The ACC is happy to announce the first brown bag event for 2016: Visualising the Smart City with Professor Gillian Rose. Overview: Digital technologies of various kinds are now the means through which many cities are made visible and their spatialities negotiated. From casual snaps shared on Instagram to elaborate photo-realistic visualisations, digital technologies for making, distributing and viewing cities are more and more pervasive. This talk will explore some of the implications of that digitisation for the cultural politics of representation. What and who is being made visible in these digitally mediated cities, and how? What forms of urban materiality, spatiality and sociality are pictured and performed? And how should that picturing be theorised? The talk will suggest that cities and their inhabitants are increasingly visualised through a mobile fluid 'digital visuality', which is in fact evident across a number of visual practices. It will also propose that critical accounts of such visuality should focus less on readings of images and more on considering the (geographically-specific) flows and frictions of images. Bio: Gillian Rose is Professor of Cultural Geography at The Open University, UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her current research interests focus on contemporary digital visual culture, urban spatialities and visual research methodologies. Her most recent funded research (with Monica Degen) examined how architects work with digital visualising technologies in designing urban redevelopment projects, and she is extending this work into the digital mediation of urban spaces more broadly, particularly in the context of 'smart cities'. As well as a number of papers on images and ways of seeing in urban and domestic spaces, the fourth edition of her bestselling Visual Methodologies (Sage) will be published in March 2016. Gillian blogs at visual/method/culture and tweets @ProfGillian.

Oliver Bakewell, from the International Migration Institute, at the University of Oxford, will be on the changing relationship between migration, diasporas and global development in a fascinating Brown Bag titled, Migration and African Cities. Overview: This presentation will look at different aspects of the complex relationship migration and African cities, highlighting points of comparison and contrast with other regions of the world. Over the last century, rural-urban migration has played a major part in the growth of African cities, stimulating many debates about people’s cultural values and social practices changes as they move to urban areas. More recently, there has been much concern about the role of some African cities as a transit point prior to international migration - the city as a stepping stone. Two other aspects have been less explored. First, there is the role of cities as gateways into global markets, which rely on the mobility of African traders across the globe –most notably to China in recent years. Second, there is the movement across Africa that is creating distinctive ‘foreign’ populations to be found in cities in every part of the continent. Despite (or perhaps because of) having no policy, ‘integration’ is taking place and people are becoming part of new societies, contributing to the diversity and dynamism of many African cities.   About the Speaker: Oliver Bakewell’s research is centred on a broad interest in the changing relationship between migration, diasporas and global development. This encompasses a number of strands which he is following through various research activities: social theory and migration; examining the boundaries between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migration; mobility within sub-Saharan Africa; and African borderlands. He is the principal investigator for the project Theorising the Evolution of European Migration Systems (THEMIS) funded by NORFACE, which examines the conditions that encourage initial moves by pioneer migrants to become established migration system. He is also leading research into the formation of African diasporas within the African continent as part of the Oxford Diasporas Programme. In addition, he is undertaking ongoing research into the changing patterns of cross-border movements between Angola and western Zambia from the mid 1990s to today. Oliver is Co-Director and Senior Research Officer, and an Associate Professor at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford holds a PhD and MSc in Development Studies from the University of Bath and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. He has spent many years working with migrants and refugees as both a researcher and practitioner with a range of development and humanitarian NGOs. Immediately prior to joining ODID, he was Senior Researcher at the International NGO Training and Researcher Centre (INTRAC) in Oxford.