Step, Step, Breathe by Sophie Oldfield is a film contribution to Volume 2 Spring 2020 of AGITATE!, an online, open access journal which provides a platform for knowledges that seek to unsettle the dominant politics and practices of experts. AGITATE! explores the possibilities and challenges of interweaving scholarship, creative writing, art, journalism, and activism. Step, Step, Breathe tells […]
Join us to celebrate and share the work of the first cohort of MPhil Southern Urbanism graduates, along with their first year colleagues. WHEN: Thursday, 7 November TIME: 14:00 to 17:00 with drinks and snacks afterwards VENUE: Davies Reading Room, EGS Building, UCT RSVP by Monday 4 November, to khaya.salman@uct.ac.za PROGRAMME Reflections on Thesis Work: […]
Housed at the most elevated part of the mountainous University of Cape Town upper campus, the African Centre for Cities (ACC) runs an exciting MPhil in Urban Studies programme to develop urban scholars that can take on the complex challenges of rapidly urbanising cities of the global south. From its vantage point, the ACC’s call […]
You are invited to attend the one-night only exhibition of pumflets produced by the students of the MPhil Southern Urbanism. The exhibition is the product of the third iteration of the City Research Studio, which forms the cornerstone of the MPhil Southern Urbanism curriculum. The City Research Studio functions as a laboratory space where students learn […]
The first semester of the MPhil in Southern Urbanism at the African Centre for Cities , University of Cape Town swept away cobwebs of old stale ways of thinking about life in the city and pushed every necessary “refresh” button. My internal adventures, both of the mental and spirit kind carefully choreographed and facilitated by […]
Walking is an important practice to access the ordinary life of a city. It offers a slow-paced, ground level and direct approach to urban environments. It allows one to experience the surrounding on an affectual plane. Each and every space has a smell, a feel, an intangible history, hidden meanings and is made up of […]
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.
Laura Nkula-Wenz’s and Sophie Oldfield reflect on the cutting-edge urban studies teaching in the innovative collaboration between the University of Basel’s Masters in Critical Urbanisms and the African Centre for Cities’s University of Cape Town-based Masters in Southern Urbanism, in ‘Urban Immersions’ published in the European Association of International Education’s winter issue of Forum, focused […]
Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda by Korydon H. Smith and Tomà Berlanda explores the pressing challenges and opportunities to be found in planning, designing, and constructing a healthy, equitable and sustainable city. Asking “what is an authentic-yet-modern, prosperous-yet-feasible African city, Rwandan city?” Smith, Berlanda and colleagues conducted research on Rwandan activities of daily living and how these routines […]
In the first six weeks of the first semester African Centre for Cities hosted a joint City Research Studio (CRS), a cornerstone of the newly launched MPhil in Southern Urbanism and the Masters in Critical Urbanisms (University of Basel) semester at UCT. CRS was conceived of as a three-part experimental space for students, and faculty, […]
Palgrave Macmillan have recently published a new title by Richard de Satgé and ACC’s Vanessa Watson Urban Planning in the Global South – Conflicting rationalities in contested urban space. (more…)
Urban studies in Africa have come a long way in the last half-century. Speaking on the final day of an international urban conference hosted by the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), pioneering US-born urban researcher AbdouMaliq Simone drew on his early experiences to emphasise the gains of this […]
To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the establishment of the African Centre for Cities, we are hosting the ACC International Urban Conference from 1 to 3 February 2018, at the University of Cape Town.
Prof Sophie Oldfield holds the University of Cape Town–University of Basel Professorship in Urban Studies. On 3 October 2017 she gave her inaugural lecture entitled High Stakes, High Hopes: Creating Urban Knowledge Collaboratively at the University of Basel, Switzerland. (more…)
To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, the International Urban Conference draws together leading urban scholars and practitioners from all corners of Africa and the world. (more…)
Seeking to address the knowledge vacuum generated by the multitude of environmental, economic and social crises manifesting in cities in the Global South due to rapid urbanisation, the African Centre for Cities (ACC), rooted at the University of Cape Town, launches a new Masters in Southern Urbanism (an MPhil specialising in Urban Studies). (more…)
Polity Books has just published New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times by AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, which explores the emerging epicentres of global urbanisation. (more…)
This workshop examines ideas of radical incrementalism across our towns and cities. It seeks to explore theories and practices that can support emancipatory change across urban regions through the power of urban dwellers to challenge poverty, oppression and unjust environments.
The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, Edited by Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield engages the twenty-first-century city through a ‘southern urban’ lens to stimulate scholarly, professional and activist engagements with the city.
This paper offers a reflection upon the epistemological project that lives at the heart of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, a young interdisciplinary space dedicated to rethinking urban things.
