African Centre for Cities

CT launch of 'August House is Dead, Long Live August House!'
2017-10-06 18:00 (Africa/Johannesburg) | A4 Arts Foundation, 23 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town , 8001 , South Africa
Writer, artist and research associate at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (ACC), Kim Gurney pens a new book on the evolving art space August House in Johannesburg.
August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier, published by FourthWall Books, is a fascinating study of the role of the atelier and its artists in South Africa’s fractious art world, and a consideration of the relationship between art and the ever-changing city of Johannesburg.
Join us for the official launch in Cape Town, at 18:00 on 6 October 2017 at the A4 Arts Foundation.

JHB launch of 'August House is Dead, Long Live August House!'
2017-09-27 18:00 | Point of Order Project Space, Wits School of Art , Johannesburg, South Africa
Writer, artist and research associate at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (ACC), Kim Gurney pens a new book on the evolving art space August House in Johannesburg.
August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier, published by FourthWall Books, is a fascinating study of the role of the atelier and its artists in South Africa’s fractious art world, and a consideration of the relationship between art and the ever-changing city of Johannesburg.
Join us for the official launch in Johannesburg, at 18:00 on 27 September 2017 at Point of Order Project Space, Wits School of Arts.

New Urban Worlds at Open Book Festival
2017-09-08 16:00 - 17:00 | D6 Homecoming Centre Workshop, 15 A Buitenkant Street, .Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
Ken Liu and Edgar Pieterse speak to Mark Swilling about cities of the future.
Date: 8 September
Venue: HCC Workshop
Time: 16.00 – 17.00
Price: R45
Read more about New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times by Edgar Pieterse and Abdoumaliq Simone.
Full festival programme
Book tickets
NOTE: A limited number of free tickets for students are available for each event of the programme. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. To apply, email openbooktickets@gmail.com by 31 August.

Cities in Fiction at Open Book Festival
2017-09-08 14:00 - 15:00 | D6 Homecoming Centre, 15 A Buitenkant Street, Cape Town , 8001 , South Africa
Elan Mastai, Fiston Mwanza Mujila and Chibundu Onuzo speak to Luso Mnthali about the craft of writing urban spaces.
Date: 8 September
Venue: HCC Workshop
Time: 14.00 – 15.00
Price: R45
Full festival programme
Book tickets
NOTE: A limited number of free tickets for students are available for each event of the programme. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. To apply, email openbooktickets@gmail.com by 31 August.

Writing Cities at Open Book Festival
2017-09-06 12:00 - 13:00 | A4 Arts Foundation, 23 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town , 8001 , South Africa
Nechama Brodie, Kim Gurney and Sean O’Toole speak to Neo Muyanga about their representations of urban spaces.
Date: 6 September
Venue: A4 Arts Foundation – Ground
Time: 12:00 – 13:00
Price: R45
Full festival programme
Book tickets
NOTE: A limited number of free tickets for students are available for each event of the programme. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. To apply, email openbooktickets@gmail.com by 31 August.

Integration Complexities at Open Book Festival
2017-09-06 10:00 - 23:00 | The Fugard Theatre Studio, Corner Caledon & Lower Buitenkant Street, District Six, , Cape Town , 8001 , South Africa
Adi Kumar, Premesh Lalu and Edgar Pieterse report back on the Integration Syndicate – an aimed at finding solutions to challenges facing Cape Town. Chaired by Pippa Green.
Date: 6 September
Venue: Fugard Studio
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Price: R45
Full festival programme.
Book tickets.
NOTE: A limited number of free tickets for students are available for each event of the programme. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. To apply, email openbooktickets@gmail.com by no later than 31 August.

Refractions of the National, the Popular and the Global in African Cities
2017-07-31 - 2017-08-01 | STIAS Wallenberg Research Centre, 10 Marais Road, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, 7600, South Africa
The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) and the African Centre for Cities (ACC) will jointly host a conference on Refractions of the National, the Popular, and the Global in African cities.
Venue: Wallenberg Research Centre in Stellenbosch, South Africa
Date: Monday, 31 July & Tuesday, 1 August 2017
There has been a significant expansion of academic research on the specificities of African urbanisms, diverse urban imaginaries and politics over the last decade. In the wake of recent formal policy shifts in acknowledging the importance of urbanisation and pro-active policy making on the one hand, and a rise in urban-based social mobilization on the other, it is opportune to create an academic space for cross-pollination and reflection.
The theme of the conference is captured in its title: Refractions of the National, the Popular, and the Global in African cities. Each of the three issues may be interrogated as follows:

How is the nationality and the nation-state manifested in the city, if at all? To what extent is the political and the social character of the state regime expressed in the city and its governance?
To what extent, in what form, and with what effect have popular forces been able for make themselves heard and influential in the city, in recent years? Why or why not? We are here thinking of protest movements, of civic associations and of reform coalitions of progressive city government.
To what extent and how has the recent and current commodity boom meant a globalization of the city? Influx of foreign capital, heating up of the real estate market, emergence or growth of financial and business services sectors, new business districts, luxury shopping, hotels, and leisure supply, immigration, skyscrapers, gated neighbourhoods, etc? How are proclaimed “world city” ambitions developing on the ground?

The conference programme is designed both to focus discussion on each of the three issues outlined above as well as to allow enough time for discussion from the participants.
For more information or to book your seat, click here.

Annual PhD Seminar Series: Understanding Capitalism in Unequal Geographies
2017-06-19 09:00 - 2017-06-23 13:00 | Seminar Room 1, EGS Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town, University of Cape Town, Cape Town , Western Cape, South Africa
The third iteration of the annual PhD seminar series presented by ACC’s Notations on Theories of Radical Urban Change project (NOTRUC), lead by Henrik Ernstson and Edgar Pieterse, on Democratic Practices focuses on “Understanding Capitalis in Unequal Geographies”. The seminar series is based on reading political philosophy with and against southern urbanism. It seeks to make an intervention in how we think about the emergent city and urbanization of the global south; to seek out and make explicit its emancipatory potential, which often gets hidden or silenced, either by overly dogmatic “Northern” frameworks, “developmentalist” techno-managerial approaches; or a sense of defeat that an emancipatory horizon is not any longer possible.In 2017 the series focuses on capitalism and its wider structuration of cities, bodies and subjectivities. It seeks to understand how classic Marxist critique and its extension into intersectional analysis can be thought with and against southern/postcolonial urban geographies to make visible contemporary struggles against exploitation.Key questions:

How does capitalism function in and through its differences across time, space, and social location?
How does capitalism interact with and structure gender, race, and sexuality?
How does this play out, manifest and structure urban spaces and extended geographies of the south?
What spaces, discourses and collectivities can a critique of capitalism help to make visible as locations to struggle against interconnected assemblages and dispositifs of oppression?

Lecturers:
Dr. Andrés Henao Castro, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Dr. Ashley Bohrer, Hamilton College, New York City
Dr. Henrik Ernstson, KTH and University of Cape Town

Read more here

Socio-Spatial Transformation Seminar Series: TOD in Cape Town
2017-05-24 15:00 - 16:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
Cape Town’s spatial organisation is characterised by fragmentation; expressed in a separation of residential and employment spaces and low density urban sprawl. This imposes a considerable cost on the State, the environment and increases the socio-economic burden and exclusion of a great majority of the city’s residents. Greater synergy between urban development and mobility through densification and the provision of quality public transport is considered to be central to the spatial and social restructuring of the city.
The next seminar in the ACC’s Socio-Spatial Transformation Series will take a closer look at the City of Cape Town’s plans for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). Leigh Stolworthy from the City’s Transport and Urban Development Authority (TUD) will present the City’s TOD approach and Prof. Roger Behrens from UCT’s Department of Civil Engineering will provide a response.
Speaker: Mr. Leigh Stolworthy – Manager: Innovation, Research & Development, City of Cape Town
PLEASE NOTE: The starting time for the seminar was changed from 2pm to 3pm.

ACC/ AFD Symposium on Informal Settlements, Slums and Precarious Neighbourhoods
2017-05-17 10:00 - 12:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
Cities in the Global South are characterised by the presence of marginalised areas with inadequate housing, inadequate infrastructure and inadequate security of tenure. Known by a variety of terms, such as informal settlements, slums and precarious neighbourhoods and settlements, it essential that we better understand these types of settlements and potential ways in which the lives of residents can be improved.
The African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) present and discuss a number of strands of related work, including the recent AFD book Rethinking Precarious Neighbourhoods edited by Professor Agnès Deboulet, the work of ACC’s Urban Violence, Safety and Inclusion CityLab coordinated by Dr Mercy Bown-Luthango, and the work of the Sustainable Human Settlements CityLab coordinated by Liza Cirolia.
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME
10:00-10:10 Welcome and introduction
10:10-10:40 “Rethinking precarious neighbourhoods” – Professor Agnès Deboulet (Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris 8 and Associate Director of the Laborotoire Ville, Architecture, Urbanisme Environment, LAVUE-CNRS)
10:40-11:10 “Informal settlement upgrading and safety: Four cases from Cape Town” – Dr Mercy Brown-Luthango (ACC)
11:10-11:40 “’Upgrading informal settlements in South Africa: Understanding the disjunctures between policy and practice” – Liza Cirolia (ACC)
11:40-12:30 Questions and discussion

Where: Studio 3, EGS Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town
Time: 10:00 – 12:30 (followed by lunch)
Date: Wednesday, 17 May 2017
Please note: Space is limited.
Please RSVP to Maryam Waglay at maryam.waglay@uct.ac.za by 12:00 on 15 May 2017.

Invitation to the next Spatial Transformation CityLab Seminar
2017-04-19 15:00 - 16:30 | Seminar Room 3, African Centre for Cities, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
The ACC is excited to host Dr. Margot Rubin and Alexandra Appelbaum from the University of the Witwatersrand for the next instalment in the Spatial Transformation seminar series. They will share with us findings from their research into Johannesburg’s Corridors of Freedom Programme.
“Neighbourhoods, NIMBYists and nobodies: the local politics of the Corridors of Freedom”

In 2013, Johannesburg’s former mayor, Parks Tau, announced the ambitious Corridors of Freedom plan to ‘restitch’ Johannesburg through a process of transit-oriented development led by the BRT and supported by a range of interventions intended to densify housing, stimulate economic opportunities, and develop mixed use activities. While the plan envisions large-scale transformation through long-term infrastructure investments, the implementation of the COF has had an immediate and substantial impact at a local level. The various responses of Johannesburg communities have revealed localized governance dynamics and complex relationships with the City and the state, speaking to significant socio-spatial politics in the city.
Based on a survey and key informant interviews the seminar reflects on community organization (or lack thereof); the role of individual and organizational intermediaries; and tactics of engagement with the state. It focuses on three case studies in Johannesburg: Orange Grove and Norwood – a mixed middle class and low-income node on the Louis Botha Corridor; Westbury and Coronationville – a historically coloured area on Empire-Perth Corridor struggling with gang violence, drug abuse and high levels of unemployment; and Marlboro South – an informal community living in reterritorialised industrial buildings adjacent to the historic township of Alexandra. We argue that the Corridors of Freedom project has had a substantial impact on local politics and has revealed significant social and spatial community dynamics across Johannesburg.
This seminar forms part of a research partnership between the AFD, City of Johannesburg and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Dr Margot Rubin
Margot Rubin is a senior researcher and faculty member in the University of the Witwatersrand (South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning) in Johannesburg. Since 2002, she has worked as a researcher, and policy and development consultant focusing on housing and urban development issues, and has contributed to a number of research reports on behalf of the National Department of Housing, the Johannesburg Development Agency, SRK Engineering, World Bank, Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality and Urban LandMark.
Her PhD in Urban Planning and Politics interrogates the role of the legal system in urban governance and its effect on the distribution of scarce resources and larger questions around democracy. She also holds a Masters in Urban Geography from the University of Pretoria, an Honours degree in Geography and Environmental Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography and Philosophy. Of late, Margot has been writing about inner city regeneration, housing policy and is currently engaged in work around mega housing projects and issues of gender and the city.

Alexandra Appelbaum
Alli Appelbaum is researcher at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) who holds a Masters in Regional and Urban Planning Studies (with distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Urban History (in the first class) and a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and History (with distinction), both from the University of Cape Town.
Her research interests are broad, meeting at the intersection of History, Geography, Urban Studies and Gender Studies. They include African urbanisms, discourse analysis, LGBT+ and gender issues, urban poverty reduction, informal trading, gated communities and urban governance. She is passionate about research that has impacts both within and beyond academia. At SA&CP she is the project manager for the AFD-funded Corridors of Freedom project, in which she is working with a team of researchers to aid the City of Johannesburg in their ambitious plan to ‘restitch’ Johannesburg, level apartheid spatial inequality and forge a more public-transport-oriented city.
Before joining SA&CP, Alli worked in consulting and the NGO sector. She received a Commonwealth Scholarship through the Canon Collins Trust in 2014 to study for her Masters at LSE and she was a member of the South Africa Washington International Programme in 2012. She was recognised by the Mail & Guardian as one of South Africa’s ‘Top 200 Young South Africans’ in 2016.
RSVP: Mercy Brown-Luthango at mercy.brown-luthango@uct.ac.za

Neighbourhoods, NIMBYists and nobodies: the local politics of the Corridors of Freedom
2017-04-19 15:00 - 16:30 | African Centre for Cities, UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
Venue: Seminar Room 3, African Centre for Cities
RSVP: Mercy Brown-Luthango at mercy.brown-luthango@uct.ac.za
In 2013, Johannesburg’s former mayor, Parks Tau, announced the ambitious Corridors of Freedom plan to ‘restitch’ Johannesburg through a process of transit-oriented development led by the BRT and supported by a range of interventions intended to densify housing, stimulate economic opportunities, and develop mixed use activities. While the plan envisions large-scale transformation through long-term infrastructure investments, the implementation of the COF has had an immediate and substantial impact at a local level. The various responses of Johannesburg communities have revealed localized governance dynamics and complex relationships with the City and the state, speaking to significant socio-spatial politics in the city.
Based on a survey and key informant interviews the seminar reflects on community organization (or lack thereof); the role of individual and organizational intermediaries; and tactics of engagement with the state. It focuses on three case studies in Johannesburg: Orange Grove and Norwood – a mixed middle class and low-income node on the Louis Botha Corridor; Westbury and Coronationville – a historically coloured area on Empire-Perth Corridor struggling with gang violence, drug abuse and high levels of unemployment; and Marlboro South – an informal community living in reterritorialised industrial buildings adjacent to the historic township of Alexandra. We argue that the Corridors of Freedom project has had a substantial impact on local politics and has revealed significant social and spatial community dynamics across Johannesburg.
This seminar forms part of a research partnership between the AFD, City of Johannesburg and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand.
About The Speakers
Margot Rubin is a senior researcher and faculty member in the University of the Witwatersrand (South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning) in Johannesburg. Since 2002, she has worked as a researcher, and policy and development consultant focusing on housing and urban development issues, and has contributed to a number of research reports on behalf of the National Department of Housing, the Johannesburg Development Agency, SRK Engineering, World Bank, Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality and Urban LandMark.
Her PhD in Urban Planning and Politics interrogates the role of the legal system in urban governance and its effect on the distribution of scarce resources and larger questions around democracy. She also holds a Masters in Urban Geography from the University of Pretoria, an Honours degree in Geography and Environmental Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography and Philosophy. Of late, Margot has been writing about inner city regeneration, housing policy and is currently engaged in work around mega housing projects and issues of gender and the city.

Alli Appelbaum is researcher at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) who holds a Masters in Regional and Urban Planning Studies (with distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Urban History (in the first class) and a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and History (with distinction), both from the University of Cape Town.
Her research interests are broad, meeting at the intersection of History, Geography, Urban Studies and Gender Studies. They include African urbanisms, discourse analysis, LGBT+ and gender issues, urban poverty reduction, informal trading, gated communities and urban governance. She is passionate about research that has impacts both within and beyond academia. At SA&CP she is the project manager for the AFD-funded Corridors of Freedom project, in which she is working with a team of researchers to aid the City of Johannesburg in their ambitious plan to ‘restitch’ Johannesburg, level apartheid spatial inequality and forge a more public-transport-oriented city.
Before joining SA&CP, Alli worked in consulting and the NGO sector. She received a Commonwealth Scholarship through the Canon Collins Trust in 2014 to study for her Masters at LSE and she was a member of the South Africa Washington International Programme in 2012. She was recognised by the Mail & Guardian as one of South Africa’s ‘Top 200 Young South Africans’ in 2016.

Luxified skies: How vertical urban housing became an elite preserve
2017-03-29 15:00 - 16:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
The African Centre for Cities and the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics are pleased to co-host a Special Lecture by Prof Stephen Graham entitled ‘Luxified skies: How vertical urban housing became an elite preserve’.
Abstract
This talk is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality’—so central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the superrich. Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.
Bio
Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He has an interdisciplinary background linking human geography, urbanism and the sociology of technology. Since the early 1990s Prof. Graham has used this foundation to develop critical perspectives addressing how cities are being transformed through remarkable changes in infrastructure, mobility, digital media, surveillance, security, militarism and verticality. His books include Splintering Urbanism; Telecommunications and the City (both with Simon Marvin); the Cybercities Reader; Cities, War and Terrorism; Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail; and Infrastructural Lives (with Colin McFarlane). Prof Graham’s 2011 book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism was nominated for the Orwell Prize in political writing and was the Guardian’s book of the week. His new book – Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers (Verso) – was published in November 2016. Another Guardian book of the week, it was in the books of the year lists of both the FT and the Observer.

What must be our urban question? Reflections on Contemporary Urban Knowledge from Delhi
2017-03-15 16:00 - 17:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
ACC is delighted to be hosting Gautam Bhan from the Indian Institute of Human Settlements who will be giving a seminar as part of our socio-spatial transformations seminar series. The seminar is entitled ‘What must be our urban question? Reflections on Contemporary Urban Knowledge from Delhi’.
About
The fact of urbanization no longer needs assertion. Today, our problem is of an excess of speech. What do we talk about when we talk about the urban? Cities? Built Form? Economic Agglomerations? Violence? Modernity? Democracy? Nature? Infrastructure? Transport? As each of us – citizens, theorists, practitioners, policy makers – seeks to grasp the urban, we find ourselves navigating multiple and often competing visions of cities that seek to be smart, inclusive, resilient, sustainable, world-class, ordinary, and global all at once.
This talk reflects on how we must think of the urban in the moment of its emergence. It asks: what are the knowledge systems, cultures and practices that we need to in order live, survive and intervene into our city-regions? It does so at a moment when the urban question is once again up for global debate, challenged to cross disciplines, offer knowledge for urgent and transformative practice to address a maddening diversity of issues from inequality to sustainability. It does so, in line with new theoretical thinking from the “south,” by beginning and rooting from place, asking questions of urban theory and practice from one its most challenging sites: the city of New Delhi. In doing so, it also takes on the task of imagining what a decolonisation of urban studies can look like.
Bio
Gautam Bhan has a BA from Amherst College and an MA from the University of Chicago in urban sociology. He has worked as a Research Fellow at the Society for Applied Studies, New Delhi, where is his first work was on gender and access to health in informal urban settlements [The Effect of Maternal Education on Gender Bias in Care-seeking for common childhood illnesses, Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 60 (4), 2005] and later focused on urban poverty in Indian cities and particularly on questions of eviction, resettlement and poverty within urban development.
He is the author of Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi [2005; Hindi Translation 2009] and most recently of This is Not the City I Once Knew: Evictions, Urban Citizenship and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi (Environment & Urbanisation, Vol. 21 (1), 2009). He is also a columnist with the Indian Express, one of India’s leading English language newspapers, where he writes on urbanisation and urban issues in India. His ongoing research at Berkeley focuses on the changing politics of citizenship and poverty in post-liberalisation Indian cities. He was awarded the prestigious Berkeley Fellowship for 2008-2012 to support his doctoral studies. He is also currently a 2009 IDRF fellow of the Social Science Research Council, New York.

'The Return of the Political: Insurgent Architects and The City' an ACC talk by Professor Erik Swyngedouw
2017-03-08 18:00 - 20:00 | The Cape Institute of Architecture (CIFA) building, 71 Hout Street, Cape Town , South Africa
Professor Erik Swyngedouw will give an ACC Special Lecture at the Cape Institute for Architecture (CIFA) on the 8 March 2017. Departing from the aftermaths of the magical year of 2011’s urban insurrections across many different cities, he will aim to understand our present historical moment under capitalism through re-configuring how we think about urban struggles, politics and the political. This will be followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Henrik Ernstson centering on what it means to politicize and radically democratize the city, making connections to ongoing urban struggles in Cape Town and South Africa.
The event is co-hosted by the African Centre for Cities (ACC) and the Cape Institute for Architecture (CIFA). We welcome you at 18:00 for drinks and snacks with the talk starting at 18:30 sharp, followed by a discussion. Please join us at CIFA in Cape Town CBD, 71 Hout Street, 18:00-20:00. Free entry with drinks and snacks.
RSVP by 3 March to Dr. Nate Millington at ACC (nate.millington@uct.ac.za)
Featured Image: Cut-out from artwork “Ayotzinapa” by Mexican artist Carlos Carmonamedina, 2017

Abstract
This talk aims to understand our present historical moment through re-configuring how we think about urban struggles and politics. How can we stop what we are doing, reflect, and maybe move towards becoming insurgent architects of a new politicized and democratized city?
I will depart from the magical year of 2011, from which we have seen a seemingly unending row of rebellions in European cities and beyond. These rebellions have disturbed a cozy neoliberal status quo, and unnerved economic and political elites in cities as different as Athens, Madrid, Lyon, Lisbon, Rome, London, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Paris, Bucharest, and Barcelona. This ability to deeply challenge the elite’s political legitimacy within our (neo)liberal states, was not made by professionals—but by people, by amateurs that had had enough. Those who was not counted, went ahead to organize and demand a new process for producing space, producing the city, becoming insurgent architects, which at times also formed political movements, most notably Syriza in Greece and PODEMOS in Spain. It is the aftermath of these urban insurrections that provides the starting point for my presentation. From a political perspective, the central question that have opened up is: what to do and what to think next? What thought and practice is possible after the squares are cleared, the tents broken up, the energies dissipated, and everyday urban life resumes its routine practices?
The talk will use political theory from Rancière, Žižek, Mouffe, Dikeç, Badiou and others, to re-centre the political in contemporary debates on the urban. This means to first distinguish “politics” from “the political” in order to understand how late capitalism and its obsession with governing and management have depoliticized the city. This has replaced debate and dissensus with technologies of governing, which also includes the enrollment of NGOs and many so called social movements. It seeks to nurture consensus and uphold a depoliticizing police order. However, while the city as polis may be dead, spaces of political engagement occur within the cracks, in-between the meshes and the strange inter-locations that shape places that contest the police order. It is here that concrete political interventions germinate new and fully politicized realities and imaginaries.
My talk is meant to provoke us to see how we might—even if we call ourselves activists or critical intellectuals—still participate in nurturing a depoliticized police order. By recuperating the political, I hope to open a discussion that can connect across geographical locations, say between Europe and South Africa, to understand our present historical moment and provoke our thinking away from what we are busy doing now (within the police order), toward a space of politicization and the becoming of insurgent architects.
About the participants:
Professor Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester University and a prolific writer and speaker on political ecology, urban governance, political theory and radical thought. He was previously professor of geography at Oxford University and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship at Science Po, Paris, 2014. He has recently published Liquid Power (MIT Press, 2015) on water and social power in 20th century Spain and co-edited with Jason Wilson the book The Post-Political and its Discontents (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). He is currently preparing a book manuscript politicization and “the political” through urban and environmental processes. With Dr. Henrik Ernstson he is preparing the edited volume Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities (for Routledge).
The Cape Institute for Architecture (CIFA) was formed in 1899, and is the largest regional architecture body in South Africa, with the potential to influence development in the city of Cape Town and the wider region. The Institute’s core objectives are to promote the practice of architecture, to serve the interests of its members, and to support the integrity of the profession.
Dr. Henrik Ernstson is an urban political ecologist that combines critical geography with postcolonial urbanism with studies in South Africa, Uganda and Louisiana (USA). He is a Research Fellow at the African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town and the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm, with a Postdoc at Stanford University (2013-2015) and a PhD from Stockholm University. Apart from his writing he is currently finalizing the documentary research film One Table Two Elephants (with Jacob von Heland) that focuses on how race, nature and history is interconnected in Cape Town, and in 2016 he helped produce the theatre production STOMPIE in Grassy Park/Lavender Hill. He is also finalizing two edited book projects: Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (for MIT Press, with Prof. Sverker Sörlin) and Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities (for Routledge, with Prof. Erik Swyngedouw). At UCT he gives the PhD winter school in June every year on Democratic Practices of Unequal Geographies (with Dr. Andrés Henao Castro). More information here.

Africa's Cities: Opening Doors to the World
2017-02-28 13:00 - 14:00 | School of Economics Seminar Room, 4th Floor School of Economics
SPEAKER: Somik Lall
DATE: 28 February 2017
TIME: 13:00 – 14:00
VENUE: Seminar Room (4th floor School of Economics)
The African Centre for Cities is pleased to be co-hosting this seminar with The School of Economics and the Cape Town Branch of the Economic Society of South Africa. Somik Lall, a lead economist from the World Bank, will be presenting on the new World Bank publication entitled, ‘Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World.
Somik Lall is a Lead Economist for Urban Development in the World Bank’s Urban and Disaster Risk Management Department. His research and policy interests span urban and spatial economics, infrastructure development, and public finance, with more than 40 publications featured in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and working papers.
Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing rapid population growth. Yet their economic growth has not kept pace. Why? Somik will present his thoughts on how urban policy plays a central role in making Africa’s cities economically competitive.
Links to the report and related materials:
• Report page: www.worldbank.org/africascities
• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtT2RA4sDMA

Invitation to the 3nd Seminar in the Spatial Transformation CityLab Series
2017-02-17 14:00 - 15:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
The Role of Affordable Housing in advancing Socio-spatial Transformation in Cape Town
Cape Town’s spatial organisation is characterised by fragmentation; expressed in a separation of residential and employment spaces and low density urban sprawl. This imposes a considerable cost on the State, the environment and increases the socio-economic burden and exclusion of a great majority of the city’s residents. The provision of affordable housing in well-located areas is critical in fostering integration and improving the social and economic conditions of poor households in Cape Town.
The next seminar in the ACC’s Socio-Spatial Transformation Series will seek to unpack what “Affordable Housing” means in Cape Town; given the diversity of housing need in the city and will provide an overview of some of the available housing instruments. It will also consider how these speak to the imperatives of socio-spatial transformation and sustainability.

Speaker:
Ms. Kahmiela August, Director of Affordable Housing – Western Cape Provincial Department of Human Settlements
Ms August is responsible for the management of the Affordable Housing Directorate, which incorporates Gap and the Rental Housing provision for persons earning between R1 500 – R3 500. The directorate is also responsible for Social Housing Programme.
Functions include;

project packaging, pipelining and approval,
Integrated settlement planning, policy review and implementation.

The team is also overseeing the development of the departmental partnership strategy.
Please RSVP to Mercy Brown-Luthango on mercy.brown-luthango@uct.ac.za

Theorizing Urbanization: the Universal and the Particular in Question
2017-02-08 15:00 - 16:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
The African Centre for Cities is pleased to announce it’s first Special Lecture for 2017. We will be hosting Prof Kevin Cox, who will be presenting a lecture on ‘Theorizing Urbanization: The Universal and the Particular in Question’.
Abstract
Over the last twenty-five years or so urban studies has witnessed increasing skepticism towards universalizing claims and a greater interest in the particularizing. Recent arguments for a view from the global South exemplify this. This raises the question of what the relationship between universalizing and particularizing tendencies might be. This is explored firstly through an exploration of how the two might be reconciled. Two case studies then follow. One focuses on the ‘view from the South’ controversy; and the other on the politics of urban development in the US and in Western Europe and a subsequent trans-Atlantic divide.
Bio
KEVIN R. COX, is Emeritus Distinguished University Professor of Geography at the Ohio State University. His major research interests include the politics of urban and regional development, geographic thought and South Africa. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which are The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception (2016) and Making Human Geography (2014.) He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two awards from the Association of American Geographers, including one for distinguished scholarship. More information can be found on his website, Unfashionable Geographies, at https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/.

São Paulo's Peripheries: Transformations in Modes of Collective Life
2016-12-14 17:30 - 19:30
Image credit: Choque Fotos

SPEAKER: Prof Teresa Caldeira
DATE: 14 December 2016
TIME: 17:30 – 19:30
VENUE: Hiddingh Hall (2nd floor), UCT’s Hiddingh Campus, 31-37 Orange Street, Gardens (opposite the Labia Theatre), Cape Town, South Africa

ACC is honoured to present a public lecture by Professor Teresa Caldeira (University of California, Berkeley) on the transformations of modes of collective life in São Paulo, Brazil, over the past two decades.
About the topic:
São Paulo’s peripheries, once exclusively the spaces where the poor working classes inhabited their autoconstructed houses, have changed considerably in the last two decades. They are now much more heterogeneous and their everyday dynamics are in need of new analyses. The mode of collective life based on autoconstruction, industrialism, migration, the dignity of labour, a certain hierarchy of gender roles, and the articulation of urban social movements has undergone profound changes. This talk explores the emerging mode of collective life that is being created in what are now much improved and diverse urban spaces. It is based on new modes of consumption, cultural production, protest, and circulation from the peripheries to the rest of the city. The transformed peripheries are fundamentally heterogeneous and new arrangements of domestic life and gender roles are at the core of their mutations. These transformations in modes of collective life happen not only in São Paulo, but also in several other autoconstructed metropolises across the global South.
About the speaker:
Professor Teresa Caldeira is an urban scholar from Brazil who teaches at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. She does research on urban violence, spatial segregation, and cultural production in cities of the global South, especially São Paulo.

Tackling Lighting Inequalities
2016-12-12 13:00 - 14:00 | African Centre for Cities, UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
Tackling Lighting Inequalities: About Urban Lighting, Design and ‘the Social’
The ACC is excited to introduce Mona Sloane, a visiting scholar for the London School of Economics and Politics. Mona will be presenting her work on ‘Configuring Light/Staging the Social’, a research programme she founded at the LSE at the final brown bag of 2016.
About the topic:
Light is central to how people experience and use city spaces, and to how urban systems operate. Through light, we carve out spaces for social life. Light impacts on the public space in the crucial hours after dusk, enabling or problematizing social activity, economic and commercial development, security, safety and public order, access, participation and identification with urban public life. Furthermore, public lighting also has significant cost impacts on local authorities’ budgets while currently undergoing a massive technological revolution which puts it centre stage in a number of urban discussions, ranging from big data and urban governance, cutting down economic and environmental costs in relation to climate change and sustainable urban development, to aesthetics and city branding.
This brown bag seminar discusses the of status public lighting and design in the UK and in London specifically. It outlines how public lighting is a barometer of developing socio-spatial inequalities in the urban context and allows rich insight into how urban inequalities are lived out and responded to. The speaker will suggest strategies for responding to these challenges.
About the Speaker:
Mona Sloane is a visiting academic at the ACC and a final-year PhD student in the LSE Department of Sociology. She is an ethnographer and works and publishes on the sociology of design, material culture, aesthetics and cultural economy as well as lighting design and public space. She holds an LSE PhD scholarship, an MSc in Sociology from the LSE and a BA in Communication and Cultural Management from Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen. She also is co-founder and former member of the LSE-based research programme Configuring Light/Staging the Social which explores the role of light and lighting in everyday life and urban design.

Resilient Urban Development: perspective of the Massive Small Collective
2016-11-28 13:00 - 14:00 | African Centre for Cities, UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
In this Brown Bag, Lauren Hermanus will introduce the work of the Massive Small Collective, which seeks to make connections between small-scale urban sustainable development and resilience thinking.
The Massive Small Collective understands resilience as social, economic and environmental sustainability under conditions of dynamic complexity. As individuals, households, businesses, and governments are faced with increasing complexity, and more frequent destructive shocks, and new information and technologies, the context and need for resilience planning and implementation is growing. The assertion of the Massive Small Collective, is that top-down, large-scale, command and control strategies aimed to improve social well-being and manage ecological risks have not delivered the promised results. The collective believes that the ‘bigness’ of these projects is the source of their weakness. Local context and history are, by necessity, rendered marginal by end-state and solutions-focused wholesale reform. But we can now see that it has showed itself to be critical to long-term success. In response, the Massive Small Collective focuses on incrementalism and redundancy, dynamic interrelation, local context, learning from failure and responsive governance.
This Brown Bag will introduce the potential of small-scale urban sustainable development initiatives and investments to contribute to the resilience agenda in cities and towns around the world. This work is done in partnership with the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, African partners of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
About the Speaker:
Lauren Hermanus is has a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and a MA in Complexity Theory and Philosophy. She is currently enrolled in MPhil in Development Policy and Practice. She is a Sustainable Development Specialist focused on urban resilience and energy innovation. Her experience is in policy, strategy and programme development in both the public and private sectors. She is interested in applying Complexity Thinking to development challenges.
Date: 28th November
Time: 1-2pm
Venue: Davies Reading Room (library), EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Invitation to the 2nd Seminar in the Spatial Transformation CityLab Series
2016-11-15 14:00 - 15:30
“The Voortrekker Road Corridor and the quest for Spatial Transformation”
One of the key outcomes of the City of Cape Town’s Spatial Development Framework (2012) is the creation of an “inclusive, integrated and vibrant” city. Greater synergy between urban development and mobility through densification and the provision of quality public transport is considered to be central to the spatial and social restructuring of the city. In line with national policy imperatives, the City of Cape Town has identified two Integration Zones, the Metro-South East Corridor Integration Zone (MSEIZ) and the Voortrekker Road Corridor Integration Zone (VRCIZ) as critical tools for the realization of a more inclusive and integrated Cape Town.
The primary objective of the VRCIZ, the focus of this CityLab seminar series, is to link the Bellville CBD with the boundary of the Metro South-East Corridor and the Cape Town CBD. The second seminar in the series will be devoted to a discussion of the City of Cape Town’s vision for the VRCIZ. Antony Marks from the City’s Spatial Planning and Urban Design department will present a detailed overview of the City’s intentions and plans; providing insight into some of the opportunities and challenges within the Corridor related to densification, integration and transport.
Rob McGaffin, Senior Lecturer in UCT’s Construction Economics and Management department will share some reflections on the potential and viability of corridors, integration zones and transit-oriented development in particular, to achieve the desired transformation of the urban form.
Please RSVP to Mercy Brown-Luthango on mercy.brown-luthango@uct.ac.za

Finding Food in the post-2015 Development Agenda
2016-11-09 13:00 - 14:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
Food is fundamental not only to well-being, but to our social and economic lives. Despite this, one of the biggest challenges facing many people in cities all over the world today is hunger. As cities rapidly urbanise, different pressures are placed on the food system which has resulted in the least nutritious food being the most affordable. This seminar series will explore the informal economy, food systems, food security and urbanisation. This final seminar by Dr Jane Battersby explores the global implications of the post-2015 development agenda.
Abstract
Food has not historically been considered central to the urban agenda. However, good nutrition is essential for equitable growth and sustainable urban food systems are key to responding to many of the challenges posed to growing cities. In the wake of Habitat III, this seminar examines the gaps and opportunities to engage the food system as part of urban governance and planning that have emerged in the space generated by the SDGs and New Urban Agenda document. It draws on findings from AFSUN (African Food Security Urban Network) and the Consuming Urban Poverty project.
Bio
Jane Battersby is an urban geographer with an interest in all things food related. Her current areas of particular interest are urban food systems, urban food policies and the construction of food security theory in Northern and Southern research contexts. This work has both theoretical and applied components. Underpinning her food work is an ongoing interest in the linkages between spatial transformation and identity transformation in post-apartheid urban areas – a topic she has addressed through the lenses of youth identities, education, music and land restitution. Jane has been the Cape Town Partner of the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) since 2008, and is currently the Research Co-ordinator of the ACC’s Consuming Urban Poverty Project, and is associated with the Hungry Cities Programme.

Brown Bag Event: Lagos a Plotted City Revisited
2016-11-03 13:00 - 14:00 | African Centre for Cities, UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
ACC Brown Bag – ‘mock PhD defence’

Thesis title: PLOTTING the prevalent but undertheorised residential areas of Lagos. Conceptualising a process of urbanisation through grounded theory and comparison

The ACC is pleased to welcome Lindsay Sawyer who has been hosted here as a visiting scholar for the past year in order to write up her thesis on Lagos. Now completed, Lindsay will present her work in a short 30min presentation that mimics her upcoming thesis defence at her university ETH Zurich. Edgar Pieterse and Sue Parnell will act as the jury.

This thesis attempts to contribute to an understanding of the urbanisation of Lagos and to arrive at a more satisfying representation of its complexities and specificities through the consideration of the prevalent residential areas of Lagos as a coherent spatial configuration, proposing Plotting as a heuristic theoretical category to account for them. Lagos still represents a significant challenge to current urban theory and methods. The gaps in knowledge about Lagos speak to the inadequate conceptual and methodological tools there have so far been to approach and analyse it as a ‘city of the global South’. This thesis forms part of the recent impetus in urban studies for new ways of producing knowledge about the urban with a revalorised focus on Southern urbanism and comparison. As such, this thesis works to formulate Plotting as a new conceptual tool to account for the production of the extensive residential areas where the majority of people in Lagos live, mostly in the ubiquitous form of rental housing called Face-Me-I-Face You by taking a grounded theory approach within a wider comparative framework. The prevalent spatial configuration of Lagos has not been adequately analysed and Plotting is an attempt to account for the piecemeal development and intensification of these areas through the contradictions, contestations and multiple systems of territorial authority of the dual land regime in Lagos. As such, Plotting is offered as a conceptual tool to account for aspects of Lagos that normative approaches have struggled to recognise and analyse such as the dual land regime, the role of customary authorities, moving beyond the formal-informal dichotomy, the growth of Lagos despite sustained political, economic and social instability, and the apparent lack of political organisation and demands from the people in the face of deep inequalities and an elitist and incapacitated state who does little to address their needs.

This research is part of the Planetary Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective project that undertook a theoretically and methodologically rigorous comparison of eight urban regions based the grounded empirical work of eight colleagues and myself. Plotting emerged as a new theoretical category through a comparison of Lagos, Istanbul, Kolkata and Shenzhen. This thesis adopts a grounded theory methodology, collecting and analysing qualitative data in order to build new theoretical categories through iterative rounds of data collection and analysis including comparative analysis. Data was primarily collected through intensive periods of fieldwork between 2012-2014. Desk-based methods were also used but there was an emphasis on fieldwork to address the lack of available data in certain areas and to allow concepts to emerge from the ground. The thesis undertakes a pattern and pathway analysis of Lagos, constructing a visual and spatial analysis of its current processes of urbanisation and a historical analysis of how these processes emerged. The thesis identifies the significant gaps in research on Lagos, linking to broader gaps in knowledge about informal rental housing and land delivery in unplanned areas of certain areas of urban Africa, showing there to be a blindspot in literature and policy towards prevalent but tolerated majority conditions. The main work of the thesis is conceptualising Plotting as a process of urbanisation through its regulatory, material and everyday dimensions with a particular focus on the dual land regime, contestations over land, and the emergence of the logic of ‘private/ network gain over public good’. Further, it is shown that through the conversation between this research and the comparison, Plotting is already proving applicable beyond the context of Lagos. Images and empirical accounts from the field and other sources are used throughout the thesis and form part of the analysis.

Announcement: A Special Event To Commemorate World Food Day
2016-10-17 09:00 - 16:00
This event will be coordinated in partnership with the Centre of Excellence in Food Security and PLAAS. Details to be confirmed shortly.

Brown Bag Event: From Naartjies to Nando’s
2016-10-03 13:00 - 14:00 | African Centre for Cities, UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa
The ACC is excited to introduce Sarah Duff to the Brown Bag series. She will be discussing a history of Johannesburg’s foodways as they relate to migration.
Presentation:
‘From Naartjies to Nando’s: The Making of Johannesburg’s Foodways’
The history of Johannesburg’s foodways is, as in the case of most cities, entangled with histories of migration. As historians of both food and of migration have demonstrated, not only does migration shape the ways in which groups of people think about their identities in relation to food (and often how nations define themselves through food), but immigrants are often disproportionately involved in food industries. While historians of Africa have begun to turn their attention to histories of food, this remains a relatively new area of study for the region, and, more specifically, for South Africa. This essay begins to address this lacuna by considering how migration shaped how Johannesburg’s diverse population ate, bought, and thought about food.
About Sarah Duff:
Sarah Emily Duff is Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Primarily an historian of childhood and sexuality, she is the author of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895 (Palgrave, 2015). She is funded by a five-year Research Career Advancement Fellowship from the National Research Foundation and is currently at work on a project which traces the history of sex education in twentieth-century South Africa.

Spatial Transformation CityLab Seminar
2016-09-22 11:00 - 12:30 | The River Club, Cnr Liesbeck Parkway & Observatory Road, Cape Town , 7705, South Africa
South African cities today continue to be marked by spatial fragmentation, low density sprawl and highly unequal land distribution patterns. Cape Town as a city is plagued by the same inefficient, fragmented and exclusionary spatial patterns inherited from Apartheid. In light of this, the ACC has embarked on a new research project which focuses on the potential of the Voortrekker Road Corridor (VRC) and specifically the Western Area (including Maitland, Kensington and Facreton) to bring about spatial transformation. This work is supported by the French Development Agency (AFD).
One of the components of this research project is a bi-monthly seminar series which will draw academics, officials and other practitioners into conversation about a number of pertinent topics. These include for example: unpacking what spatial transformation means in Cape Town, the role of corridor projects in facilitating this transformation, the potential and challenges of transit-oriented development and the role of government policy instruments and programmes like the Urban Development Zone (UDZ) tax incentive to support social and spatial integration.
To kick off the seminar series, Francesco Orsini, a visiting researcher from Colombia will present a case study of Medellin’s Social Urbanism” programme. This will provide key insights and a useful basis for future deliberations about the nature and dynamics of interventions to transform Cape Town’s spatial form.

A systematic review of the literature that focuses on both the ‘informal economy’ and ‘food security’ in South Africa
2016-09-14 15:00 - 16:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
Food is fundamental not only to well-being, but to our social and economic lives. Despite this, one of the biggest challenges facing many people in cities all over the world today is hunger. As cities rapidly urbanise, different pressures are placed on the food system which has resulted in the least nutritious food being the most affordable. This seminar series will explore the informal economy, food systems, food security and urbanisation.
The second seminar is entitled ‘A systematic review of the literature that focuses on both the ‘informal economy’ and ‘food security’ in South Africa’ presented by Candice Kelly and Etai Even-Zahav (Research Fellows at the Sustainability Institute).
Abstract
Despite the importance of the informal food economy in fulfilling the daily and weekly food needs of a large proportion of South Africa’s low-income population, it appears little research exists on the exact nature of the relationship between the informal food economy and food security. This paper performed the first qualitative systematic review of research from South Africa that addresses both these aspects. The methods used in the review are described in detail, to increase the readers’ ability to assess the reliability of subsequent findings and analysis. Findings confirmed the low level of research focus on the informal food economy (and food security), in particular the stages of the value chain beyond the farm gate and before the consumer. Food safety research is common, although applied narrowly and with mixed findings. The conceptualisation of nutrition research is encouragingly wide, encompassing both over- and under-nutrition, but does not seem to consider the broader urban informal context in which consumers are embedded. Lastly, the research approaches used are predominately quantitative, and the voices of those who survive within the informal food economy are largely absent.
Bios
Candice Kelly’s doctoral research focuses on people leading food system transitions in South Africa. She teaches into the MPhil at the Sustainability Institute, focusing on sustainable food systems.
Etai Even-Zahav is also part of the Food Systems team at the Sustainability Institute. He is particularly interested in the informal food economy.

The Informal Economy's Role in Feeding Cities - a Missing Link in Policy Debates?
2016-08-24 15:00 - 16:30 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
Food is fundamental not only to well-being, but to our social and economic lives. Despite this, one of the biggest challenges facing many people in cities all over the world today is hunger. As cities rapidly urbanise, different pressures are placed on the food system which has resulted in the least nutritious food being the most affordable. This seminar series will explore the informal economy, food systems, food security and urbanisation.
The first seminar is entitled ‘The Informal Economy’s Role in Feeding Cities – A Missing Link in Policy Debates?’ and will be presented by Caroline Skinner and Gareth Haysom.
Abstract
The paper starts by considering the genealogy of the term ‘informal sector’ and then reviews the international context – urbanisation trends and the latest estimates on the size and contribution of the informal economy. The former confirm Crush and Frayne’s contention of the likelihood of an urban future for the majority of Africans and latter suggest that informal work is a predominant source of non-agricultural employment on the most regions of the Global South. Attention is then turned to the South African informal economy, which although smaller than our developing country counterparts, is still a significant source of employment. The informal economy is thus playing a key role in household income – a key aspect of accessibility, particularly in urban areas. The paper then outlines the evidence on the informal economies role in food sourcing of poorer households. The paper critically assesses the current food security policy position in South Africa and the post-Apartheid policy response to the informal economy in general both nationally and in key urban centres. We trace a productionist and rural bias in the food security agenda and argue that the policy environment for informal operators is at best benign neglect and at worse actively destructive.
Speaker bios
Caroline Skinner is a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and Urban Policies Research Director for the global action-research-policy network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). For over 15 years, Skinner’s work has interrogated the nature of the informal economy with a focus on informing advocacy processes and livelihood-centred policy and planning responses. She has published widely on the topic.
Dr Gareth Haysom holds a Ph.D in Environmental and Geographic Sciences from UCT. The focus of his Ph.D was on urban food system governance. Gareth is the southern cities project coordinator for the Hungry Cities Partnership project at the ACC. He also works on the Consuming Urban Poverty research project.
Venue: Studio 3, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT

CityLab Symposium
2016-08-18 10:00 - 13:00 | Studio 3, ENGEO Building, Upper Campus. University of Cape Town,, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8001, South Africa
The African Centre for Cities’ CityLab programme facilitates the co-production of policy-relevant knowledge to reduce urban poverty through the engagement of researchers, government officials and civil society. Started in 2008, the CityLab programme created a platform for interaction between practitioners and researchers and has generated a wide range of different kinds of knowledge on Cape Town. The CityLab programme also became a core component of Mistra Urban Futures, a network of institutions involved in the co-production of urban knowledge in five cities around the world.
Please join us in reflecting on the Sustainable Human Settlements CityLab, the Urban Violence, Safety and Inclusion CityLab, the Healthy Cities CityLab and the Public Culture CityLab. The co-ordinators of the CityLabs, Dr Warren Smit, Dr Mercy Brown-Luthango, Dr Rike Sitas and Liza Cirolia, will present key findings from the CityLab process, followed by a discussion and a light lunch.
The symposium will be hosted on 18 August in Studio 3 in the Environmental and Geographical Sciences building on Upper Campus at UCT, from 10h00 to 13h00, followed by lunch.
Please RSVP to Rike Sitas on rike.sitas@uct.ac.za by 12 August 2016
CityLab_Symposium_Invite
