Join ACC on Friday, 8 November at 12:30 for a special seminar session entitled Global Agendas and Urban Equality: Exploring synthesis, connections and contestations. ACC Director Edgar Pieterse will be in conversation with Michele Acuto, Director of the Connected Cities Lab, The University of Melbourne, and Winnie Mitullah Director of Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. The discussion will be chaired by Stephanie Butcher, a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Connected Cities Lab.
While great strides have been made in recent years to help place the urban more firmly on international development agendas, questions remain as to how, and in what ways, global policy can be operationalised at an urban scale. Bringing together leading thinkers on urbanisation this moderated discussion will explore the scalar connections between global processes and policy agendas and their material, political and social impacts across urban environments in the global South.
WHEN: Friday, 8 November
TIME: 12:30 to 13:30
VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT
BIOGRAPHIES
Professor Michele Acuto is an expert on urban politics and international urban planning. Michele is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a Senior Fellow of the Bosch Foundation Global Governance Futures Program.
Before joining the Faculty, Michele was Director of the City Leadership Lab and Professor of Diplomacy and Urban Theory at University College London, having previously worked as Stephen Barter Fellow of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities at the University of Oxford. He also taught at the University of Canberra, University of Southern California, Australian National University and National University of Singapore. Outside academia, Michele worked for the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds, the European Commission’s response to pandemic threats. He also has worked for several years on city leadership and city networks with, amongst others, Arup, World Health Organization, World Bank Group, the C40 Climate Leadership Group, and UN-Habitat.
Professor Winnie V. Mitullah is the current Director and Associate Research Professor of Development Studies at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), and the Director Gender Affairs, University of Nairobi. She holds a PhD in Political Science and Public Administration from the University of York, UK. Her PhD thesis was on Urban Housing, with a major focus on policies relating to low income housing. Over the years, she has researched and consulted in the areas of governance, in particular in the area of provision and management of urban services and the role of stakeholders in development. Her focus in these areas has included an examination of policies, and institutional dynamics in relation to local level development, including that of devolved governments, Micro and Small Enterprises [SMEs], public and Non Motorised Transport (NMT), gender, youth and media.
Dr. Stephanie Butcher is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Connected Cities lab. She is a part of the ‘Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality’ (KNOW) project, a global consortium which seeks to deliver transformative research and capacity in policy and planning that will promote and strengthen pathways to urban equality. Previous to this post, she worked with the Development Planning Unit (DPU) at the University College London as a Teaching Fellow, convening courses focused on the themes of participatory planning, urban inequality, and gender and diversity in the Global South. Her doctoral thesis was shaped by principles of action-research, and focused on the ‘everyday politics’ of water infrastructure for informal settlement residents in Kathmandu, Nepal. It examined the micro-politics of how gender, tenure relations, and ethnicity shaped how diverse residents interacted with the socio-technical aspects of infrastructure, impacting a sense of citizenship.
IMAGE CREDIT: Unequal Scenes by Johnny Miller