urban everyday

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.