African Centre for Cities presents its annual seminar series by the Notations of Theories of Radical Urban Change (NOTRUC) project. The 2017 series is entitled 'Thinking Emancipatory Change from Cape Town, Nairobi to New Orleans'.
Is urban segregation simply a fact of contemporary life? Are the shopping mall and gated community to blame for new forms of urban division? What role does the real estate market play in reproducing urban patterns? Is middle-class suburbia deracializing or not? Does public investment in housing and social amenities worsen or improve urban divides? Do BRT systems help or hinder urban integration? Who, if anyone, can make a difference in altering spacial patterns of the city? It is arguable that South African cities are more divided today compared to 1994. How can this be? Why are we seemingly unable to shift the contours of division and live differently? Edgar Pieterse will review the drivers of contemporary urban divides and explore the reasons why policy after policy since 1994 say the “right” things but achieve the opposite outcome. He will place his discussion in the context of the nature of both public and private investments into South African cities and illustrate the talk with data and policy experiments in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Pieterse will conclude by putting forward what some of the preconditions for genuine urban transformation might be. Date: 28 November 2018 Time: Doors open at 18:30, no admittance after 20:00. Venue: The Orbit, Braamfontein, Johannesburg Entrance to the event: R20. No registration is necessary but guests are strongly encouraged to arrive early. Dinner is served from 18:00. Guests wishing to have dinner before the event should book in advance with The Orbit and arrive by 18:30. (Last orders for dinner at 19:15 to make it to the event). Directions to the venue.
The last instalment of the annual ACC NOTRUC Seminar Series is presented by Dr Nate Millington on Producing water scarcity in São Paulo, Brazil: The 2014 Water Crisis and the Binding Politics of Infrastructure at 15:00 in Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town. ABSTRACT In 2014, political intransigence combined with a severe drought to push São Paulo, Brazil, to the edge of a profound water crisis. In this paper, I consider the response to the crisis on behalf of the state government, focusing on both the way that the crisis was narrated as well as responded to. I consider the suite of actions taken to cope with scarcity, focusing specifically on the state’s employment of pressure reductions in the water pipes as opposed to a formal rationing. I argue that despite the state government’s claims that only a small minority was going without water, the reality was that residents of the urban periphery were facing consistent water shortages. I argue that these shortages are representative of a form of infrastructural politics, in which the seemingly most technically viable solutions to the crisis exacerbated inequality due to the inequity that is built into the city’s hydrological infrastructure itself. I conclude by thinking of the city’s crisis as indicative of the changing nature of daily life in contemporary cities in the wake of climate change at both the local and global scale. More on the full seminar series here. More on the NOTRUC programme here.