The African Centre for Cities, along with its hosting partners, convene the African Infrastructure Futures Conference from 21-23 November 2022, in Cape Town, South Africa. The conference is curated as follows: Day 1 will adopt a more traditional academic conference format and Day 2 and 3 will focus on the substance of policy and practice debates.
THE ACADEMIC CONFERENCE | 21 November 2022
The one-day Academic Conference programme will kick-off with a keynote presentation by Prof Dilip M Menon, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, Director, and Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. The presentation is entitled Drowning Cities: Thinking urbanism in the age of global warming.
Three parallel sessions are structured along four thematic tracks:
TRACK A – Design/Resilience
Session 1: How Africa’s marginalised urban majority reframes the sustainability agenda
Session 2: Resilience as a concept, infrastructural practice, and/or (re)imagination
Session 3: Redirecting urban trajectories through speculative design practices and dispositions
TRACK B – Power/Governance
Session 1: Power and politics from urban peripheries
Session 2: States and possibilities of urban infrastructure policymaking
Session 3: Plural governance regimes: urban politics beyond the state
TRACK C – Networks/Frontier
Session 1: Finance as & of infrastructure: reframing financial and fiscal frontiers
Session 2: Platformed cities and citizen
Session 3: Enduring and emerging spatial imaginaries: from SEZs to ring road
TRACK D – Everyday/Hybridity
Session 1: Infrastructure’s multiplicities-circulations, adaptations, and composites
Session 2: Everyday socio-infrastructural encounters in African cities
Session 3: Decaying, caring and repairing urban infrastructure
The day will conclude with a panel discussion entitled Propositions of the Present: Closing Reflections on the Potentials and Pathways for Urban Infrastructure Scholarship from Africa.