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THE URBAN EVERYDAY – FINAL STUDENT EXHIBITION

APG Foyer, Centlivres Building Upper Campus University of Cape Town

The ‘Urban Everyday’ offers a perspective on city-making that explores agency found in intersecting practices of occupation and adaptation, engagement and participation, resistance and protest, as well as waiting, encountering and imagining the city, its inhabitants and the state. In tracking diverse forms of agency, this framework of urban inquiry explores the substance of the city – its housing and land struggles, experiences of work and strategies to make ends meet, as well as questions of identity and belonging. It also examines how these diverse urban experiences frequently meet, compete with, and rub up against rights, policies, and state techniques. In this exhibition, postgraduate students present their creative reflections on different course themes and grapple with the question of how we can hold structural forces in productive tension with ordinary forms of agency. By focusing on seemingly mundane practices, their works offer provocative points of entry for questioning how we theorize Southern cities and engage in imagining and building their future. Participating students come from the following programs: MPhil Southern Urbanism (African Centre for Cities), MA Critical Urbanisms (University of Basel in collaboration with the African Centre for Cities), MA Urban Design and EGS Honours.

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Book Launch – Apartheid Remains by Sharad Chari

The Book Lounge 71 Roeland Street, Cape Town, South Africa

UKZN Press, The Book Lounge and the African Centre for Cities invite you to the launch of 'Apartheid Remains' by Sharad Chari. Sharad will be in conversation with Omar Badsha and Caroline Skinner. DATE | Thursday, 18 July 2024 TIME| 17h30 for 18h00 VENUE | The Book Lounge, 71 Roeland Str, Cape Town RSVP | booklounge@gmail.com About the book: In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilised in various ways – through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty and capital – submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament. Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley; Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER); and author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India. Apartheid Remains is published by UKZN Press.

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Brown bag seminar: The visible hand of a transport mafia in Lagos (Nigeria)

Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

The National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) is a recognized union, an unofficial section of a political party, and a 'parastatal' organization transporting millions of passengers in Nigeria. These multiple functions are seen by academics and the public as a problem. Many researchers consider NURTW as a mafia because of its collusions with political parties, the police and civil servants, an increasingly dominant interpretation characterizing popular transport organizations in the African continent. This project is aimed at understanding divergent views of 'informal' transport organization in Lagos, the economic capital of Nigeria. To do this, historian and political scientist Laurent Fourchard works with photographer Andrew Esiebo to engage in a common fieldwork based on visual ethnography methods. By associating photography and ethnography, they would like to explore the visible hand of an organization whose main functions are unseen, hidden, difficult to grasp or stigmatized. Bio: Laurent Fourchard is a research professor at the National Foundation for Political Science (CERI) and teaching faculty at Sciences Po's Urban School. He was Director of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) in Nigeria from 2000 to 2003 and visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town in 2008 and 2009. Before joining CERI in 2016 he was a research fellow at the research institute, Les Afrique dans le monde at Sciences Po Bordeaux.

Info Session – MPhil Southern Urbanism

The MPhil Southern Urbanism is designed to cultivate the next generation of urban thinkers from the South, who are rooted in the realities, theories and practise of cities of the Global South. Drawing together a diverse cohort of scholar and practitioners, the programme uses a combination of guided learning in small-group seminars, experimentation in various spaces of urban practice and independent thesis research to ground students in Urban Studies theory, and new research methodologies. If you are interested in applying for the MPhil Southern Urbanism programme but still have some questions? This info session, hosted by programme convenor, Dr Anna Selmeczi will provide a brief overview of the pedagogical approach, programme structure and entry requirements, as well as discussion time to answer all your questions. APPLICATIONS DEADLINE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN AND INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: 31 October 2024 REGISTER HERE

Brownbag seminar_ACCRETION THROUGH FRICTION: examining garbage flows in Dakar’s Baie de Hann

Studio 1, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Once the second most beautiful to the bay of Rio de Janeiro, Dakar’s Baie de Hann is now known for its pollution. A largely EU-funded infrastructure project (2017-2021) promised to resolve the bay’s challenges. Jonas Le Thierry d’Ennequin challenges this modernist project from an Urban Political Ecology perspective. By examining how the bay’s infrastructure flows accrete (Anand, 2015) since the 1980s, he argues for the generative potential of “friction” in infrastructural development. Details: Date: Thursday, 01 August 2024 Time: 12h30 –14h00 Venue: Studio 1, Level 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building Jonas is a UKRI-funded PhD candidate at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. He holds an MSc Urban Development Planning from UCL and a BA Global Challenges from Leiden University & Universidad de Chile. Prior to his doctoral research he worked as a strategic communications consultant in different sectors.

Brownbag seminar: African Landscape Architectures_Alternative futures for the field

EGS Library, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Based on landscape fieldwork across 11 African nations during 2022–23, this talk speculates on the future of landscape architecture in Africa and the Global South. While visiting educational programs, designed landscapes, and meeting practitioners across African nations, Gareth Doherty saw and registered various landscape practices as they exist on the ground, whether professionally designed or not. Some forms of “grassroots” practice are more deeply engaged with solving the problems of our age—including climate change and social inequalities— than their more formalized and institutionalized counterparts. Details: Date: Thursday, 15 August 2024 Time: 13h00 –14h00 Venue: EGS Library, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT About the presenter: Gareth Doherty is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and principal of the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Doherty takes a human-centered approach to landscape architecture, applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory methodologies to design and theory. His work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Doherty addresses these issues through research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds. Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How the Engaging the World Changes Design (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming), and his recent fieldwork on African landscape architecture. Doherty was a Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities in 2022–23.

Info Session: MPhil Urban Studies – Southern Urbanism

Virtual Event Virtual Event

The MPhil Southern Urbanism is designed to cultivate the next generation of urban thinkers from the South, who are rooted in the realities, theories and practise of cities of the Global South. Drawing together a diverse cohort of scholar and practitioners, the programme uses a combination of guided learning in small-group seminars, experimentation in various spaces of urban practice and independent thesis research to ground students in Urban Studies theory, and new research methodologies. This info session, hosted by programme convenor, Dr Anna Selmeczi will provide a brief overview of the pedagogical approach, programme structure and entry requirements, as well as discussion time to answer all your questions. APPLICATIONS DEADLINE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN AND INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: 31 October 2024 REGISTER HERE