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BOXES

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

BOXES is a social-justice theatre project devised by award-winning theatre makers Neil Coppen and Ameera Conrad, Journalist Daneel Knoetze and performers Quanita Adams and Mark Elderkin. The project draws from a range of research-based, verbatim and documentary theatre methodologies to explore a myriad of perspectives and insights into urban land justice issues occurring across city of Cape Town. The plays central narrative focuses around a young Cape Town couple: Kaye (Quanita Adams) and Lawrence (Mark Elderkin) who have recently moved into the inner-city and find their preparations for a house-warming dinner, derailed when Lawrence announces that he has accepted a job offer to design a state-of-the art residential development in lower Woodstock. When it is discovered that local residents will be evicted from their neighbourhood to make room for the development, Kaye begins to probe the repercussions of her partner’s latest venture. As Kaye and Lawrence battle it out, we learn of Kaye’s interactions with her Aunt Sumaya in the Bo Kaap, who due to rising rates is having to sell up her family home and has been inspired to return to her activist roots. As Kaye and Lawrence attempt to arrive at some sort of a resolve before the arrival of their dinner guests, audiences encounter a myriad of characters including property developers, politicians, residents and whistleblowers whose lives are impacted, for better or worse, by the gentrification trends sweeping across the city and suburbs. Over the course of four short scenes, BOXES probes the legacy of apartheid spatial planning and forced removals, examining notions of ‘development’ and ‘progress’, by interrogating the question: Who is really benefitting from all this so-called progress? BOXES forms part of a wider Open Society Foundation project which connects South African investigative journalists with theatre makers and artists. The Open Society foundation funded the project which sees creatives interpret the work of investigative journalists with the hope that alternative dissemination strategies would enable these narratives to reach wider audiences in the lead up to the 2019 South African elections. The play is produced by Empatheatre, a company founded by Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni and Dylan McGarry. Empatheatre has been responsible for launching several social-justice theatrical projects over the last decade including Soil & Ash (focusing on rural communities facing pressure from coal-mining companies), Ulwembu (street-level Drug addiction and harm reduction advocacy), The Last Country (female migration stories) and Lalela ulwandle (an international theatre project supporting sustainable transformative governance of the oceans). More recently the Empatheatre team has been invited to work internationally in New York, St Louis, Toronto, Fiji, Ghana and Namibia. DATE: 26 April 2019 TIME: 14:00 to 15:00 VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT Space is limited. Please RSVP to africancentreforcities.rsvp@gmail.com

Governing Cape Town’s Informal Economy

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

ACC invites you to a special Brownbag lecture by Dr Graeme Young entitled Governing Cape Town Informal Economy, on Friday 26 July at 13:00 to 14:00 in Studio 5, EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT. Young, a visiting QES Scholar, has been working with the Office of the Premier of the Western Cape as part of the wider provincial food system strategy. This presentation will outline initial perspectives on research carried out to understand the institutional and policy landscape in which Cape Town’s informal economy is governed and offer theoretical insights that may be useful for engaging with broader questions surrounding urban governance in Cape Town and beyond. VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT DATE: Friday, 26 July 2019 TIME: 13h00 – 14h00

Launch of ‘The Walk’

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

African Centre for Cities invites  you to the launch of a new publication entitled The Walk. This publication, which is based on a research study entitled The Prospects for Socio-Spatial Transformation in the Voortrekker Road Corridor by Mercy Brown-Luthango, was supported by the French Development Agency (AFD) and focuses on Maitland, Kensington and Factreton. The main concern of this study was to understand the vision of city officials and politicians, as outlined in major policy documents, and how this compares to the daily lived experiences of those who reside and conduct business in the three study areas. Please join us for a series of panel presentations followed by a facilitated discussion on the prospects and challenges for socio-spatial transformation in the Voortrekker Road Corridor Integration Zone (VRCIZ). DATE: 18 March 2019 TIME: 11:30 to 13:00 (followed by lunch) VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town PLEASE RSVP to africancentreforcities.rsvp@gmail.com by 16 March 2019 for catering purposes.

BROWNBAG SEMINAR: How Cities Respond to Climate Change: Ambition and Reality of European and African Cities

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

Join ACC and ACDI for a lunchtime brownbag seminar by Diana Reckien, Associate Professor, University of Twente, Netherlands entitled How Cities Respond to Climate Change: Ambition and Reality of European and African Cities. WHERE: Studio 5, Level 5, Environmental & Geographical Sciences Building (EGS) UCT Upper Campus, Rondebosch WHEN: 12.30 – 1.30pm, Monday 28 January 2019 Diana Reckien will present some of her latest research on local climate planning in European cities, that builds on a network of 30 collaborators across the EU-28. Building up a database of the climate change response of 885 cities in the EU-28 (representative of the urban profile in their country), Diana and colleagues were able to yield insights into which cities in Europe prepare climate (adaptation or mitigation) plans and what these plans entail. This provides information about, e.g., the mitigation targets/ambitions and whether these would be sufficient to reach 1.5/2C, prominent mitigation and adaptation sectors, and modes of implementation (mainstreaming or not). Diana will then move to some of her work in African cities, presenting recent research on mainstreaming in Kigali City (Rwanda) and on environmental urban migration in northern Kenya. She will close with ideas and plans for future research, e.g. potentially open up topics for collaboration, such as perception based climate change impact analyses in African cities using FCM, cascading impacts, socially sensible adaptation options, and/or the effectiveness of adaptation plans. BIOGRAPHY Diana Reckien is Associate Professor "Climate Change and Urban Inequality" at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She specializes at the interface of climate change and urban research, with the aim to contribute to justice efforts. One of her current research question is how climate change mitigation and adaptation policies affect and interact with social vulnerability, equity and justice, and how to set up adaptation and mitigation policies in order to avoid respective negative side-effects. Other research interests include method development for impact and adaptation assessments, and modelling approaches, social vulnerability, and climate change migration. She mainly investigates urban areas in Europe, Asia (mainly India), and Africa. To do so, she employs large comparative studies using social science methods, such as questionnaires, case study analyses and multi-variate statistics, as well as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM). Diana is Coordinating Lead Author for “Chapter 17: Decision-making options for managing risk” of the Working Group II Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. She led parts of the Second Assessment Report for Climate Change in Cities (ARC3.2; Eds: Rosenzweig, Solecki et al.; Cambridge University Press) - those that relate to equity and environmental justice. She serves on the Editorial Board of “Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews”(IF 8.050). Her publication record comprises roughly 70 publications, including 25 peer-reviewed journal papers, a number of book chapters, and two special issues.

ACC BROWNBAG Future Foreshore: are affordable housing and lowered freeways possible?

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

Join ACC on Thursday, 8 March at 13:00 for the first in a series of Brownbag seminars. The hot topic of discussion is the winning bid for the redevelopment of the Foreshore Freeway Precinct, Cape Town. SPEAKERS Lisa Kane Kane is a Honorary Research Associate with the Centre for Transport Studies at UCT and co-founder and board member of Open Streets, Cape Town. Her PhD thesis considered the history and politics of engineering of the Foreshore freeway projects from its initiation to the 1980s, and how that period has informed current thinking around road engineering in South Africa. Rob McGaffin McGaffin is a town planner and land economist.  He has worked as town planner with the City of Cape Town and the Gauteng Department of Economic Development, and in property finance at several financial institutions. He was a Mistra Urban Futures Researcher with the ACC. He lectures in the Department of Construction Economics and Management at the University of Cape Town and is a founding member of the UCT - Nedbank Urban Real Estate Research Unit. CHAIR Vanessa Watson WHEN: Thursday, 8 March 2018 TIME: 13:00 to 14:30 VENUE: Studio 5, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town

Rethinking Sustainable Cities: from slogan to implementation

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

ACC is excited to host representatives from Mistra Urban Futures who will be presenting on their forthcoming book entitled 'Rethinking Sustainable Cities: from slogan to implementation'. Overview Mistra Urban Futures’ forthcoming book provides detailed intellectual and practical histories of fair, green and accessible cities - three key urban characteristics chosen to symbolise the research centre’s approach, which utilises transdisciplinary co-production methodologies to promote sustainable urban solutions to specific local problems in each of its research platforms. These characteristics suffuse MUF’s work and Strategic Plan for 2016-19. David Simon will explain these agendas, focusing particularly on the origins and current nature of urban greening discourses and the challenges to implementation to ensure that they make a substantive as opposed to purely marginal or incremental difference. Sue Parnell will do likewise in relation to fair cities. Bios David Simon joined Mistra Urban Futures in September 2014 from Royal Holloway, University of London, where he still holds a part-time appointment as Professor of Development Geography. He was Head of theGeography Department there from 2008-11. He has vast international experience including grant-funded research on sub-Saharan Africa (especially Namibia, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana), Asia (especially Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines), the UK and the USA. He has also served as specialist advisor to UN-HABITAT on cities and climate change, was one of only two academics on the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office's specialist Africa Advisory Group prior to its disbandment, and has consulted for various NGOs and national and international development agencies. Furthermore, he is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. Susan Parnell’s early academic research was in the area of urban historical geography and focussed on the rise of racial residential segregation and the impact of colonialism on urbanisation and town planning in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1994 and democracy in South Africa her work has shifted to contemporary urban policy research (local government, poverty reduction and urban environmental justice). By its nature this research is not been purely academic, but has involved liasing with local and national government and international donors. Sue is also on the boards of several local NGOs concerned with poverty alleviation, sustainability and gender equity in post-apartheid South Africa. She serves on a number of national and international advisory research panels relating to urban reconstruction.

Josh Palfreman: Waste Ventures in East Africa

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

 Waste Ventures in East Africa: a critical examination of the science, collection models and innovative technologies being employed by urban planners in Kenya and Tanzania In this Brownbag, Josh Palfreman will be reflecting on the science, collection models and innovative technologies being employed by urban planners in Kenya and Tanzania in an effort to manage solid waste. Abstract: Josh Palfreman takes a market systems approach to develop a deeper understanding of solid waste management in Mombasa, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  His presentation will provide insight into a waste characterization study. This study was conducted to underpin the formulation of strategic waste management policy, geospatial analysis and scientific research to map formal and informal waste management stakeholders.  It further brings to attention how action research is used to support innovation and entrepreneurship in municipal solid waste collection models while piloting various technologies designed, manufactured and maintained in East Africa that are tailored to local skill sets and infrastructure, to enhance waste collection and recovery operations across the region.    Biography: Joshua Palfreman is an urban planning and waste management professional with over six years of experience in East Africa. In 2009, he founded WASTEDAR, an NGO providing waste management services in Tanzania. Palfreman currently provides technical assistance to DFID on waste management programmes run by the development arm in Kenya and has recently published works relating to waste pickers and innovative collection models tailored to developing world waste characteristics and resources; work that will feature in this year's Fifteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium in Sardinia, Italy.  

Performing a New Model of Active and Activist Citizenship in South Africa

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

In this seminar, Dr Chloé Buire will be presenting a paper entitled 'Performing a New Model of Active and Activist Citizenship in South Africa'. Abstract In 2014, South Africa celebrated its “Twenty Years of Democracy”. Official commemorations emphasized the pride in belonging to the Rainbow Nation, but commentators recalled the fragility of the national myth.  Many of these commentators feared that young people who have not lived under apartheid could endanger democracy because of their unstable and conflicting political identities.  In this context, this paper explores the kind of citizenship promoted in youth policies and curricula, and traces how citizenship has been reframed since the heyday of the democratic transition in the 1990s.  Emerging from this analysis is an “active citizen” whose commitment to social justice is measured against her or his contribution to the national economy.  Nevertheless, interviews with key actors from government and civil society conducted in Cape Town reveal that the definition of a self-sufficient, responsible, and caring citizen is contested, as projects developed to produce young citizens engage with critical thinking as well as with personal economic advancement. While academic education remains seen as the primary tool for building citizenship, many are exploring alternative pedagogies and experimental training to challenge the status-quo of a profoundly unequal society.  The learning process of various actors involved in youth development suggests that South African citizenship is performed through this complex relationship between a model of economically active citizens and a model of politically conscious citizens. Biography Chloé completed her PhD in geography at the University of Paris Ouest (France). Her doctoral work examined the practices of urban citizenship in Gugulethu and Heideveld (Cape Town). She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) in 2012 and 2013, where she explored the construction of political identities in Luanda, Angola. Since January 2014, Chloé is a post-doctoral research associate at Durham University (UK). She is currently doing fieldwork in Cape Town for YouCitizen, a research project examining the meaning and experience of citizenship for young people in societies with histories of conflict and division (www.youcitizen.org).

Transnational Labor and Place Making in the Rustbelt US: Implications for Theorizing Place and Politics of Place in the Global Era

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa

ACC is excited to host Prof Faranak Miraftab in the first of our academic Seminar Series for 2015. In this seminar 'Transnational Labor and Place Making in the Rustbelt US: Implications for Theorizing Place  and Politics of Place in the Global Era', Prof Miraftab will be presenting from her forthcoming book (2016) entitled Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility. Abstract As a point observation I take an industrial town in rural rustbelt of the United States, and study the rapid social transformation of this space due to transnational labor recruitment by the meat processing industry. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Illinois, Mexico and Togo, I unfold the global production and social reproduction of migrant workers; how they make place globally and locally; and how they renegotiate inter-racial relations to make a former sundown town their new home in Illinois. Focusing on an often overlooked space in urban scholarship of globalization and taken-for-granted processes of global labor mobility, this study recovers voices and stories often hidden, made invisible or left out of the picture, to theorize place and place making relationally and stress the difference that place makes. Spanning urban studies, human geography, immigration and transitional studies, Making a Home in the Heartland makes important intervention in the theorization of urban, production and social reproduction of transnational migrants, politics of place and place making. Biography Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A native of Iran, she did her undergraduate studies at the Tehran University; while in political asylum she earned her Master's degree in Norway and later moved to the US and completed her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary ethnographic work crosses planning, geography and transnational studies and is empirically based in cities of Latin America, Africa and North America. As an urban scholar of globalization she is interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens' struggles to access dignified livelihood. She was named as a 2014-15 University Scholar, a prestigious award bestowed on faculty at the University of Illinois campuses. Her most recent and forthcoming publications include Cities of the Global South Reader (Miraftab and Kudva, Routledge 2014); Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World (eds. Miraftab, Wilson and Salo, Routledge April 2015), and Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility (Miraftab, Indiana University Press, January 2016). Her presentation will draw on the latter, a multi-sited ethnography concerning global production and social reproduction of migrant labor and how this makes for local development in the heartland US.