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'.
African Centre for Cities Director Prof Edgar Pieterse will be one of the speakers at the Falling Walls Conference, 8 to 9 November 2017, Berlin. His talk is entitled How Urban Studies Envision the New Era of the Metropolis. The Falling Walls Conference is an annual global gathering of forward thinking individuals from 80 countries organised by the Falling Walls Foundation. Each year on 9 November – the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – 20 of the world’s leading scientists are invited to Berlin to present their current breakthrough research. The aim of the Conference is to: identify trends, opportunities and solutions for global challenges and discover international breakthrough research. connect outstanding researchers from different disciplines and support the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas internationally. build bridges between business, politics, academia and the arts. promote the latest scientific findings among a broader audience. inspire people to break down walls in science and society. In 15-minute-talks, researchers from all disciplines present their work in front of 700 international guests. During the breaks, the Falling Walls Forum becomes the place for high-level Q&A where the audience can ask questions and engage in discussions. A new peer-learning platform, Falling Walls Connect, gives the audience the opportunity to contribute their knowledge and expertise to fellow participants. The Conference is broadcasted online via free livestream. All presentations are available in the Falling Walls Library. Get the full programme here.
This seminar focuses on environmental politics and regional urban planning based on a paper by Dr Joshua Lewis and Dr Henrik Ernstson called Contesting the Coast: Infrastructure, Ecology and Coastal Planning in New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta. The paper is presented by Dr Henrik Ernstson who works at ACC and is affiliated to KTH Royal Institute of Technology and The University of Manchester. The presentation will take place on 8 November 2017, at 15:00 in Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town. Please note this seminar has been cancelled. ABSTRACT For over 150 years two major and capital-driven projects have re-worked the vast Louisiana coastal landscape. One has centered on ‘adapting’ the landscape to compete and increase for global maritime trade, shortening the time distance from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. The second has been about increasing the amount of space for real estate and urban development. However, developing large-scale water infrastructure in a vast and complex ecosystem comes with unexpected social and ecological dynamics. Indeed, our argument is that infrastructure has changed biophysical relations that have been stable for hundreds and thousands of years to fundamentally change how ecosystems operate and function with social and ecological effects. Based on in-depth historical research, we develop an analytical repertoire for understanding historical interrelationships between water infrastructure, regional environmental politics, and large-scale coastal ecosystems. By further drawing on planning theory that has striven to de-center Habermasian consensus approaches (e.g., Vanessa Watson), this paper focuses on how knowledge controversies can help not only to ‘slow down reasoning’ (sensu Isabelle Stengers and Sarah Whatmore) to include more textured and situated ways of knowing the vast and complex Louisiana coastal landscape, but also drives the making of proper political subjects (Jacques Rancière) that can interrupt and shape the wider administration of large-scale planning efforts. Our analysis shows how water infrastructure has produced persistent divisions in the body politic to hinder contemporary strategies to secure New Orleans and other settlements in the region from devastating storm surge and inundation. In a world under climate change, when novel biophysical dynamics are constantly introduced, we believe our textured case study can help to think about the new kind of politics we need to understand, from the role of ‘ecological expertise’ (now siding increasingly with ‘engineering expertise’), to how ecological dynamics are shaping political subjectivities. MORE ON JOSHUA LEWIS & HENRIK ERNSTSON Dr Joshua Lewis is based in New Orleans where he studies how infrastructure networks transform regional ecosystems and its effects on environmental justice and political processes. His historically grounded focus on the implementation and maintenance of large-scale water infrastructure connects between the local and the regional and across human geography, ecology and sociology. He has also developed comprehensive vegetation studies in New Orleans (linked to a comparative study in Cape Town) to understand how hurricanes and urban development shape urban ecosystems and its often-unequal effect on different social groups. He completed his PhD at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the Stockholm University in 2015 and he is now employed at Tulane University as Research Assistant Professor at the ByWater Institute where he is leading a novel ecological monitoring project in New Orleans that tracks ecological changes associated with a major green infrastructure and stormwater management project. With his studies in political ecology and urban ecology, he also networks with partners in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program to deepen knowledge exchanges around urban ecology in partner cities. For more information, go here: publications. Dr Henrik Ernstson is developing a situated approach to urban political ecology that combines critical geography, urban infrastructure studies, postcolonial urbanism and collaborations with designers, artists and activists. He has lead various projects to study collective action, environmental conflicts and urban ecosystem management in Cape Town, New Orleans and Stockholm, and infrastructure politics in Kampala. Currently he is finalizing two edited books for MIT Press and Routledge, “Grounding Urban Natures” (Ernstson & Sörlin) and “Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene” (Ernstson & Swyngedouw). With Jacob von Heland he has created the research-based cinematic ethnography film “One Table Two Elephants,” a film that richly surfaces the politics of nature, race, and history in a postcolonial city (71 minutes, screening 2018). In 2017 he was awarded The AXA Research Award for recognition of his innovative work on urban sustainability in the global South, which will fund a research group to study petro-urbanism and urban infrastructure in Luanda with South-South connections to Brazil and China. He holds a PhD in Natural Resource Management from Stockholm University (2008) with postdoctoral positions at Stanford University (2013-2015) and the University of Cape Town (2010-2011). He lives in Cape Town and works at the African Centre for Cities, while holding a Research Fellowship at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm contributing to KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. In August 2017 he joined The University of Manchester as part-time Lecturer in Human Geography. For more information, go here: publications and projects.
The African Academy for Urban Diversity; a joint initiative of the African Centre for Migration & Society; the African Centre for Cities; and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity invites you to a special public lecture by Dr Mpho Matsipa (Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). A city like Johannesburg offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. By exploring black cultural practices, like braiding, as both ontology and epistemology, the lecture will explore how such practices recalibrate local economies, infrastructures, and aesthetic codes, and thus might co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city and its architecture. However, can such soft infrastructures sufficiently disrupt the grand narrative of African cities in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting colonial and colonizing cartographies of African urban environment? Biography Dr Mpho Matsipa is a researcher at the Wits City Institute. After completing her professional degree in Architecture at the University of Cape Town, with a distinction in design, Mpho was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and later, a Carnegie Grant as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her PhD in Architecture, from the University of California, Berkeley, is titled The Order of Appearances explored the entangled geographies of urban informality, urban redevelopment and the politics of race, gender and aesthetics in Johannesburg’s inner city. Mpho has written critical essays and reviews on public art, culture and space for Art South Africa, the Architectural Review and Thesis 11 (forthcoming). Mpho has worked as an architect and she has been shortlisted in two prestigious national design competitions. She has curated several exhibitions, including of the South Africa Pavilion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2008).She has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture and associate research scholar at Columbia GSAPP and Curator of Studio-X Johannesburg – an experimental public platform on architecture and the city sponsored by Columbia University. She is currently co-curating a pan-African architecture exhibition at the Architecture Museum in Munich titled “African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp Exhibition”, that will open in April 2018. For more information and to RSVP: info@migration.org.za Date: Thursday 9 November 2017 Time: 16:00 to 17:30 Venue: Humanities Graduate Centre Seminar Room, South West Engineering Building, East Campus, University of the Witwatersrand