The third Southern Africa City Studies conference will be held in Johannesburg from 27th to 29th March 2014.

The meeting is a partnership between the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES) in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Witwatersrand and the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town.

The conference offers an exciting platform for Southern African scholarship on cities. It builds on a series of previous conferences and workshops which have brought together people who have the CITY as an object of their research, writing, reading, theorising and practice. Previous participants have ranged from those focused on the micro-scale of particular cities to those conceptualising cities across macro-regions of the world; from those investigating the successes and failures of public policies and community plans to those shaping new forms of intervention towards the future of cities; with histories and creative practice both informing parts of the wide tableau.

The 2014 Southern Africa City Studies Conference provides a forum for discussion across scales, fields, disciplines and practices. It encourages a sharing of the crafts of research, writing, visualising and conceptualising cities and citizens, in Southern Africa and worldwide. We hope participants will emerge from this conference – held in the twentieth year of democracy in South Africa – with their own sense of where city studies are at, now, and what are some of the opportunities and challenges for taking forward the city research agenda.

A central objective since the first conference in 2009 has been the promotion of new scholars working on cities in the Southern African region – or elsewhere but resident in Southern Africa. There will be a modest conference fee to cover costs, with a reduced rate for students.

The date for submission of Abstracts for consideration has passed, but people interested in attending the conference are invited to contact the organisers at: SAcitystudies2014@wits.ac.za