African Centre for Cities

Info Session - MPhil Southern Urbanism
2024-07-30 12:00 - 13:00 (Africa/Johannesburg)
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
