Governance and politics of harnessing urbanisation for Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban development

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

Visiting scholar Prof Winnie Mitullah, of the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Nairobi will present a seminar entitled Governance and politics of harnessing urbanisation for Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban development, on Tuesday, 3 December at 12:30 to 14:00 in Studio 3, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT. The session will be chaired by senior researcher Dr Liza Rose Cirolia. Urbanisation in Africa has attracted attention of scholars, policy makers and practitioners, but problems of urbanisation are seemingly insurmountable and are not being adequately  addressed. African cities are rapidly growing but contrary to conventional patterns, the population growth is not matched by economic growth and development. This inconsistency has resulted in the persistence of spatial, demographic, social, cultural, economic and environmental problems, which have diverted attention of the continent to studying and highlighting the problems of urbanisation, and theories which explain problems. This has left a gap in analysis in respect to harnessing opportunities for consolidating urbanisation and urban development. The seminar is part of a larger paper focusing on harnessing Africa’s urbanisation for sustainable urban development, concentrating on understanding how the unique aspects of Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation, existing opportunities and related disruptions are being governed for Africa’s urban development. The seminar will provide context and review some of the explanations and related theories used to explain Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation. This is aimed at setting the ground for exploring governance attributes and related politics which advance or undermine Africa’s urban development. A key question for exploration is how governance and politics enable or undermine tapping urbanisation opportunities for sustainable urban development. Transport infrastructure in the city of Cape Town and the city of Nairobi is used to dig out inherent governance and related politics which shroud the development of urban areas in Africa. The seminar will concentrate on the first part of this research which include review of context, urban growth, theoretical lenses and overview of mediation of transport infrastructure for sustainable urban development. WHEN: 3 December 2019 TIME: 12:30 to 14:00 VENUE: Studio 3, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT BIOGRAPHY Professor Winnie V. Mitullah is the current Director and Associate Research Professor of Development Studies at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), and the Director Gender Affairs, University of Nairobi. She holds a PhD in Political Science and Public Administration from the University of York, UK. Her PhD thesis was on Urban Housing, with a major focus on policies relating to low income housing. Over the years, she has researched and consulted in the areas of governance, in particular in the area of provision and management of urban services and the role of stakeholders in development. Her focus in these areas has included an examination of policies, and institutional dynamics in relation to local level development, including that of devolved governments, Micro and Small Enterprises , public and Non Motorised Transport (NMT), gender, youth and media.

Global Agendas and Urban Equality: Exploring synthesis, connections and contestations

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

Join ACC on Friday, 8 November at 12:30 for a special seminar session entitled Global Agendas and Urban Equality: Exploring synthesis, connections and contestations. ACC Director Edgar Pieterse will be in conversation with Michele Acuto, Director of the Connected Cities Lab, The University of Melbourne, and Winnie Mitullah Director of Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. The discussion will be chaired by Stephanie Butcher, a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Connected Cities Lab. While great strides have been made in recent years to help place the urban more firmly on international development agendas, questions remain as to how, and in what ways, global policy can be operationalised at an urban scale. Bringing together leading thinkers on urbanisation this moderated discussion will explore the scalar connections between global processes and policy agendas and their material, political and social impacts across urban environments in the global South. WHEN: Friday, 8 November TIME: 12:30 to 13:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT   BIOGRAPHIES Professor Michele Acuto is an expert on urban politics and international urban planning. Michele is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a Senior Fellow of the Bosch Foundation Global Governance Futures Program. Before joining the Faculty, Michele was Director of the City Leadership Lab and Professor of Diplomacy and Urban Theory at University College London, having previously worked as Stephen Barter Fellow of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities at the University of Oxford. He also taught at the University of Canberra, University of Southern California, Australian National University and National University of Singapore. Outside academia, Michele worked for the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds, the European Commission's response to pandemic threats. He also has worked for several years on city leadership and city networks with, amongst others, Arup, World Health Organization, World Bank Group, the C40 Climate Leadership Group, and UN-Habitat. Professor Winnie V. Mitullah is the current Director and Associate Research Professor of Development Studies at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), and the Director Gender Affairs, University of Nairobi. She holds a PhD in Political Science and Public Administration from the University of York, UK. Her PhD thesis was on Urban Housing, with a major focus on policies relating to low income housing. Over the years, she has researched and consulted in the areas of governance, in particular in the area of provision and management of urban services and the role of stakeholders in development. Her focus in these areas has included an examination of policies, and institutional dynamics in relation to local level development, including that of devolved governments, Micro and Small Enterprises , public and Non Motorised Transport (NMT), gender, youth and media. Dr. Stephanie Butcher is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Connected Cities lab. She is a part of the 'Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality' (KNOW) project, a global consortium which seeks to deliver transformative research and capacity in policy and planning that will promote and strengthen pathways to urban equality. Previous to this post, she worked with the Development Planning Unit (DPU) at the University College London as a Teaching Fellow, convening courses focused on the themes of participatory planning, urban inequality, and gender and diversity in the Global South. Her doctoral thesis was shaped by principles of action-research, and focused on the 'everyday politics' of water infrastructure for informal settlement residents in Kathmandu, Nepal.  It examined the micro-politics of how gender, tenure relations, and ethnicity shaped how diverse residents interacted with the socio-technical aspects of infrastructure, impacting a sense of citizenship.           IMAGE CREDIT: Unequal Scenes by Johnny Miller

SDG Seminar: Unpacking SDG implementation in eThekwini

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

Puvendra Akkiah, IDP Manager of eThekwini Municipality and Technical Chair of the United Cities and Local Governments Committee on Urban Strategic Planning, will present a talk entitled Unpacking SDG implementation in eThekwini on Wednesday, 17 April, at 14:00 to 15:30 in Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT. Akkiah will be talking about the City of eThekwini's bottom-up approach to aligning its Integrated Development Plan to the SDGs as part of its strategic approach to sustainability and the advocacy and training activities that the City has undertaken to raise awareness and support for SDG localization. WHEN: 17 April 2019 TIME: 14:00 to 15:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT.

Urban Humanities: Contextualising strategies to enable LGBT rights in Africa: legitimacies, spatial inequalities and socio-spatial relationships

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

Join us for the an Urban Humanities academic seminar entitled Contextualising strategies to enable LGBT rights in Africa: legitimacies, spatial inequalities and socio-spatial relationships, by Dr Andrew Tucker on Thursday, 1 November 2018 at 15:00. ABSTRACT This paper explores the potential benefits of relationally considering the efficacy of radically different strategies to support LGBT rights in Africa. While a great deal has been written about the deployment of human rights-based framings to support LGBT needs on the continent, less attention has been paid to other emergent strategies based around HIV/AIDS programming and economic development initiatives. This paper sets out a schema to consider the relational nature of these different strategies and highlights how such a schema can also enable researchers to better understand how civil society groups strategically and pragmatically harness different approaches in particular places and at particular times. WHEN: Thursday, 1 November 2018 TIME: 15:00 to 16:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Urban Humanities: Storytelling as method: migration, gender and inclusion in Durban

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT Storytelling as a form of urban scholarship has the potential for empathetic ways of producing knowledge, understanding, seeing and being in the city. This seminar explores how storytelling in a multitude of forms can be a productive method for data collection, public dissemination and advocacy for social justice. It discusses this based on a year and half long partnership project between scholars and civil society organisations on Migration, Gender and Inclusion in the city of Durban. In this project women’s stories of arriving in the city and making it something like home were positioned at the centre of project activities. Thirty oral histories of migrant women, both South African women living in a Durban hostel and women arriving from the DRC, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Uganda formed the primary data set. These narratives were then developed into a verbatim theatre performance titled The Last Country that was performed in many different settings around the city. The seminar outlines how the play was both a form of storytelling in itself, making accessible the oral history data to a broader public audience, and a form of data collection through discussion sessions with audience members and city officials. This seminar looks at the learnings and challenges we experienced through being a part of a project built around the idea of sharing stories in the city.   BIOGRAPHY Dr Kira Erwin is a sociologist and senior researcher at the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology. Kira's research and publications focus largely around race, racialisation, racism and anti-racism work in South Africa. She is interested in how place identities related to space and the built environment impact on ideas of social difference. Kira makes use of creative participatory methods in her research and engagement projects, and collaborates with colleagues in the creative arts to design forms of storytelling that extend research findings beyond the walls of academia. WHEN: 18 October 2018 TIME: 15:00 - 16:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Urban Humanities: Conversations on cultural mapping and planning

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

“Cultural planning sits at the intersection of people, places and policies— It provides a framework for addressing the needs and objectives of a city’s cultural sector and cultural life including arts, culture and heritage groups and practitioners that shape a city’s cultural ecosystem.”   Dr Rike Sitas will facilitate a discussion between three panelists that will look at how cultural mapping and planning responds to different research contexts depending on the questions asked and the way in which every day cultural practises unfold in different communities, namely, Hanover Park and Mannenberg, Cosmo City and Mitchells Plain. The overall aims of this research is to unearth some of the cultural practises and narratives in deprived communities in South African cities and how people navigate and express themselves despite the lack of material resources and services. These types of research projects also help to inform policy around arts and cultural services for local government.   BIOS Shamila Rahim is a cultural worker and activist who has worked extensively in the Arts, Cultural and Heritage sector in Cape Town for the last 25 years. Currently she works at City of Cape Town as a Professional Officer in the Arts and Culture Branch. Her interests are in understanding and using arts, culture and heritage as agents to facilitate mind set change which empower the individual to voice and become active in creating positive narratives of themselves and society as a whole.   Vaughn Sadie is a conceptual artist, educator and researcher, living and working in Cape Town (South Africa). He is currently registered in the PhD Programme at the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology and work at African Centre for Cities as a researcher. He is interested in interdisciplinary and participatory practices, and the place of art in various social contexts.   Alicia Fortuin is a Masters Graduate from the School of Architecture and Planning where she completed her Masters degree in City and Regional Planning. Her Dissertation looked at the Spaces of and for Participation in the Restitution of land in District Six. It is through this research process where her interests in urban governance, rights, community participation and healing and memory evolved. She has most recently received the Pan African College Phd Scholarship at the African Centre for Cities, where she will be embarking on a PHD journey which will look at the impacts and of land use dynamics and urban sprawl on young professionals in Cape Town.

Urban Humanities Seminar Series: Vital Geopolitics by Gerry Kearns

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

Vital Geopolitics is the study of international relations from the perspective of life itself. Colonialism and neoliberalism are not only economic forces, they shape social reproduction and the geography of labour power. Viewed in this way, demography and gender, famine and migration, intellectual property and extortion, suicide and capital punishment share a profound set of mutual determinants. Tracing marginality as a set of biological relations reveals some of the links between, for example, primitive accumulation and the Anthropocene. Gerry Kearns is Professor of Human Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His is the author of Geopolitics and Empire (Oxford University Press 2009) and co-editor of Spatial Justice and the Irish Crisis (Royal Irish Academy 2014). WHEN: Tuesday, 18 September 2018 TIME: 15:00 to 16:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT IMAGE CREDIT: Michael Farrell, Wounded Wonder, Mixed media on paper, 96.5 x 105 cm.

Urban Humanities Seminar Series: The Invention of the ‘Sink Estate’: Consequential Categorization and the UK Housing Crisis

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

The Invention of the ‘Sink Estate’: Consequential Categorization and the UK Housing Crisis presented by Tom Slater explores the history and traces the realisation of a category that was invented by journalists, amplified by free market think tanks and converted into policy doxa (common sense) by politicians in the United Kingdom: the ‘sink estate’. This derogatory designator, signifying social housing estates that supposedly create poverty, family breakdown, worklessness, welfare dependency, antisocial behaviour and personal irresponsibility, has become the symbolic frame justifying current policies towards social housing that have resulted in considerable social suffering and intensified dislocation. The article deploys a conceptual articulation of agnotology (the intentional production of ignorance) with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power to understand the institutional arrangements and cognitive systems structuring deeply unequal social relations. Specifically, the highly influential publications on housing by a free market think tank, Policy Exchange, are dissected in order to demonstrate how the activation of territorial stigma has become an instrument of urban politics. The ‘sink estate’, it is argued, is the semantic battering ram in the ideological assault on social housing, deflecting attention away from social housing not only as urgent necessity during a serious crisis of affordability, but as incubator of community, solidarity, shelter and home. WHEN: Thursday 20 September 2018 TIME: 15:00 to 16:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT  

Urban Humanities Seminar Series: Inclusive Cultural Governance: Integrating artistic and cultural practices into national urban frameworks by Avril Joffe

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

Join African Centre for Cities for the second seminar the second seminar in our Urban Humanities series, Zayd Minty will be responding to Avril Joffe talking about Inclusive Cultural Governance: Integrating artistic and cultural practices into national urban frameworks  WHEN: 16 August 2018 TIME: 15:00 to 16:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town. SPEAKER Avril Joffe is an economic sociologist with experience in the field of cultural policy, culture and development and the cultural economy. She is the head of the Cultural Policy and Management Department at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.  Avril is an active member of UNESCO’s Panel of Experts for Cultural Policy and Governance undertaking missions to support African governments in developing cultural policies, cultural industry strategies, reporting on their implementation of the UNESCO Convention, writing and editing training manuals and recently contributed to the Global Monitoring Report 2018 on the ‘Integration of Culture in Sustainable Development’. Avril is a member of the South African Ministerial Review Panel to draft a revised cultural policy for South Africa.  She is on the board of the National Arts Council and chairs the Audit and Risk Committee for the NAC. RESPONDENT Zayd Minty is a professional cultural development manager and curator.  He has previously, since 1993, worked in and with the cultural sector, civil society, academia and government, in various leadership roles.  In addition to cultural policy and strategy work, he has curated various arts projects and festivals. He is currently registered at the African Centre for Cities doing a doctorate looking at Cultural Clusters and Urban Development in the Johannesburg Inner City.

Urban Humanities Seminar Series: Prof Sophie Oldfield “High Stakes, High Hopes: Creating Collaborative Urban Theory”

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN MOVED TO TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST DUE TO A CLASH WITH THE UCT MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR THE LATE PROF BONGANI MAYOSI.  ACC is excited to invite you to the first Urban Humanities Seminar Series. Prof Sophie Oldfield will be presenting a paper entitled 'High Stakes, High Hopes: Creating Collaborative Urban Theory'. ABSTRACT: High Stakes, High Hopes creates urban theory in the political and physical realities of everyday southern city life. This work examines the high stakes at play in a decade-long research and teaching partnership, which has brought this university and the neighbourhood’s civic organization in Cape Town to research the city together to collaboratively build urban theory. In narrating the project and partnership, this lecture will explore collaborative forms of urban theory, immersed in the registers, inspirations and meanings of everyday struggles and learning across the city. This approach brings together multiple voices, registers and accounts, shaping urban theory in shared spaces across the city. In this context of extreme urban inequality, this approach to theorising infuses the personal, political, and public struggles through which urban theory is generated, expertise opened up, and solidarity and commitment built. BIO: Sophie Oldfield holds the University of Basel–University of Cape Town Professorship in Urban Studies, based at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Her research is grounded in empirical and epistemological questions central to urban theory. Focusing on housing, informality and governance, mobilization and social movement organizing, and urban politics, her work pays close attention to political practice and everyday urban geographies, analysing the ways in which citizens and organized movements craft agency to engage and contest the state. She has a track record of excellence in collaborative research practice, challenging how academics work in and between “university” and “community.”