Prof. Ananya Roy — Gray Areas

In the lexicon of American urban policy, community development is a prominent force. This talk, based on an essay co-authored with Stuart Schrader and Emma Shaw Crane, provides a global history of community development.  It shows how, in the 1960s, an impending sense of urban crisis, what was perceived to be an “apartheid” of race and income, conjoined with American geopolitical concerns about wars of insurgency in the global South to produce a field of ideas and practices focused on pacification, participation, and poverty. Such programs reveal how the management of poverty is articulated with pacification and punitive regulation, not just at a moment of neoliberalism but also in liberal government and its struggles with racial difference.  Community development though was more than a bureaucracy of poverty. Multiple mobilizations and movements sought to challenge racial subjugation.  From Alinsky-style direct action to the anti-colonial imaginary of the Black Panther Party, poor people’s movements also reshaped urban policy and community development in the turbulent American 1960s. (full paper is available on request, please email Pippin.Anderson@uct.ac.za)

About the Speaker: Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair of Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.  Her research, teaching, and public scholarship is concerned with global urbanism, territories of poverty, the politics of postcolonial development. Roy’s most recent books include “Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development” and “Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.”

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Ananya Roy’s visit to South Africa is enabled by the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University, which invited her to deliver the bi-annual Rusty Bernstein Memorial Lecture on 16 May 2013