African Centre for Cities

LSX - WP Training
2020-07-25 08:00 - 2020-07-26 17:00, 2020-07-18 08:00 - 2020-07-19 17:00, 2020-07-11 08:00 - 2020-07-12 17:00, 2020-07-04 08:00 - 2020-07-05 17:00, 2020-06-27 08:00 - 2020-06-28 17:00, 2020-06-20 08:00 - 2020-06-21 17:00, 2020-06-13 08:00 - 2020-06-14 17:00 (Africa/Johannesburg) | UCT, Seminar Room 1 Chemical Engineering, UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

Book launch: Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa
2020-02-27 17:30 | Breezeblock Cafe, 29 Chiswick Street, Johannesburg, South Africa
The South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning within the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, the Chair in Local Histories and Present Realities at the History Workshop, also at Wits, and the African Centre for Cities at UCT would like to invite you to the joint launch of Njogu Morgan and Alexandra Halligey’s new books, with guest speakers, Ruth Oldenziel and Terry Kurgan.
Cycling Cities: The Johannesburg Experience by Njogu Morgan and Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa: Place and Play in Johannesburg by Alexandra Halligey will be jointly launched on 27 February at the Breezeblock Cafe, Johannesburg.
Ruth Oldenziel, Professor in The History of Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology and programme leader of Cycling Cities: The Global Experience will speak to Morgan’s book while Terry Kurgan, artist and writer based in Johannesburg, editor and partner of Fourthwall Books and Research Associate of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, will focus on Halligey’s title.

DATE: Thursday, 27th February
TIME: 17:00 for 17:30
VENUE: Breezeblock Café, 29 Chiswick Street, Brixton
Please RSVP to alexandra.halligey@wits.ac.za by 24 February for catering and parking purposes.

Non-Motorised Transport Capabilities and Needs in Sub-Saharan African Cities
2020-02-27 14:00 - 16:00 | 4th Floor Boardroom, New Engineering Building, Cape Town , South Africa
Join ACC’s researcher Sean Cooke for an open discussion on non-motorised transport capabilities and needs in Sub-saharan African cities. The two-hour session will start with a presentation by Bianca Ryseck on the capabilities approach and its applications to mobility followed by an open discussion to further understanding NMT needs of vulnerable groups through their capabilities.
WHEN: Thursday, 27 February 2020
TIME: 14:00 to 16:00
VENUE: 4th Floor Boardroom, New Engineering Building, Upper Campus, UCT
RSVP: sean.cooke@uct.ac.za
Refreshments will be served.

Academic Seminar: The edge economies of migration
2020-02-25 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 Suzanne Hall for a special academic seminar entitled The edge economies of migration on Tuesday, 25 February 2020 from 12:30 to 14:00 in the Davies Reading Room, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT. Camalita Naicker, of the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town will act as a respondent.
ABSTRACT
‘Edge Economies’ emerge in the asymmetries of global migration and the ongoing ferocities of urban marginalisation. From the grounded perspective of street economies formed in the peripheries of post-industrial UK cities, I explore the racialised frameworks of citizenship and economic inequality and their everyday contestations. I locate the global and urban formations of the edge in the European ideologies of displacement and immobility, incorporating the extended coloniality of political interventionism and human subordination. By moving between spaces of globe, state and street, I further explore the edge as a capricious space in which social sorting, cultural intermixtures and claims to difference are forged. Such combinations encourage connections between the histories and geographies of how people and places become bordered, together with practices of edge economies that are both marginal and transgressive.
BIOGRAPHY
Suzanne Hall is a Co-director of the Cities Programme and Associate Professor in Sociology at the LSE. Suzi’s research interests engage with the street life of brutal borders, migrant economies and urban multi-culture.
WHEN: Tuesday, 25 February 2020
TIME: 12:30 – 14:00
VENUE: Davies Reading Room, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Cities of integrity – innovative approaches to tackling corruption and cultivating a culture of integrity, trust and openness in urban development
2020-02-09 14:00 - 16:00 | Hall 2, Room 1, Abu Dhabi , United Arab Emirates
Cities of Integrity project hosts a panel discussion at the World Urban Forum in Abu Dhabi, on Sunday, 9 February 2020 from 14:00 to 16:00.
Urban innovation flows from multiple actors securely, independently seeking opportunities for improvement of their livelihoods, their homes and their social fabric. Urban development that is underpinned by a culture of integrity, transparency and accountability is an essential condition minimising the risks that would otherwise block this innovation and investment. You may plan and wish for a prosperous, inclusive, equitable, resilient or sustainable city but if norms of integrity and openness are corroded by corruption none of these aspirations can be achieved. Our event will provide a platform to raise our shared understanding of the urban corruption risks at hand. We will discuss the latest facts and figures related to the major integrity challenges in urban development, their scale, scope and development over time in the cities of both the global north and south. At least equally important we will take this empirical overview as a point of departure to embark on a joint exploration of the innovative tools and approaches available to build and nurture strong cultures of integrity at the city scale. By weaving together insights and perspectives from urban planners, architects and urban policy-makers on the one side and experts and practitioners on transparency, integrity and governance we will launch an inspirational, interactive conversation around the many practical tools and innovative levers that can be activated to architect and nurture such cultures of urban integrity. Questions to explore with the audience include: what are the major ”integrity vulnerabilities” in urban development? What strategies to promote urban cultures of integrity have been found to be effective so far? What roles can the professional community of urban planners and architects play in addressing these integrity risks? What is a realistic contribution that new technologies can make beyond the hype that surrounds them? What responsibility falls to the private sector and what practical action is already coming from the business side? How can the creativity of urban place-making be harnessed? We will seek to explore these questions not just through a set of inspirational panel presentations but also by tapping into the expertise and creativity of the audience through interactive conversation formats. The aim is to provoke new thinking around these issues and plant the seeds for much needed new partnerships around urban integrity issues that harness the expertise and commitment of a diverse set of urban stakeholders.
MODERATOR
Adi Kumar – Development Action Group, South Africa
PANELISTS
Gilbert Siame – Centre for Urban Research and Planning, University of Zambia
Jennifer Bretana – Hivos, Philippines
Dieter Zinnbauer – African Center for Cities, South Africa and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Alex Warnock-Smith – Central Saint Martins, United Kingdom
WHEN: Sunday, 9 February 2020
TIME: 14:00 to 16:00
VENUE: Hall 2, Room 1, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Contested Knowledges for Just Urban Futures
2019-12-10 10:00 - 17:00 | Channing Hall, 45 Surrey Street, Sheffield, United Kingdom
For urban scholars to be committed to more just urban futures is not new; yet the conditions and contexts from and in which academics engage are constantly changing. From means concerning ourselves with the context of the university itself, the distancing and / or proximity afforded by the university, the dynamics of the spaces from which we engage and the implications for our understanding of and relationships between knowledge and action. In means recognising that a commitment and/or engagement to realising just urban futures is often practiced in the interstices, boundaries or margins of intersecting domains, in liminal spaces between the university and the urban context.

Working from and in these different spaces requires reflexive engagement (May and Perry 2017) and adaptiveness and creativity in academic practice, as knowledge claims are challenged and contested in intentional and unanticipated ways. A range of issues are brought into focus: how we think about time, space, positionality and power; how competing or contesting knowledge claims affect our sense of belonging and our commitment; if (and how) these are mediated through inter-referential reflexivity. We need to pay attention to the peculiarities of these spaces and how these are navigated, negotiated and with what effects. This seminar asks: How does our commitment to just urban futures specifically manifest in practice, in the context of the wider co-productive turn and interest in different ideas about what it means to be an ‘engaged’ academic?
Event details

Tuesday, December 10, 2019 – 10:00 to 17:00

Channing Hall, 45 Surrey Street, Sheffield S1 2LG
This seminar is explicitly aimed at established academic researchers working in universities, with a commitment to socially just and sustainable futures, to share and learn from practice. It will take place over one day with propositions, presentations and discussions and include an early evening dinner (1730-1900).

The seminar is organised by Professors Tim May and Beth Perry with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Realising Just Cities Programme (https://realisingjustcities-rjc.org/). It is also part of the Urban Institute’s Co-producing Urbanisms theme.
Provocations will be made by

Professor Beth Perry, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield
Dr Zarina Patel, University of Cape Town
Dr Michele Lancione, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield
Professor Felicity Callard, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, University of London
Dr Sally Lloyd Evans, University of Reading
Professor Rowland Atkinson, Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield
Dr Lee Crookes, Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield
Dr Hayley Bennett, University of Edinburgh and Dr Richard Brunner, University of Glasgow
Professor Doina Petrescu, University of Sheffield

Click here for a detailed seminar programme and abstracts.
Places will be limited and booking is essential. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to v.l.simpson@sheffield.ac.uk with name, university and a couple of lines on your urban research and engagement activity.

EXHIBITION: It all starts with me
2019-12-05 16:00 - 18:00 | The New Lecture Theatre, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 7700, South Africa
You are invited to a pop-up exhibition and book launch of the Youth, Identity and the City project together with Rosca Warries, Kirstin Warries, Dane Van Rooyen and TPA Youth for Change, on Thursday 5 December from 16:00.
It all starts with me is a one-day exhibition based on the African Centre for Cities research project Youth, Identity and the City led by researcher Mercy Brown-Luthango, which engaged 13 out-of-school and unemployed young people from Mitchell’s Plain, Philippi and Gugulethu in a process of self-reflection using photography as a tool. The focus was on the role of young people in cities; how they understand their position, community, identity and location (spatially, emotionally and socially) in relation to the city as a whole, in this case Cape Town.
As part of this process, led by noDREAD Productions and their photography workshop design Image vs Truth, each participant was furnished with two disposable cameras to capture photographs of the communities where they live as well as historical places visited in the city. As one of the final outputs of the project, with guidance from Rosca Warries, Kirstin Warries and Dane Van Rooyen, the young people undertook a process of curating an exhibition of these photographs. All the photographs are part of a moving exhibition from the University of Cape Town, for the launch, to Phillipi Village and Tafelsig Library where the participants’ peers and community can engage and encounter their messages and photographs of hope.
WHEN: Thursday, 5th December 2019
TIME: 16:00 to 18:00
VENUE: The New Lecture Theatre, Upper Campus, UCT
RSVP: shakira.jeppie@uct.ac.za

Governance and politics of harnessing urbanisation for Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban development
2019-12-03 12:30 - 14:00 | Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa
Visiting scholar Prof Winnie Mitullah, of the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Nairobi will present a seminar entitled Governance and politics of harnessing urbanisation for Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban development, on Tuesday, 3 December at 12:30 to 14:00 in Studio 3, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT. The session will be chaired by senior researcher Dr Liza Rose Cirolia.
Urbanisation in Africa has attracted attention of scholars, policy makers and practitioners, but problems of urbanisation are seemingly insurmountable and are not being adequately addressed. African cities are rapidly growing but contrary to conventional patterns, the population growth is not matched by economic growth and development. This inconsistency has resulted in the persistence of spatial, demographic, social, cultural, economic and environmental problems, which have diverted attention of the continent to studying and highlighting the problems of urbanisation, and theories which explain problems. This has left a gap in analysis in respect to harnessing opportunities for consolidating urbanisation and urban development. The seminar is part of a larger paper focusing on harnessing Africa’s urbanisation for sustainable urban development, concentrating on understanding how the unique aspects of Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation, existing opportunities and related disruptions are being governed for Africa’s urban development.
The seminar will provide context and review some of the explanations and related theories used to explain Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation. This is aimed at setting the ground for exploring governance attributes and related politics which advance or undermine Africa’s urban development. A key question for exploration is how governance and politics enable or undermine tapping urbanisation opportunities for sustainable urban development. Transport infrastructure in the city of Cape Town and the city of Nairobi is used to dig out inherent governance and related politics which shroud the development of urban areas in Africa. The seminar will concentrate on the first part of this research which include review of context, urban growth, theoretical lenses and overview of mediation of transport infrastructure for sustainable urban development.
WHEN: 3 December 2019
TIME: 12:30 to 14:00
VENUE: Studio 3, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT
BIOGRAPHY
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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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
