African Centre for Cities

Exhibition: 'this image may contain' by heeten bhagat
2018-11-21 18:00 - 23:55 (Africa/Johannesburg) | The Quad, The Arena Theatre, Cape Tpwn
Join ACC’s PhD candidate heeten bhagat for ‘this image may contain’ – a visual articulation of research in speculative indigeneities on Wednesday, 21 November 2018, 18:00 at The Quad, The Arena Theatre.
The aim of this doctoral research was to attempt an interdisciplinary approach to search for registers (and absences) of indigeneity through a close reading of the 2017 Independence day celebration, held at the National Sports Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe. The focus of this study was motivated by two distinct elements from the event: The first is a banner that hangs over the official entrance to the performance arena, that declares – ‘ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER A BE COLONY AGAIN’. The second element is a fragment from the president’s address to the nation at this ceremony, which proclaims, “…..we can now call ourselves full the masters of our destiny”.
This works on show constitute the concluding articulation of this research journey into notions of speculative and speculating indigeneities.

BROWNBAG SEMINAR: How Cities Respond to Climate Change: Ambition and Reality of European and African Cities
2019-01-28 12:30 - 13:30 | Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
Join ACC and ACDI for a lunchtime brownbag seminar by Diana Reckien, Associate Professor, University of Twente, Netherlands entitled How Cities Respond to Climate Change: Ambition and Reality of European and African Cities.
WHERE: Studio 5, Level 5, Environmental & Geographical Sciences Building (EGS)
UCT Upper Campus, Rondebosch
WHEN: 12.30 – 1.30pm, Monday 28 January 2019
Diana Reckien will present some of her latest research on local climate planning in European cities, that builds on a network of 30 collaborators across the EU-28.
Building up a database of the climate change response of 885 cities in the EU-28 (representative of the urban profile in their country), Diana and colleagues were able to yield insights into which cities in Europe prepare climate (adaptation or mitigation) plans and what these plans entail. This provides information about, e.g., the mitigation targets/ambitions and whether these would be sufficient to reach 1.5/2C, prominent mitigation and adaptation sectors, and modes of implementation (mainstreaming or not).
Diana will then move to some of her work in African cities, presenting recent research on mainstreaming in Kigali City (Rwanda) and on environmental urban migration in northern Kenya.
She will close with ideas and plans for future research, e.g. potentially open up topics for collaboration, such as perception based climate change impact analyses in African cities using FCM, cascading impacts, socially sensible adaptation options, and/or the effectiveness of adaptation plans.
BIOGRAPHY
Diana Reckien is Associate Professor “Climate Change and Urban Inequality” at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She specializes at the interface of climate change and urban research, with the aim to contribute to justice efforts.
One of her current research question is how climate change mitigation and adaptation policies affect and interact with social vulnerability, equity and justice, and how to set up adaptation and mitigation policies in order to avoid respective negative side-effects. Other research interests include method development for impact and adaptation assessments, and modelling approaches, social vulnerability, and climate change migration.
She mainly investigates urban areas in Europe, Asia (mainly India), and Africa. To do so, she employs large comparative studies using social science methods, such as questionnaires, case study analyses and multi-variate statistics, as well as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM).
Diana is Coordinating Lead Author for “Chapter 17: Decision-making options for managing risk” of the Working Group II Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. She led parts of the Second Assessment Report for Climate Change in Cities (ARC3.2; Eds: Rosenzweig, Solecki et al.; Cambridge University Press) – those that relate to equity and environmental justice. She serves on the Editorial Board of “Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews”(IF 8.050).
Her publication record comprises roughly 70 publications, including 25 peer-reviewed journal papers, a number of book chapters, and two special issues.

SDGs Seminar Series: Localizing the SDGs in South Africa
2019-02-13 12:30 - 14:00 | Environmental and Geographical Science Building, South Lane, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape , 8001, South Africa
Over the course of the next semester African Centre for Cities will be curating and hosting a series of seminars and discussions on the Sustainable Development Goals. The series kicks-off with Dr Sylvia Croese with a seminar on Localizing the SDGs in South Africa on Wednesday, 13 February 2019, at 12:30 to 14:00 in the Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town.
The inclusion of a standalone urban goal as part of the 17 SDGs adopted in 2015 represents the culmination of the growing recognition and acknowledgement of the importance of cities as both drivers and actors in achieving sustainable development. However, nearly four years down the line very little is known about the ways in which local governments are going about the implementation and monitoring of the SDGs. This presentation draws on on-going research in and with the City of Cape Town to shed some light on some of the factors and conditions that may limit or enable SDG localization. It kicks off a series of seminars that will be held on a monthly basis throughout 2019 on the challenges and opportunities for SDG implementation in (South) Africa.
WHEN: Wednesday, 13 February 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Bad Health in a Good Retreat: Life and Death in the 'Worst' Neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil
2019-02-25 12:30 - 14:00 | Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa
Prof Jeffrey Lesser will be presenting a seminar entitled Bad Health in a Good Retreat: Life and Death in the ‘Worst’ Neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil, on Monday, 25 February 2019, 12:30 to 14:00, in the Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT.
ABSTRACT
Bom Retiro was (and is) a small neighborhood in the huge megalopolis of São Paulo, Brazil. The mainly working class neighborhood has been populated since the end of the 19th century by immigrants, migrants from the impoverished Brazilian northeast, and Afro-Brazilian descendants of slaves. While the cultural backgrounds of the immigrants have shifted (from Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese Catholics in the early 20th century to East European Jews in the mid-20th century to Chinese, Korean, Paraguayan, and Bolivian immigrants today), the neighborhood has been viewed internally and externally as one where health (in the broadest sense of the word) is precarious. “Bad Health in a Good Retreat” analyzes the relationship between “Public Health” (as a state driven set of policies and linked enforcement) and “The Public’s Health” (how real people understand their own experiences). By focusing on one square block of Bom Retiro from about 1900 to the present I use archival and ethnographic methods to analyze the daily practices of residents and health officials, and the stories they tell about life, death, and the spaces in between.
BIOGRAPHY
Jeffrey Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Brazilian Studies and Director of Emory University’s Halle Institute for Global Research. His research focus is on the construction of national identity in Brazil, focusing on how immigrant and ethnic groups understand their own and national space. Lesser is the author of numerous prize winning books including, Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil (Cambridge University Press) A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy (Duke University Press); Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Duke University Press); and Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (University of California Press).

Launch of 'The Walk'
2019-03-18 11:30 - 13:00 | Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
African Centre for Cities invites you to the launch of a new publication entitled The Walk. This publication, which is based on a research study entitled The Prospects for Socio-Spatial Transformation in the Voortrekker Road Corridor by Mercy Brown-Luthango, was supported by the French Development Agency (AFD) and focuses on Maitland, Kensington and Factreton. The main concern of this study was to understand the vision of city officials and politicians, as outlined in major policy documents, and how this compares to the daily lived experiences of those who reside and conduct business in the three study areas.
Please join us for a series of panel presentations followed by a facilitated discussion on the prospects and challenges for socio-spatial transformation in the Voortrekker Road Corridor Integration Zone (VRCIZ).
DATE: 18 March 2019
TIME: 11:30 to 13:00 (followed by lunch)
VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town
PLEASE RSVP to africancentreforcities.rsvp@gmail.com by 16 March 2019 for catering purposes.

Whose Heritage Matters? Mapping, Making and Mobilising Heritage Values for Sustainable Livelihoods in Cape Town and Kisumu
2019-04-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa
Cape Town and Kisumu are two secondary African cities with high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality. There is much interest in developing sustainable approaches to harnessing tangible and intangible heritage to address these challenges. However, cultural heritage is a value-laden concept, particularly in the context of colonial histories and urban futures. Whose heritage matters? How can we negotiate competing and plural values? How can cultural heritage be mobilised to support sustainable livelihoods? Funded by the British Academy, this co-produced action research project will bring different stakeholders and communities together to map heritage values and develop creative interventions to harness tangible and intangible heritage for sustainable development’.
This Brown Bag Seminar will introduce the project, and open up a conversation about the role and value of heritage in sustainable and just urban development.
When: 10 April 2019
Time: 12:00 – 13:o0
Venue: Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

SDG Seminar: Unpacking SDG implementation in eThekwini
2019-04-17 14:00 - 15:30 | Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa
Puvendra Akkiah, IDP Manager of eThekwini Municipality and Technical Chair of the United Cities and Local Governments Committee on Urban Strategic Planning, will present a talk entitled Unpacking SDG implementation in eThekwini on Wednesday, 17 April, at 14:00 to 15:30 in Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT.
Akkiah will be talking about the City of eThekwini’s bottom-up approach to aligning its Integrated Development Plan to the SDGs as part of its strategic approach to sustainability and the advocacy and training activities that the City has undertaken to raise awareness and support for SDG localization.
WHEN: 17 April 2019
TIME: 14:00 to 15:30
VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT.

BOXES
2019-04-26 14:00 - 15:00 | Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
BOXES is a social-justice theatre project devised by award-winning theatre makers Neil Coppen and Ameera Conrad, Journalist Daneel Knoetze and performers Quanita Adams and Mark Elderkin. The project draws from a range of research-based, verbatim and documentary theatre methodologies to explore a myriad of perspectives and insights into urban land justice issues occurring across city of Cape Town.
The plays central narrative focuses around a young Cape Town couple: Kaye (Quanita Adams) and Lawrence (Mark Elderkin) who have recently moved into the inner-city and find their preparations for a house-warming dinner, derailed when Lawrence announces that he has accepted a job offer to design a state-of-the art residential development in lower Woodstock. When it is discovered that local residents will be evicted from their neighbourhood to make room for the development, Kaye begins to probe the repercussions of her partner’s latest venture. As Kaye and Lawrence battle it out, we learn of Kaye’s interactions with her Aunt Sumaya in the Bo Kaap, who due to rising rates is having to sell up her family home and has been inspired to return to her activist roots.
As Kaye and Lawrence attempt to arrive at some sort of a resolve before the arrival of their dinner guests, audiences encounter a myriad of characters including property developers, politicians, residents and whistleblowers whose lives are impacted, for better or worse, by the gentrification trends sweeping across the city and suburbs. Over the course of four short scenes, BOXES probes the legacy of apartheid spatial planning and forced removals, examining notions of ‘development’ and ‘progress’, by interrogating the question: Who is really benefitting from all this so-called progress?
BOXES forms part of a wider Open Society Foundation project which connects South African investigative journalists with theatre makers and artists. The Open Society foundation funded the project which sees creatives interpret the work of investigative journalists with the hope that alternative dissemination strategies would enable these narratives to reach wider audiences in the lead up to the 2019 South African elections.
The play is produced by Empatheatre, a company founded by Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni and Dylan McGarry. Empatheatre has been responsible for launching several social-justice theatrical projects over the last decade including Soil & Ash (focusing on rural communities facing pressure from coal-mining companies), Ulwembu (street-level Drug addiction and harm reduction advocacy), The Last Country (female migration stories) and Lalela ulwandle (an international theatre project supporting sustainable transformative governance of the oceans). More recently the Empatheatre team has been invited to work internationally in New York, St Louis, Toronto, Fiji, Ghana and Namibia.
DATE: 26 April 2019
TIME: 14:00 to 15:00
VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Space is limited.
Please RSVP to africancentreforcities.rsvp@gmail.com

POWER TALKS
2019-05-07 18:30 | Ramolao Makhene Theatre at The Market Theatre Laboratory, 138 Lilian Ngoyi Street Newtown, Johannesburg, South Africa
The POWER TALKS discussion series, curated and co-hosted by African Centre for Cities and the Goethe-Institut, considers the various practices of European cultural institutions that are active on the African continent. Working in post-apartheid or post-colonial contexts means, for these institutions, a need to situate themselves carefully as well as to be mindful of, and willing to review their working methods.
For the first iteration of POWER TALKS, happening at the Ramolao Makhene Theatre at The Market Theatre Laboratory, we have invited Laila Soliman, Khwezi Gule, Leigh-Ann Naidoo and Molemo Moiloa. The discussion will be facilitated by Jeff Tshabalala.
WHEN: Tuesday, 7 May 2019
TIME: 18:30
VENUE: Ramolao Makhene Theatre at The Market Theatre Laboratory, 138 Lilian Ngoyi Street
Newtown, Johannesburg
POWER TALKS is part of a series of events in 2019 and 2020 to consider dynamics on the African continent and working methodologies of the Goethe-Institut in the region.

GDI Lecture Series: Ambitious and ambiguous public investments in African cities with Edgar Pieterse
2019-05-08 16:30 - 18:00
The Global Development Institute is pleased to host Edgar Pieterse as part of the GDI Lecture Series, talking about: Ambitious and ambiguous public investments in African cities
Urban governance in most African cities is marked by weak regulatory enablement by national governments, limited autonomous fiscal resources, limited managerial capacity, overlaid by distortionary politics—read a combination of clientelism, patronage, corruption, etcetera. At least, this is the conclusion one arrives at by reading most of the academic literature on the topic. However, in contradistinction, over the last decade or so, there has been a proliferation of ambitious planning and delivery, of especially, mega infrastructural projects. These developments coincide with the proliferation of mainstream incantations of “Africa rising” and other boosterism discourses. It raises important questions about how this level of institutional efficacy could be possible if the literature is accurate. In this talk I aim to report on the findings of a research project on so-called turn-around African cities. We set out to document how noteworthy urban mega projects came onto the agenda, were implemented, often effectively, and what the possible effects might be. The idea is to offer a set of empirical reflections, drawing on six African cities, to get a more refined understanding of contemporary urban planning and governance dynamics in rapidly changing and conflictual contexts.
The Global Development Lecture Series brings experts involved in global development to The University of Manchester. It aims to facilitate dialogue and discussion, providing a space for leading development thinkers to share their latest research and ideas. Lectures are followed by an audience Q&A.
This event is open to members of the public and information on the accessibility of the venue is detailed at this link: https://www.accessable.co.uk/venues/roscoe_th-b

How data-ready are African governments to monitor SDG progress?
2019-05-15 12:30 - 14:00 | Davies Reading Room, Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8000, South Africa
UCT Datafirst Manager Lynn Woolfrey presents How data-ready are African governments to monitor SDG progress? Zambia and Zimbabwe reviews on Wednesday, 15 May at 12:30 to 14:00 in Davies Library, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT.
ABSTRACT
It is clear from the development literature that Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) plans must include the building of efficient development data ecosystems (OECD, 2015, p. 16). Such systems can provide governments with country-level indicators for SDG planning and monitoring. For example, the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s Africa Data Consensus suggests that official and other data producers partner to create an international data ecosystem for development planning (UNECA, 2015, p. 2). In 2017 the UN Development Programme (UNDP) adopted such an ecosystems approach to conduct data audits with African governments. The audits assess a government’s “SDG indicator readiness”- whether accurate and current data is available to compile their SDG indicators – and investigate causes and solutions. The UNDP has found ecosystems mapping useful to expose the causes of poor quality national statistics, such as inadequate funding and bureaucratic resistance to change (Menon, 2017, pp. 12-13, 20). This seminar presents the findings of two SDG indicator readiness audits, in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and comment on the outcomes, and the value and shortcomings of these audits for development data capacity-building in African countries.
WHEN: Wednesday, 15 May 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: Davies Library, Level 2, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT.

From platform to plotform: Artistic thinking in spaces of flux
2019-05-28 02:00 - 15:00 | Seminar Room 2, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape
From platform to plotform: Artistic thinking in spaces of flux is a public talk in which ACC research associate Kim Gurney shares work in progress on her project called Platform/ Plotform to help forward future work and interdisciplinary outputs. The project explores working principles identified in participant independent art spaces in five African cities (Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam), and how the predominant forms and strategies of these selected spaces correspond to the urban fabric. The session, a joint effort between ACC and Centre for Humanities Research, will provide an overview of recently concluded fieldwork and some preliminary findings before opening up for discussion.
WHEN: Tuesday, 28 May 2019
VENUE Seminar Room 2, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape
TIME: 14:00 to 15:00
RSVP: Please RSVP Micaela Felix at centreforhumanitiesresearch@uwc.ac.za

Hacking the Future - New ideas for an urban era
2019-06-06 17:30 - 19:30 | The Old Granary, Cnr of Longmarket Street and Harrington Street, Cape Town , South Africa
ACC and Cityscapes Collective presents experts from the worlds of architecture, public health, education, culture and technology to discuss the key ideas driving their work in a series of provocations moderated by award-winning filmmaker, community organiser and urbanist Michael Uwemedimo of CMAP.
Presented as a series of provocations, the ideas they will share on their various practices will show the radical thinking that is necessary to address the many seemingly intractable challenges faced cities globally – but specifically across the global South. It’s clear that business as usual is not enough anymore. This event seeks to expand the palette we are using to determine the future of the global South city beyond the Western template of received wisdom that has been the dominant informant of how we think of the ongoing urban transition
WHEN: 6 June 2019
WHERE: The Old Granary, Cnr Longmarket and Harrington Street, Cape Town
TIME: 17:30- 19:30 followed by drinks and snacks
SPEAKERS

Why systems for health matter, Tolullah Oni
Manufactured architecture can tackle the housing crisis, James Shen
Art & Science alchemy in Tijuana, Raúl Cárdenas Osuna
The case for transforming contemporary African architectural education, Leslie Lokko

BIOGRAPHIES
Michael Uwemedimo is co-founder and director of CMAP [Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform] and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. As a founding member of the filmmaking collaboration, Vision Machine, and a producer of the Academy Award-nominated, BAFTA-winning documentary, The Act of Killing, he has been developing innovative approaches to documentary practice as a means of enabling critical reflection on histories of political violence and challenges to official impunity. As project director of the Human City Project, a community-driven media, architecture, planning and human rights initiative in Nigeria, Michael is exploring design processes through which violently marginalised urban communities might gain a greater measure of control over their representation and the shaping of their cities. Michael has curated major programmes at the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, Architecture Association and Institute for Contemporary Art, London; and sat on international film festival juries.

Tolullah Oni is a Public Health Physician Scientist and urban epidemiologist, a Clinical Senior Research Associate in Global Public Health at the University of Cambridge MRC Epidemiology Unit, and an Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town School of Public Health and Family Medicine. Born in Lagos, she completed her medical training (and a BSc in International Health) at University College London, postgraduate medical training in the UK and Australia, a Masters degree in Public Health (Epidemiology) at the University of Cape Town, and a research doctorate in Clinical Epidemiology at Imperial College London. She completed Public Health Medical Specialty training in South Africa and is a Fellow of the College of Public Health Medicine of South Africa. She leads the Research Initiative for Cities Health and Equity (RICHE) conducting transdisciplinary urban health research focused on generating evidence to support development and implementation of healthy public policies in rapidly growing cities, with a focus on Africa. Research activities include Systems for Health projects: investigating how urban systems (e.g. human settlements, food) can be harnessed for health; and Health Systems projects: integrated health system responses to changing patterns of disease and multimorbidity in the context of urbanisation.

Raúl Cárdenas Osuna is founder and principal at Torolab (1995), an artist collective, workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research, basing the studies in the realm of life styles to better grasp the idea of quality of life. His work has been shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Havana, Liverpool, Lyon, Montreal and Venice Biennials; and has been awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard’s Cultural Agents Initiative, among others. Cárdenas Osuna has been an advisor for Tijuana’s gov on sustainable city development and social innovation; founded the Digital and Creative axis for the Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Tijuana-Rosarito-Tecate; currently directs the non-profit organization ‘Sociedad de Agentes de Cambio’; directs the program of the Transborder Farmlab in Tijuana; directs the Applied Social Research and Innovation Lab (LiiSA) in Tijuana/Mexico City.

James Shen is principal at People’s Architecture Office. He received his Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BSc in Product Design from California State University, Long Beach. Shen currently holds positions as Research Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and Innovation Fellow at MIT’s China Future City Lab. He has taught as Visiting Lecturer at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. People’s Architecture Office (PAO) is an international practice with offices based in Beijing and Boston. Founded in 2010 by James Shen, He Zhe, and Zang Feng, the firm is a multi-disciplinary studio focused on social impact through design particularly in the areas of housing, education, and urban regeneration. People’s Architecture Office is the first architecture firm certified as a B-Corporation in Asia and serves as a model social enterprise. Domus named PAO as one of the world’s best architecture firms of 2019 and Fast Company listed PAO as one of the world’s ten most innovative architecture companies in 2018. The studio’s award-winning works have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Harvard Graduate School of Design and the London Design Museum.

Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic and the author of eleven best-selling novels. She is currently Director of School and Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. In December 2019, she will be taking up a new position as Dean of Architecture, CUNY. She was born in 1964 to Ghanaian-Scots parents and grew up in Ghana. She trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 1989–1995, and gained her PhD in Architecture from the University of London in 2007. She has taught at schools in the US, the UK, Europe, Australia and Africa. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture and is on the editorial board of ARQ (Cambridge University press). She has been an on-going contributor to discourses around identity, race, African urbanism and the speculative nature of African architectural space and practice for nearly thirty years. She is a regular juror at international competitions and symposia, and is a long-term contributor to BBC World. In 2004, she made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion 2004), a UK-Guardian top forty best-seller, and has since then followed with ten further best-sellers, which have been translated into fifteen languages.

SDG Seminar Series: Financing the SDGs in African cities?
2019-06-19 12:30 - 14:00 | Davies Reading Room, Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8000, South Africa
The fourth instalment of the ACC SDG Seminar is presented by Liza Rose Cirolia on Wednesday, 19 June 2019 at 12:30 to 14:00 in the Davies Room, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT.
Entitled Financing the SDGs in African cities?, her seminar will explore the fiscal constraints and opportunities for local government to participation in global agendas.
WHEN: Wednesday, 19 June 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: Davies Room, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT.

Governing Cape Town’s Informal Economy
2019-07-26 13:00 - 14:00 | Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
ACC invites you to a special Brownbag lecture by Dr Graeme Young entitled Governing Cape Town Informal Economy, on Friday 26 July at 13:00 to 14:00 in Studio 5, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT.
Young, a visiting QES Scholar, has been working with the Office of the Premier of the Western Cape as part of the wider provincial food system strategy. This presentation will outline initial perspectives on research carried out to understand the institutional and policy landscape in which Cape Town’s informal economy is governed and offer theoretical insights that may be useful for engaging with broader questions surrounding urban governance in Cape Town and beyond.
VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT
DATE: Friday, 26 July 2019
TIME: 13h00 – 14h00

MPhil 'pumflets' exhibition
2019-08-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Wolff Architects, 136 Buitenkant Street, Bo Kaap, Cape Town, Cape Town , South Africa
You are invited to attend the one-night only exhibition of pumflets produced by the students of the MPhil Southern Urbanism.
The exhibition is the product of the third iteration of the City Research Studio, which forms the cornerstone of the MPhil Southern Urbanism curriculum. The City Research Studio functions as a laboratory space where students learn to walk, see, smell, touch, embrace, explore and reimagine the city through intimate engagements.
City Research Studio 3 was convened by Ilze Wolff of Wolff Architects, who co-founded pumflet: art, architecture and stuff with artist Kemang Wa Lehulere in 2016. According to Wolff the publication series explores the social imagination, stories of neighbourhoods and reflecting on histories of the present. “pumflet’s aim is to publicise research-in-process and to conceive of interventions in space and public culture based on research. It is a collection of conceptual art interventions and a collection of correspondence art practices. pumflet, then, is in a way a continued digging and reflecting on the imagination of the collective, with ideas around restoring some ‘deleted scenes’, consequences of forced removals, hyper capitalist urban development and the impacts of state power of the land and the landless,” she explains.
Using this methodology students have produced their own pumflets over the course of six weeks and will showcase them on Friday, 23 August 2019, from 18:00 at the studio of Wolff Architect, 136 Buitenkant Street, Bo Kaap, Cape Town.
WHEN: Friday, 23 August 2019
TIME: 18:00
WHERE: Wolff Architects, 136 Buitengracht Street, Bo Kaap, Cape Town

Refreshments will be served.

Stitching fragments and fractals
2019-08-29 01:00 - 14:00 | Pink Room, Centlivres Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
On 29 August 2019, the UCT School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics is hosting Prof Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Centre for Cities. Pieterse recently returned from a year-long sabbatical and will be reflecting on this in his presentation Stitching fragments and fractals: A meandering reflection on twelve months of being elsewhere, writing fragments and lots of plotting. Sabbaticals are known for disrupting well laid plans and mine was no different.
WHEN: 29 August 2019
TIME: 13:00 to 14:00
VENUE: The Pink Room, Level 2, Centlivres Building, Upper Campus, UCT

International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2019
2019-09-10 08:00 - 2019-09-13 17:00 | Unnamed Venue, Gothenburg, Sweden
The International Transdisciplinary Conference 2019, co-organised by the University of Gothenburg and Mistra Urban Futures, takes place 10 to 13 September 2019 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Our societies are facing critical points in their development, where large challenges are becoming increasingly difficult to handle. Numerous conflicts and complexities are surfacing – to which we can see societies responding with fragmentation, intolerance and exclusion. One way to address such developments is through societal transformation processes that implicitly include a variety of interest groups, stakeholders and organisations. Transdisciplinary research is one approach that focuses specifically on co-producing and integrating knowledge and expertise from a variety of sources, including communities, research, cities and businesses. It is an approach that is driven by the need to create processes where values and transformations towards a more just and sustainable society are openly debated.
The aim of this conference, Joining Forces for Change, is to bring together actors from different professional mandates, disciplines and sectors to engage and discuss practical examples and case studies that approach societal transformation through boundary breaking collaboration. The conference invites practitioners and researchers from government and administrative organisations and agencies, interest groups from community and business, and researchers and students from across the university. The overall focus is on what we can learn from our collaborative experiences, case studies and practices regarding wider societal transformation, methodological innovations and theoretical development. We will specifically search for “sites for change” in terms of spaces, practices and learnings where TD research and co-production play a crucial role.
The conference programme will be structure around three streams:
Societal transformation

What experiences in initiating and fostering transformation processes do we have and what can we learn from them?
How can different theories of change contribute to sustainable transformations?
What forms of organising are needed for our institutions, agencies, companies and universities to handle the necessary transformations, with particular reference to collaboration between different types of stakeholders?
What skills and competences are needed by civil servants, researchers and students to co-design and lead processes that target sustainable outcomes?

Methodological innovation

What does individual and organisational learning in change processes – working on, challenging and transgressing borders – look like?
How can universities promote collaborative learning?
How can different types of transdisciplinary pedagogies, research methods and processes of co-production be developed to more effectively contribute to societal transformations?

Theoretical development

How can we imagine and conceptualise a sustainable and inclusive knowledge economy?
What are the core challenges in transdisciplinary research regarding ontological and epistemological issues – what worldviews and paradigms are challenged and what kind of knowledge is included and produced?
How does TD research engage with systems thinking, scenario planning, design thinking and other holistic theories and practices?

Call for contributions
Contributions from all fields and research cultures are invited, particularly submissions from practitioners and from transdisciplinary teams.
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: extended to 31 March 2019
Notice of acceptance: mid-May 2019

For more information go to the conference website.

SDG Seminar Series: SDG indicators for health outcomes in South Africa
2019-09-18 12:30 - 14:00 | Aadil Moerat Seminar Room, Barnard Fuller Room, Health Science Campus, Anzio Road, Observatory, Cape Town . , South Africa
Next up in the ACC seminar series on the Sustainable Development Goals, Associate Professor Salome Maswime will present SDG indicators for health outcomes in South Africa on Wednesday, 18 September 2019 from 12:30 to 14:00.
Maswime is Head of Global Surgery in the Surgery Division at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town.
WHEN: Wednesday, 18 September 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: Aadil Moerat Seminar Room, Barnard Fuller Room, Health Science Campus, Anzio Road, Observatory
RSVP: Please rsvp to clare.jeffrey@uct.ac.za by 13 September 2019

Beyond our borders: Independent art spaces as a lens on city futures
2019-09-26 17:30 - 19:30 | Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, The Old Granary Building, Buitenkant Street, Cape Town, Cape Town , South Africa
Four leading shapers of the contemporary art world from cutting-edge independent spaces on the African continent will next week share their insights and experience in a public panel hosted in central Cape Town.
The panellists, who respectively manage or help direct programming for multidisciplinary contemporary art spaces in Addis Ababa, Cairo, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi respectively, will speak about the work they do and the broader value it has.
Their contributions come at a time of growing global interest in contemporary art from Africa and burgeoning private museums and foundations but also increasing sustainability challenges for non-profits. The panel simultaneously coincides with a national crisis in South Africa around xenophobic attacks and gender-based violence, which gives extra resonance to hearing the compelling voices of four women from beyond our borders.
The discussion panel, on Thursday 26 September at 18:00, is organised by University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (ACC), which hosts a research project on the topic, called Platform. The panellists comprise the project’s key participants, whom ACC has brought to Cape Town for a two-day workshop to inform final outcomes. Prof Achille Mbembe from Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, a well known theorist and philosopher, will chair the discussion.
Prof Edgar Pieterse, the Director of the ACC, said that despite limited resources, artists are sustaining vital institutions in their cities to ensure that there are spaces for engagement with urban dynamics from an artistic perspective. This greatly enriches and extends the quality of the public sphere, pointing to novel questions and insights.
“ACC believes that it is impossible to foster a rounded understanding of contemporary urbanism in Africa without engaging the perspectives and practices of African artists, especially those who operate within and through artist-led spaces dedicated to autonomy and expression.” By hosting the event, ACC was creating an opportunity to learn from the determined practices in key nodes in Africa, Pieterse added. “Political and policy discussions in South Africa often fail to appreciate the important role the arts play in giving expression to the unsayable and the unthinkable,” says Pieterse
Dr Kim Gurney, the researcher behind the project, identified and visited these participant spaces – plus one more in Accra, Ghana (ANO Institute) – at different times over the past year to come to grips with their working principles. They are all navigating conditions of flux in some of Africa’s fastest urbanising cities, she said. “Their emergent forms and strategies can help unlock new ways of thinking and doing with deep resonance for others in comparable places and spaces.”
The discussion panel is hosted at the newly refurbished Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation at the Old Granary Building on Buitenkant Street. The evening event is open to the public and free; all are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

The discussion panel comprises:

Meskerem Assegued – Curator of numerous exhibitions both in Ethiopia and abroad and a cultural anthropologist. Together with artist Elias Sime, Meskerem co-founded and co-directs Zoma Museum (Addis Ababa), an environmentally conscious art institution recently relaunched;
Rebecca Corey – The Director of Nafasi Art Space (Dar es Salaam), a creative hub and centre for contemporary visual and performing arts which provides a meeting point for intensive dialogue between artists and the public;
Mariam Elnozahy – Curator, archivist, and writer based in Cairo, who focuses primarily on critical, community-based work and is Programme Manager at Townhouse Gallery (Cairo);
Joy Mboya – Executive Director of The GoDown Arts Centre (Nairobi), a multidisciplinary national and regional focal point for artistic experimentation, cross-sector partnerships and creative collaboration;
Edgar Pieterse [panel chair] – Director of the African Centre for Cities and South African Research Chair in Urban Policy.

WHEN: Thursday 26 September 2019
TIME: 17h30 for 18h00 start
WHERE: Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, The Old Granary Building, Buitenkant Street, Cape Town – entrance on cnr Longmarket and Harrington streets
Google map: https://goo.gl/maps/ukM81xiP7NwmyL7o9
IMAGE CREDIT: On the move at the GoDown Arts Centre, Nairobi. by Kim Gurney

Collapse: Grey development and fake buildings in Nairobi
2019-10-08 15:00 - 16:30 | Davies Reading Room, Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8000, South Africa
Visiting scholar Constance Smith from Social Anthropology at The University of Manchester presents Collapse: Grey development and fake buildings in Nairobi, on Tuesday, 8 October 2019, at 15:00.
ABSTRACT
Nairobi has recently experienced a spate of residential tower block collapses resulting in significant casualties. In an attempt to understand this precarious architecture, I juxtapose two different, yet linked, construction booms currently reshaping the city. The Kenyan government development rubric Vision 2030 is re-envisioning Nairobi as a ‘world class’ city of spectacular infrastructure and gleaming high-rise buildings. At the same time, ad hoc property speculation is constructing high density, poor-quality tower blocks that pose a high risk of structural failure; buildings that Nairobians often describe as ‘fake’. Drawing on literature in African Studies about the power of fakes and the counterfeit, as well as on recent debates in Urban Studies problematising informality, I reflect on Nairobi’s drastic landscape of architectural failure, and how this is entangled with larger processes of urban transformation.
ABOUT
Constance Smith is a UKRI Future Leader Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK, where she also works within the Urban Institute. Her work explores the social, political and material dynamics of urban landscapes in times of transformation. She has done fieldwork in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kampala and London. Her new book, Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of time and urban belonging (James Currey, 2019) explores how the residues of colonial architecture shape self-making and city-making in contemporary Nairobi.
WHEN: Tuesday, 8 October 2019
TIME: 15:00 – 16:30
VENUE: Davies Reading Room, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Realising Just Cities conference week
2019-10-13 - 2019-10-18 | Unnamed Venue, Sheffield , United Kingdom
The 4th Annual Realising Just Cities Conference takes place in Sheffield, UK from 13-18 October 2019. The conference focuses on lessons, impacts and outcomes since the start of Mistra Urban Futures (MUF) in 2010 but with particular emphasis on the current 2016-19 phase of closer international collaborative and comparative research now ending.
MUF has sought to co-produce knowledge and action to support sustainable urban development across cities in the Global North and South, working through Local Interaction Platforms and other forms of partnership that bring together researchers from different stakeholders in transdisciplinary teams.
The conference is hosted by the Sheffield-Manchester Local Interaction Platform and will include representatives from partner cities in Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Gothenburg, Kisumu, Malmö, Shimla, and Stockholm.
The Week at a Glance

Sunday 13th October, 1830-2030, Welcome Drinks and Reception, Sheffield Winter Gardens. Detailed Programme.
Monday 14th October, 0900-1700, Comparative Project Work, Lunch and Sheffield Walking Tours. Detailed Programme.
Tuesday 15th October, 0815-1800, Open Conference with parallel sessions, Lunch and Conference Dinner. Detailed Programme.
Wednesday 16th October, 0730-2100, Coaches to Manchester field trips and workshops with Lunch and Networking Dinner in Manchester and coaches back to Sheffield. Detailed Programme.
Thursday 17th October, 0900-1700, Board meeting, Some comparative project workshops, Keynote lecture and Lunch. Detailed Programme.
Friday 18th October, 0900-1200, LIP-directors meeting, Some comparative project workshops. Detailed Programme.

This page is only intended for Mistra Urban Futures delegates already associated with our city teams and who have been invited. Not a Mistra Urban Futures delegate? Head over to our Open Conference page, where you can find more information about how you can participate.

The city/psychosis nexus beyond epidemiology and social constructivism
2019-10-15 12:30 - 14:00 | Davies Reading Room, Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8000, South Africa
Visiting scholar Ola Söderström from University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland presents a lecture entitled: The city/psychosis nexus beyond epidemiology and social constructivism on Tuesday, 15 October from 12:30 to 14:00.
ABSTRACT
My talk draws on a recently completed interdisciplinary research project involving geographers, psychiatrists and linguists in the study of the relations between urban living and psychosis. Our research originates in the now long-standing observation that there is a higher prevalence of cases of psychosis in dense urban areas. Particularly interesting in the context of this talk and discussion at the ACC is that recent epidemiological studies point to the fact that this phenomenon is generally not observed in cities of the Global South. What was for long described as a universal relation between mental health and urbanism has now been provincialized.
My aim will be first to explain why the question of the city/psychosis nexus has recently come to the fore not only in epidemiological research in psychiatry but also in the more-than-constructivist approaches of scholars trying to identify and practice new alliances between the life and the social sciences. Second, I will walk you through two moments – an epistemic and an ontological one – in our research process to describe how we explored such new alliances by co-designing and co-experimenting across disciplines. Thirdly, I will discuss our research findings and how they emerged from methodological triangulations. I will conclude by evoking present developments of this interdisciplinary process and how they relate to contemporary discussions on the study of bio-social entanglements.
ABOUT
Ola Söderström is professor of social and cultural geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His work draws on science and technology studies, postcolonial urban studies and visual studies. His research has notably analysed the role of visual representations in urban planning, urban policy mobilities in cities of the Global South, smart urbanism, and the relations between urban living and psychosis. His books and edited collections include: Des images pour agir. Le visuel en urbanisme, Payot, 2000; Cities in Relations. Trajectories of Urban Development in Hanoi and Ouagadougou, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014; Reshaping Cities. How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Forms, Routledge, 2009 (co-edited with Michael Guggenheim); Critical Mobilities, Routledge, 2013 (co-edited with Shalini Randeria, Didier Ruedin, Gianni D’Amato and Francesco Panese).
WHEN: Tuesday, 15 October 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: Davies Reading Room, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Financing infrastructure in cities of the global South
2019-10-17 09:30 - 17:00 | Sheffield Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Liza Rose Cirolia, Tom Goodfellow and Jonathan Silver present Financing infrastructure in cities of the global South, a full-day workshop on 17 October 2019 at the Urban Institute (The University of Sheffield, UK).
The ‘infrastructure turn’ within Urban Studies has resulted in growing scholarly attention on the importance of infrastructure (such as water, energy, transport and the like) in the everyday life and governing of cities. Such work has been used to think through the broader social and political dimensions of urbanisation and the challenges of urban service provision across rapidly urbanizing regions.
Fiscal and financial issues feature in some of this research on infrastructure (for example in the recent work on financialization, of the investments required for delivering Sustainable Development Goals). However, detailed attention to the complexities of finance are often overlooked or simplified. In more conventional structural accounts, finance is given an overpowering and almost mythical position. In contrast, in much of the more relational work on urban infrastructure, finance is only briefly touched on, ignoring the range of new mechanisms being mobilised by city governments. From carbon finance to municipal bonds to public-private partnerships, new tax regimes and cost-recovery schemes, alongside the growth of private capital flows and new forms of financialized infrastructure, the financial geographies of rapidly urbanizing cities remain a complex patchwork.
Moreover, the financial stories and narratives which are produced on cities often focus on Western/Northern contexts (for example, by centring the 2008 financial crisis as a crucial, global historical moment and ignoring decades of structural adjustment). While certainty important, this framing creates huge gaps, particularly in the experiences of regions, countries, and cities which are only partially (if at all) connected to the global financial system. In these same contexts, infrastructure systems are more heterogeneous and less networked and financial transactions relating to infrastructure often play out at the scale of the community. These fiscal challenges and circulations of investment create particular relations with urban governance regimes and shape the possibilities of urban regions in delivering safe, fully-functioning and universal infrastructure services.
To explore these issues this workshop seeks to focus attention on:

The specificities and complexities of the relations between infrastructure and finance.
Critical research on new investments into infrastructure across urban regions.
Fiscal challenges of mega cities or small cities/towns for infrastructure investment.
The growth of new municipal financial mechanisms incorporating bonds, various forms of loans, cost-recovery programs, investments, tax regimes.
A new wave of neoliberal, financialized mechanisms and public-private partnerships transforming urban governance.
Innovative and progressive new financial tools such as P2P, basic income grants through to demands for paying carbon debt.
Financial investments into ‘hybrid’ infrastructures especially across informal urban space.
Methodologies and tools for tracing infrastructure-finance configurations.
How these dynamics play out in Southern cities and urban areas and with what implications.

We aim to bring together scholars who are interested in creative approaches to studying finance and infrastructure, drawing insights from their own projects and research in global South urban regions, and sharing work-in-progress to get feedback and comment. The workshop will provide an informal space to share work, ideas, research projects and discuss pathways for strengthening research in this area.
WHEN: 17 October 2019
TIME: 09:30 for 10:00 to 17:00
WHERE: Urban Institute, The University of Sheffield, UK
If you are interested in attending, please contact workshop organisers
Liza Rose Cirolia (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za) or Tom Goodfellow (t.goodfellow@sheffield.ac.uk) or (Jonathan Silver (j.silver@sheffield.ac.uk)

SDG SEMINAR: Citizen-centric approaches to achieving the SDGs in Africa: reflections from practice
2019-10-23 12:30 - 14:00 | John Martin Boardroom, New Engineering Building, Cape Town
Namhla Mniki will present Citizen-centric approaches to achieving the SDGs in Africa: reflections from practice on 23 October, from 12:30 to 14:00 as part of ACC’s on-going SDG Seminar series.
Namhla Mniki is a global development strategist leading African Monitor, an entity working to eradicate poverty, to create economic opportunities, and to empower African citizens to drive the achievement of sustainable development goals in Africa.
She specialises in citizen-centric sustainable approaches to development that promote accountable leadership and good governance in Africa and beyond. Namhla is a global activist and speaker, having addressed high-level audiences from the United Nations to Heads of State in Africa and Europe. She has worked extensively with various arms of the United Nations, including her current role as Cepei’s Expert Panel on United Nations Regional Review. She is a patron for the Africa Youth SDGs Summit, a Global Peer Review Expert for the German government, and a member of the expert team for the Africa Progress Group and the World Economic Forum Africa.
Her latest work focusses on increasing knowledge of and building capacity for co-creation and collaboration across government, business and civil society to implement sustainable development strategies. She has a strong belief that a new paradigm of development delivery can benefit the world, focusing on innovation, collaboration, multi-sectoralism, co-creation, and broad participation.
WHEN: 23 October 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: John Martin Boardroom, Level 5, New Engineering Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Travels between the digital and material: Curating the gendered city from the margins
2019-11-01 13:00 - 14:00 | Room 3.33, Centlivres Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Berlin , Germany
The School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics is hosting Ayona Datta, who will present Travels between the digital and material: Curating the gendered city from the margins on Friday, 1 November at 13:00 in Room 3.33, Level 3, Centlivres Building, Upper Campus, UCT.
This talk presents a gendered perspective of Delhi’s urban future produced and curated by young women living in slum resettlement colonies in the peripheries. Using the metaphor of #aanajaana [#ComingGoing] as a paradigm for postcolonial urbanism, this paper argues that their everyday mobility across the home and the city reflect the paradox of belonging and exclusion in a digital urban age. The paper captures the ambiguities and paradoxes of their lives – on the one hand living as second generation rural migrants forcefully evicted from the city slums in the 2000s and resettled in the peripheries. On the other hand, as millennials with increased access to mobile and communication technologies, these women are also riding the digital urban age with promises of their inclusion in the future city. Using WhatsApp diaries entries of multimedia content (audio recordings, photographs, videos and text messages by women), conversations between the women and researchers as well as observations of the dynamics within the WhatsApp group over a period of 6 months, I suggest that #AanaJaana highlights the inherent slow violence of living between material and digital exclusions from the city.
BIOGRAPHY
Ayona Datta is a Professor in the Department of Geography at University College London. Her broad research interests are in postcolonial urbanism, smart cities, gender citizenship and urban futures. In particular, she is interested in how cities seek to transform themselves through utopian urban visions of the future and their impacts on everyday social, material and gendered geographies. She uses interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, planning, feminist and urban geography, combining qualitative, digital/mapping and visual research methods to examine urbanisation and urban development as experiments in urban ‘futuring’. For her contributions to an understanding of smart cities through fieldwork she received the Busk Medal from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in 2019.

MPhil Southern Urbanism - a celebration of the first cohort
2019-11-07 14:00 - 19:00 | Davies Reading Room, Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8000, South Africa
Join us to celebrate and share the work of the first cohort of MPhil Southern Urbanism graduates, along with their first year colleagues.
WHEN: Thursday, 7 November
TIME: 14:00 to 17:00 with drinks and snacks afterwards
VENUE: Davies Reading Room, EGS Building, UCT
RSVP by Monday 4 November, to khaya.salman@uct.ac.za
PROGRAMME
Reflections on Thesis Work: 2nd Year Graduating MPhil Students

Thesis research artefacts
Fieldwork stories
Arguments and contributions
Finding a voice in urban studies

Discussion
Forthcoming Thesis Research: 1st Year Students

Discussants:
Anna Selmeczi – Mphil Southern Urbanisms Convenor
Sophie Oldfield – Professor of Urban Studies
Edgar Pieterse – Director ACC, Professor of Urban Policy

Global Agendas and Urban Equality: Exploring synthesis, connections and contestations
2019-11-08 12:30 - 13:30 | Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa
Join ACC on Friday, 8 November at 12:30 for a special seminar session entitled Global Agendas and Urban Equality: Exploring synthesis, connections and contestations. ACC Director Edgar Pieterse will be in conversation with Michele Acuto, Director of the Connected Cities Lab, The University of Melbourne, and Winnie Mitullah Director of Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. The discussion will be chaired by Stephanie Butcher, a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Connected Cities Lab.
While great strides have been made in recent years to help place the urban more firmly on international development agendas, questions remain as to how, and in what ways, global policy can be operationalised at an urban scale. Bringing together leading thinkers on urbanisation this moderated discussion will explore the scalar connections between global processes and policy agendas and their material, political and social impacts across urban environments in the global South.
WHEN: Friday, 8 November
TIME: 12:30 to 13:30
VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

BIOGRAPHIES
Professor Michele Acuto is an expert on urban politics and international urban planning. Michele is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a Senior Fellow of the Bosch Foundation Global Governance Futures Program.
Before joining the Faculty, Michele was Director of the City Leadership Lab and Professor of Diplomacy and Urban Theory at University College London, having previously worked as Stephen Barter Fellow of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities at the University of Oxford. He also taught at the University of Canberra, University of Southern California, Australian National University and National University of Singapore. Outside academia, Michele worked for the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds, the European Commission’s response to pandemic threats. He also has worked for several years on city leadership and city networks with, amongst others, Arup, World Health Organization, World Bank Group, the C40 Climate Leadership Group, and UN-Habitat.
Professor Winnie V. Mitullah is the current Director and Associate Research Professor of Development Studies at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), and the Director Gender Affairs, University of Nairobi. She holds a PhD in Political Science and Public Administration from the University of York, UK. Her PhD thesis was on Urban Housing, with a major focus on policies relating to low income housing. Over the years, she has researched and consulted in the areas of governance, in particular in the area of provision and management of urban services and the role of stakeholders in development. Her focus in these areas has included an examination of policies, and institutional dynamics in relation to local level development, including that of devolved governments, Micro and Small Enterprises [SMEs], public and Non Motorised Transport (NMT), gender, youth and media.
Dr. Stephanie Butcher is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Connected Cities lab. She is a part of the ‘Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality’ (KNOW) project, a global consortium which seeks to deliver transformative research and capacity in policy and planning that will promote and strengthen pathways to urban equality. Previous to this post, she worked with the Development Planning Unit (DPU) at the University College London as a Teaching Fellow, convening courses focused on the themes of participatory planning, urban inequality, and gender and diversity in the Global South. Her doctoral thesis was shaped by principles of action-research, and focused on the ‘everyday politics’ of water infrastructure for informal settlement residents in Kathmandu, Nepal. It examined the micro-politics of how gender, tenure relations, and ethnicity shaped how diverse residents interacted with the socio-technical aspects of infrastructure, impacting a sense of citizenship.

IMAGE CREDIT: Unequal Scenes by Johnny Miller

Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW): The challenges of translocal knowledge co-production
2019-11-15 12:30 - 14:00 | Davies Reading Room, Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8000, South Africa
Join ACC as we host Caren Levy, Camila Cocina and Alex Frediani from KNOW on Friday, 15 November, 12:30 to 14:00, in the Davies Reading Room, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT.
This talk, chaired by Vanessa Watson will introduce the KNOW programme, a 4-year research and capacity building programme funded by GCRF which works with 13 organisation across 12 cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The talk will reflect on its partnerships, operational principles and the interface between research and practice. It will draw on the KNOW work done so far as it approaches the end of its second year. We hope that this session will open up an opportunity to exchange experiences of collaborative initiatives addressing urban equality.
WHEN: Friday, 15 November 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: Davies Reading Room, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

BIOGRAPHIES
Caren Levy is the Principal Investigator (PI) on the GCRF funded project, Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW), and Professor of Transformative Urban Planning at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL. Her research focuses on community-led approaches to planning and governance of transport and infrastructure, housing and land in cities in the global South. Levy has a special interest in the institutionalisation of social justice in policy and planning, particularly related to the cross-cutting issues of gender, diversity, and environment. She has 35 years’ experience of teaching, research, training and consultancy, developing innovatory approaches to planning methodology, planning education and capacity-building. Her works engages with communities, governments and international organisations both in London and abroad in a range of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Camila Cocina is a Research Fellow in the working package ‘Translating Research into Practice’ for KNOW. We focus on investigating the challenges of knowledge translation processes at the global and local levels, and support city research partners to influence policy and planning practices. Cocina is an urbanist and architect with a PhD in Development Planning and MSc Building & Urban Design in Development, from The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. She’s worked as a practitioner, researcher, and teacher in Chile and the UK, with experience of fieldwork and teaching in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Her practice has focused primarily on urban development, housing policies, participatory urban design, urban informality, and housing reconstruction; and she’s worked both in academic institutions as well as in independent NGOs. She has a special interest in linking research, advocacy, planning practices, and policies. Cocina’s PhD research focused on the challenges faced by housing policies in reducing urban inequalities, in the Chilean context.
Alex Frediani is a Senior Lecturer at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit. He also co-direct the MSc in Social Development Practice and direct the DPUs communications. In KNOW, he leadsWork Package 4, which focuses on translating research into practice to advance urban equality. His research interests include the application of Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach in development practice; participatory planning and design; as well as housing and informal settlement upgrading. Frediani has collaborated with academics and grassroots collectives in Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and South Africa. Apart from research and action learning initiatives, he has provided consultancy for international development donors and agencies such as Oxfam, Comic Relief, Practical Action and UNDP. He is a founding and board member of the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC). He is also on the board of Habitat International Coalition and an associate of Architecture Sans Frontières–UK.

Relaunch: Cityscapes Magazine
2019-11-19 17:30 - 19:00 | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town, South Africa
African Centre for Cities invites you to the relaunch of Cityscapes Magazine on 19 November 2019, 17:30 at The Book Lounge. The new issue is themed ‘Passages’ is a collection of stories that explore the nature(s) of movement, the impact it has on how we live and who we are, as well as the lives that are made – mobile and immobile – after the passage.
People move. That is what we do. We move our bodies, move house, neighbourhood; we move across and through borders. We move because we want to and sometimes because we need to. To be with or away from family, to adventure and experience new things, on pilgrimage, to escape, learn, and sometimes to return home when it calls us. We move through space, we move up(becoming wealthier, more affluent),down (becoming materially more impoverished), we also move ideas and resources. We move to work, to search, to find, and sometimes to lose.
We move… It’s in our nature and has been since time immemorial.
Yet, as the world becomes better connected, moving has become a challenging and divisive experience at every scale you can imagine. We are building and strengthening physical borders to keep those we feel are “not worthy” from occupying the same spaces we do, while inviting the “desirable” – the educated, “clever”, connected, wealthy and talented – in. Our interest is in where people move to, and why. Also, how ideas and capital circulate, traverse borders, and what the impacts are once “there”. This is the reason we have produced this issue. The ninth issue of Cityscapes and our new tagline—Urbanism Beyond Geography—marks a re-launch, after a hiatus (of sorts).
As the abundance of figures being released on the topic attests, we have been moving to cities – everywhere. The magnetism of places larger than where we are from has attracted legions – for centuries – and is now just part of the human story. Cities are not a new construct, and moving to them is really not that new a phenomenon. What’s different is the scale. In many economies, cities are the places where opportunities lie, where dreams can be fulfilled—or dashed, but still given a chance—if you’re one of the lucky ones. We will always move to such places. Some inner instinct demands that we do.
What we have to figure out is how we live together once we get there. How the resources we have can be more equitably shared, and what we do when they are not. What do we do when the assets we have fuel distributional conflicts, understandably, with those who have been dealt a bad hand and have little to lose?
We have dug up stories that explore the nature(s) of movement, the impact it has on how we live and who we are, as well as the lives that are made – be they mobile or immobile – after the passage. It seems we move so that we are able to move some more. We move so we can “do better”, jump from one station in life to another. We become mobile hoping that it will expand our choices and send us ever onward.
Between these covers, we have tried to explore the question of what happens when we move to where we desire, or leave where we cannot be any more. In a “new” place, whether it’s for the short or long haul, how do we keep the ideas we hold dear? How do we, as “newcomers”, maintain the cultures that define us? How can we embrace our new situation in a manner that changes both us and our new settings?
Often, the “new” is old too. It seeks to hold on to its idea of self and wants to be loved and embraced on its own terms. It does not want to lose itself to the influence of newcomers – reinforcements of sorts – that, willingly or not, are its lifeblood.
