ACC and Cityscapes Collective presents experts from the worlds of architecture, public health, education, culture and technology to discuss the key ideas driving their work in a series of provocations moderated by award-winning filmmaker, community organiser and urbanist Michael Uwemedimo of CMAP.
Presented as a series of provocations, the ideas they will share on their various practices will show the radical thinking that is necessary to address the many seemingly intractable challenges faced cities globally – but specifically across the global South. It’s clear that business as usual is not enough anymore. This event seeks to expand the palette we are using to determine the future of the global South city beyond the Western template of received wisdom that has been the dominant informant of how we think of the ongoing urban transition
WHEN: 6 June 2019 WHERE: The Old Granary, Cnr Longmarket and Harrington Street, Cape Town TIME: 17:30- 19:30 followed by drinks and snacks
SPEAKERS
Why systems for health matter, Tolullah Oni
Manufactured architecture can tackle the housing crisis, James Shen
Art & Science alchemy in Tijuana, Raúl Cárdenas Osuna
The case for transforming contemporary African architectural education, Leslie Lokko
BIOGRAPHIES
Michael Uwemedimo is co-founder and director of CMAP [Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform] and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. As a founding member of the filmmaking collaboration, Vision Machine, and a producer of the Academy Award-nominated, BAFTA-winning documentary, The Act of Killing, he has been developing innovative approaches to documentary practice as a means of enabling critical reflection on histories of political violence and challenges to official impunity. As project director of the Human City Project, a community-driven media, architecture, planning and human rights initiative in Nigeria, Michael is exploring design processes through which violently marginalised urban communities might gain a greater measure of control over their representation and the shaping of their cities. Michael has curated major programmes at the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, Architecture Association and Institute for Contemporary Art, London; and sat on international film festival juries.
Tolullah Oni is a Public Health Physician Scientist and urban epidemiologist, a Clinical Senior Research Associate in Global Public Health at the University of Cambridge MRC Epidemiology Unit, and an Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town School of Public Health and Family Medicine. Born in Lagos, she completed her medical training (and a BSc in International Health) at University College London, postgraduate medical training in the UK and Australia, a Masters degree in Public Health (Epidemiology) at the University of Cape Town, and a research doctorate in Clinical Epidemiology at Imperial College London. She completed Public Health Medical Specialty training in South Africa and is a Fellow of the College of Public Health Medicine of South Africa. She leads the Research Initiative for Cities Health and Equity (RICHE) conducting transdisciplinary urban health research focused on generating evidence to support development and implementation of healthy public policies in rapidly growing cities, with a focus on Africa. Research activities include Systems for Health projects: investigating how urban systems (e.g. human settlements, food) can be harnessed for health; and Health Systems projects: integrated health system responses to changing patterns of disease and multimorbidity in the context of urbanisation.
Raúl Cárdenas Osuna is founder and principal at Torolab (1995), an artist collective, workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research, basing the studies in the realm of life styles to better grasp the idea of quality of life. His work has been shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Havana, Liverpool, Lyon, Montreal and Venice Biennials; and has been awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard’s Cultural Agents Initiative, among others. Cárdenas Osuna has been an advisor for Tijuana’s gov on sustainable city development and social innovation; founded the Digital and Creative axis for the Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Tijuana-Rosarito-Tecate; currently directs the non-profit organization ‘Sociedad de Agentes de Cambio’; directs the program of the Transborder Farmlab in Tijuana; directs the Applied Social Research and Innovation Lab (LiiSA) in Tijuana/Mexico City.
James Shen is principal at People’s Architecture Office. He received his Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BSc in Product Design from California State University, Long Beach. Shen currently holds positions as Research Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and Innovation Fellow at MIT’s China Future City Lab. He has taught as Visiting Lecturer at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. People’s Architecture Office (PAO) is an international practice with offices based in Beijing and Boston. Founded in 2010 by James Shen, He Zhe, and Zang Feng, the firm is a multi-disciplinary studio focused on social impact through design particularly in the areas of housing, education, and urban regeneration. People’s Architecture Office is the first architecture firm certified as a B-Corporation in Asia and serves as a model social enterprise. Domus named PAO as one of the world’s best architecture firms of 2019 and Fast Company listed PAO as one of the world’s ten most innovative architecture companies in 2018. The studio’s award-winning works have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Harvard Graduate School of Design and the London Design Museum.
Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic and the author of eleven best-selling novels. She is currently Director of School and Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. In December 2019, she will be taking up a new position as Dean of Architecture, CUNY. She was born in 1964 to Ghanaian-Scots parents and grew up in Ghana. She trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 1989–1995, and gained her PhD in Architecture from the University of London in 2007. She has taught at schools in the US, the UK, Europe, Australia and Africa. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture and is on the editorial board of ARQ (Cambridge University press). She has been an on-going contributor to discourses around identity, race, African urbanism and the speculative nature of African architectural space and practice for nearly thirty years. She is a regular juror at international competitions and symposia, and is a long-term contributor to BBC World. In 2004, she made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion 2004), a UK-Guardian top forty best-seller, and has since then followed with ten further best-sellers, which have been translated into fifteen languages.
