; informal transport operators between South Africa and Zimbabwe. Migrant entrepreneurship is shown to involve generating employment, paying rents, providing cheaper goods to poor consumers, and supporting formal sector wholesalers and retailers. Mean Streets also highlights the xenophobic responses to migrant and refugee entrepreneurs and the challenges they face in running a successful business on the streets.