African Centre for Cities

Ma in Sustainable Urban Practice Info Session
2023-08-25 12:30 - 13:30 (Africa/Johannesburg)
From siloed practitioner to systems integrator for sustainable African city futures – the new Masters programme, convened by the African Centre for Cities, at the University of Cape Town cultivates a new generation of urban practitioner.
The complex, multi-dimensional demands of our rapidly urbanising world require holistic, inter-disciplinary thinking and practice. However traditional professional paradigms and often-siloed institutions seem doomed to replicate the entrenched patterns and practices of path-dependent urban infrastructure provision and management. To overcome the often-fragmented ways in which urban questions are framed, institutionalised, and engaged by varied levels of government, citizens, civil society organisations, and private sector actors, we need a new kind of urban practitioner, who can work across practices, professional norms, hierarchies, sectors and urban problems.
To meet this need, the African Centre for Cities (ACC), UCT, launched a Masters in Sustainable Urban Practice, which seeks to cultivates urban integrators who are able to discern opportunities for integration, and can build the necessary coalitions for change; who are confident in varied cultures of communication and can build bridges between sectors, fields, and scales of urban practice.
Join this information session with programme convenor Dr Mercy Brown-Luthango.
WHEN | Friday, 25 August 2023
TIME | 12:30-13:30 SAST
REGISTER HERE
MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAMME

Lunchtime Lecture: Panya Routes - From platform to plotform
2023-08-31 13:00 - 14:00
Join ACC and the Michaelis School of Fine Art for a lunchtime lecture by Dr Kim Gurney on her latest book Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa, on Thursday, 31 August 2023, 13:00-14:00 at the Michaelis Lecture Theatre.
In this public talk, Kim will share the innovative working principles that independent art spaces in fast-changing cities in Africa have in common as they navigate conditions of uncertainty and accelerated flux.
These key principles are at the heart of her latest book, Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa (2022), produced from research conducted whilst formerly affiliated to UCT’s African Centre for Cities (ACC).
Kim made correlations between curatorial strategies and everyday urban innovations to surface these findings. The featured spaces span five different countries: GoDown Art Centre (Nairobi, Kenya), ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge (Accra, Ghana), Townhouse Gallery (Cairo, Egypt), Zoma Museum (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), and Nafasi Art Space (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania). They all self-assemble infrastructures of various kinds through refusals and reimaginations, with implications for new modes of institution-building and thinking about city futures.
About the book
WHEN | Thursday, 31 August
TIME | 13:00-14:00
VENUE | Michaelis Lecture Theatre, Hiddingh Campus
BIO
Kim Gurney is a researcher, writer and visual artist. She is the author of three books: Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa (Motto, 2022), August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier (Fourthwall, 2017), and The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re imagining the Ephemeral City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Kim is currently based at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, working on Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (in production).

INFO SESSION | DAAD MPhil Southern Urbanism Scholarships
2024-03-25 12:00 - 13:00
The African Centre for Cities, through Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), are calling for scholarship applications for 2025.
DAAD are offering five In-Region Scholarships* for students from Sub-Saharan Africa who enrol for the MPhil Southern Urbanism (Masters in Urban Studies) programme at the University of Cape Town.
If you are interested in applying for the scholarship but have questions, join MPhil Southern Urbanism convenor Anna Selmeczi for this information session.
WHEN | Monday, 25 March 2024
TIME | 12:00-13:00 SAST
JOIN ZOOM MEETING
MEETING ID: 874 0499 7882
PASSCODE: [REDACTED]

ACC Brown Bag - Living Off-Grid: Reflections from Ghana and Zimbabwe
2024-04-11 15:30 - 16:30 | Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT
Speakers: Percy Toriro – University of Zimbabwe and Issahaka Fuseini – University of Ghana
Join this discussion between Percy Toriro and Issahaka Fuseini, who will share findings from their work as city partners in the LOGIC (off-grid) project. Percy will engage the theme of ‘Electricity visits us’: the challenges of living with poor infrastructure and services in an off-grid settlement, with a focus on Dzivarasekwa, Zimbabwe. Issahaka will speak to the realities of off-griddedness and various assemblages to adapt to water scarcity and sanitation challenges in Tamale, Ghana.
These inputs will be followed by reflections by Hayley MacGregor (IDS) locating these discussions within the overlooked intersections between urban studies, the “infrastructure turn” and emerging urban food, nutrition and wider wellbeing debates.
This brownbag will build on the earlier conversations by Mercy Brown Luthango and Iromi Perera and the LOGIC (off grid) project, speaking to research in two additional project cities.
WHEN: Thursday, 11 April 2024
TIME: 15h30 – 16h30
VENUE: Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Percy Toriro has over 20 years’ experience as a city planner, having been the Chief Planner for the City of Harare for 10 years. Dr Toriro also leads the Urban Planning Program at the Municipal Development Partnership (MDP) a network spanning 15 Southern African countries, engaging in urban development challenges. Percy holds a PhD from the University of Cape Town. His research has covered urban infrastructure, urban housing, urban informality, housing, governance, food systems and environment. Percy’s work sees him interacting with national, regional and local governments in different countries and cities. Percy served four terms as President of the Zimbabwe Institute of Regional and Urban Planners (ZIRUP). Percy holds an adjunct lectureship position at the University of Zimbabwe.
Issahaka Fuseini is a senior lecturer at the University of Ghana, Ghana. Issahaka holds a PhD from Stellenbosch University. Issahaka’s research interest spans food systems governance, collaborative local-level governance, and inclusive urban development. Issahaka previously worked at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, during which time he was involved in multi-country, interdisciplinary projects aimed at improving urban food systems governance and nutrition security in nine cities in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. Presently, Issahaka is a co-investigator responsible for the Ghanaian component of a UKRI-sponsored multi-country research project (under the Global Challenges Research Fund’s Off-Grid Cities call) that is being implemented in five cities in Ghana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, and Sri Lanka. This project seeks to understand how access to or the lack of infrastructure, broadly defined, impacts the food and nutrition security of marginalised populations in cities in the Global South. Issahaka is also a lead partner in a city dialogue, facilitated by RUAF/FAO, that is aimed at developing a city-level food systems governance agenda for his home city of Tamale, Ghana.

THE URBAN EVERYDAY - FINAL STUDENT EXHIBITION
2024-05-14 13:30 - 15:00 | APG Foyer, Centlivres Building Upper Campus University of Cape Town
The ‘Urban Everyday’ offers a perspective on city-making that explores agency found in intersecting practices of occupation and adaptation, engagement and participation, resistance and protest, as well as waiting, encountering and imagining the city, its inhabitants and the state. In tracking diverse forms of agency, this framework of urban inquiry explores the substance of the city – its housing and land struggles, experiences of work and strategies to make ends meet, as well as questions of identity and belonging. It also examines how these diverse urban experiences frequently meet, compete with, and rub up against rights, policies, and state techniques.
In this exhibition, postgraduate students present their creative reflections on different course themes and grapple with the question of how we can hold structural forces in productive tension with ordinary forms of agency. By focusing on seemingly mundane practices, their works offer provocative points of entry for questioning how we theorize Southern cities and engage in imagining and building their future.
Participating students come from the following programs: MPhil Southern Urbanism (African Centre for Cities), MA Critical Urbanisms (University of Basel in collaboration with the African Centre for Cities), MA Urban Design and EGS Honours.

Book Launch - Apartheid Remains by Sharad Chari
2024-07-18 17:30 - 19:00 | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town, South Africa
UKZN Press, The Book Lounge and the African Centre for Cities invite you to the launch of ‘Apartheid Remains’ by Sharad Chari.
Sharad will be in conversation with Omar Badsha and Caroline Skinner.
DATE | Thursday, 18 July 2024
TIME| 17h30 for 18h00
VENUE | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Str, Cape Town
RSVP | booklounge@gmail.com
About the book:
In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles.
When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilised in various ways – through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty and capital – submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.
Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley; Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER); and author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India.
Apartheid Remains is published by UKZN Press.

Brown bag seminar: The visible hand of a transport mafia in Lagos (Nigeria)
2024-07-22 12:30 - 14:00 | Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT
The National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) is a recognized union, an unofficial section of a political party, and a ‘parastatal’ organization transporting millions of passengers in Nigeria. These multiple functions are seen by academics and the public as a problem. Many researchers consider NURTW as a mafia because of its collusions with political parties, the police and civil servants, an increasingly dominant interpretation characterizing popular transport organizations in the African continent. This project is aimed at understanding divergent views of ‘informal’ transport organization in Lagos, the economic capital of Nigeria.
To do this, historian and political scientist Laurent Fourchard works with photographer Andrew Esiebo to engage in a common fieldwork based on visual ethnography methods. By associating photography and ethnography, they would like to explore the visible hand of an organization whose main functions are unseen, hidden, difficult to grasp or stigmatized.
Bio: Laurent Fourchard is a research professor at the National Foundation for Political Science (CERI) and teaching faculty at Sciences Po’s Urban School. He was Director of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) in Nigeria from 2000 to 2003 and visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town in 2008 and 2009. Before joining CERI in 2016 he was a research fellow at the research institute, Les Afrique dans le monde at Sciences Po Bordeaux.

Info Session - MPhil Southern Urbanism
2024-07-30 12:00 - 13:00
The MPhil Southern Urbanism is designed to cultivate the next generation of urban thinkers from the South, who are rooted in the realities, theories and practise of cities of the Global South. Drawing together a diverse cohort of scholar and practitioners, the programme uses a combination of guided learning in small-group seminars, experimentation in various spaces of urban practice and independent thesis research to ground students in Urban Studies theory, and new research methodologies.
If you are interested in applying for the MPhil Southern Urbanism programme but still have some questions? This info session, hosted by programme convenor, Dr Anna Selmeczi will provide a brief overview of the pedagogical approach, programme structure and entry requirements, as well as discussion time to answer all your questions.
APPLICATIONS DEADLINE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN AND INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: 31 October 2024
REGISTER HERE

Brownbag seminar_ACCRETION THROUGH FRICTION: examining garbage flows in Dakar’s Baie de Hann
2024-08-01 12:30 - 14:00 | Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT
Once the second most beautiful to the bay of Rio de Janeiro, Dakar’s Baie de Hann is now known for its pollution. A largely EU-funded infrastructure project (2017-2021) promised to resolve the bay’s challenges. Jonas Le Thierry d’Ennequin challenges this modernist project from an Urban Political Ecology perspective. By examining how the bay’s infrastructure flows accrete (Anand, 2015) since the 1980s, he argues for the generative potential of “friction” in infrastructural development.
Details:
Date: Thursday, 01 August 2024
Time: 12h30 –14h00
Venue: Studio 1, Level 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building
Jonas is a UKRI-funded PhD candidate at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. He holds an MSc Urban Development Planning from UCL and a BA Global Challenges from Leiden University & Universidad de Chile. Prior to his doctoral research he worked as a strategic communications consultant in different sectors.

Brownbag seminar: African Landscape Architectures_Alternative futures for the field
2024-08-15 13:00 - 14:00 | EGS Library, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT
Based on landscape fieldwork across 11 African nations during 2022–23, this talk speculates on the future of landscape architecture in Africa and the Global South. While visiting educational programs, designed landscapes, and meeting practitioners across African nations, Gareth Doherty saw and registered various landscape practices as they exist on the ground, whether professionally designed or not. Some forms of “grassroots” practice are more deeply engaged with solving the problems of our age—including climate change and social inequalities— than their more formalized and institutionalized counterparts.
Details:
Date: Thursday, 15 August 2024
Time: 13h00 –14h00
Venue: EGS Library, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT
About the presenter:
Gareth Doherty is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and principal of the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Doherty takes a human-centered approach to landscape architecture, applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory methodologies to design and theory. His work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Doherty addresses these issues through research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds. Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How the Engaging the World Changes Design (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming), and his recent fieldwork on African landscape architecture. Doherty was a Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities in 2022–23.

Info Session: MPhil Urban Studies - Southern Urbanism
2024-10-01 13:00 - 14:00
The MPhil Southern Urbanism is designed to cultivate the next generation of urban thinkers from the South, who are rooted in the realities, theories and practise of cities of the Global South. Drawing together a diverse cohort of scholar and practitioners, the programme uses a combination of guided learning in small-group seminars, experimentation in various spaces of urban practice and independent thesis research to ground students in Urban Studies theory, and new research methodologies.
This info session, hosted by programme convenor, Dr Anna Selmeczi will provide a brief overview of the pedagogical approach, programme structure and entry requirements, as well as discussion time to answer all your questions.
APPLICATIONS DEADLINE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN AND INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: 31 October 2024
REGISTER HERE

Book launch: High Stakes, High Hopes
2024-10-29 17:30 - 19:30 | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town, South Africa
The African Centre for Cities, University of Georgia Press and The Book Lounge invite you to the launch of High Stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theorizing in Partnership by Sophie Oldfield.
Sophie will be in conversation with Shireen Square, Valhalla Park resident and Anna Selmeczi, from the African Centre for Cities.
High Stakes, High Hopes tracks the building of urban theorizing in a decade-long urban research and teaching partnership in Cape Town, South Africa. An argument for collaborative urbanism, this book reflects on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution. Oldfield explores how research and assessment were reshaped when framed in neighborhood questions and commitments, and what was reoriented in urban theorizing when community activism and township struggles were recognized as sites of valid knowledge-making.
WHEN | Tuesday, 29 October 2024
TIME | 17H30 – 19H00
VENUE | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town
Please RSVP here

Launch: CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship in South Africa
2024-10-31 15:00 - 17:00 | Studio 5, Environmental & Geographical Science Bld, UCT Upper Campus
The African Centre for Cities (ACC), in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen invite you to the public launch of the CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship project. The launch will take place under the theme “Infrastructure’s Transitions”, where the project team will share the project overview, structure and direction.
CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship is a four-year research project funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). In the context of a contested energy transition, the project explores claim-making, citizenship, and statecraft in Cape Town, South Africa. The project aims to advance creative and interdisciplinary methods for contributing to thinking related to the politics of infrastructure transitions.
Thirty years after the formation of the post-apartheid state, a series of global and national transitions are reconfiguring the energy landscape. We present these transitions not as contextual inevitabilities but as social facts that require critical observation and new modes of sense-making.
The event is titled Infrastructure’s Transitions as a tribute to Antina von Schnitzler’s influential work, Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid. This seminal book has inspired scholars across various disciplines to see infrastructure as a site where state-society relations and urban futures are substantiated, contested, and performed.
WHEN | Thursday, 31 October 2024
TIME | 3PM – 5PM
VENUE | Studio 5, Environmental & Geographical Science Bld. UCT Upper Campus
Please RSVP here
