Workshop on Critical Research on African Urban Environments Broken
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Mary Lawhon has produced a book review for the geography journal Antipode for the forthcoming book Afropolis: City/Media/Art which has been formed as a catalogue for the travelling exhibition. The exhibition is described on its website (http://www.afropolis.net/) as… The curatorial approach highlights the interconnectedness of scientific and artistic concepts, not only exploring urban histories and recent developments,but also presenting 30 artistic viewpoints on issues of urbanity about and from these five cities. The result is a remarkable synergy of scientific and artistic research, documentary material and artistic reflection. The works shown in Afropolis include graphic arts, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, film and video art, as well as design, comics and weblogs. You can read the review here: http://radicalantipode.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/book-review_lawhon-on-pinther-et-al.pdf
Jonathan Silver has co-edited a special issue of the journal Local Environment: ‘Urban vulnerability, adaptation and resilience: analysing the lessons from UN-Habitats CCCI’ including a paper on ‘Climate change, urban vulnerability and development in Saint-Louis and Bobo-Dioulasso: learning from across two West African cities’ The papers in this special issue bring together the research and policy communities to examine the insights which are emerging from UN-Habitat’s Cities and Climate Change Initiative (CCCI) and their implications for understanding and action on urban vulnerability, adaptation and resilience in response to climate change. The papers have emerged through collaboration between the ESRC Urban Transitions and Climate Change project at Durham University (funded by ESRC) and UN-Habitat, as well as with colleagues at UCL and a number of municipalities involved in the CCCI process. They draw on the ongoing work undertaken by UN-Habitat since 2008 to support small and medium sized cities across the global South and the insights developed through the work of the Urban Transitions project concerning how, why and with what implications cities are responding to climate change. The focus of the special issue is on the three related issues of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience as they […]
A new book is out from Julian Agyeman that should be of interest to a broad audience, from urban sociologists, geographers, planners and activists, and their combinations! Read more here. Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning, and Practice Julian Agyeman This unique and insightful text offers an exploration of the origins and subsequent development of the concept of just sustainability.Introducing Just Sustainabilities discusses key topics, such as food justice, sovereignty and urban agriculture; community, space, place(making) and spatial justice; the democratization of our streets and public spaces; how to create culturally inclusive spaces; intercultural cities and social inclusion; green-collar jobs and the just transition; and alternative economic models, such as co-production. With a specific focus on solutions-oriented policy and planning initiatives that specifically address issues of equity and justice within the context of developing sustainable communities, this is the essential introduction to just sustainabilities.
Jonathan Silver co-organised and presented a paper at three linked sessions on ‘The contested politics of urban electricity networks: Insights from urban infrastructure studies’ This included a number of papers from African cities including Accra and Maputo This session is aimed at unpacking the ongoing politics across electricity networks in cities. It aims at drawing attention to the political and political ecological dimensions shaping electricity networks and their current transformation. Cities across the global North and South are reimagining and redeploying their electricity networks in response to issues of climate change, resource constraints, the search for energy efficiency and the advent of smart digital technologies. Building on previous work that highlight the political nature of urban infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001; McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008; Coutard and Rutherford, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2004) and uncover the uneven power relations embedded in the urbanization of nature through infrastructure (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000; Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003), the session aims to explore new ways in which the urban infrastructure literature can contribute to the field of energy geographies, furthering its use for understanding urbanization processes. Some of the key questions we aim to collectively answer are: • How the reconstitution of electricity networks through […]
By Henrik Ernstson How to think cities anew? When what we are seeing are not new Londons, Parises, New-Yorks or even Tokyos growing, we need to start re-thinking what urbanization and urbanism is about. New Cityscapes issue #3 out. Speaking from the south on ‘Smart Cities’. This is when we need a magazine like Cityscapes. Started in 2011 by artist-desginer-urbanist Tau Tavengwa and Sean O’Toole, backed up by southern urbanist stalwart Edgar Pieterese, the magazine gives a provocative shot or sip of a matured postcolonial critique of knowledge production. Indeed when urban Theory, capital T, is not longer valid for the type of cities we see in Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Johannesburg, Mumbai, and Jakarta, we need new tools, registers and ways of engaging that allows for new theories of the urban to grow and influence city-making, including planning and design professions. This is when we need to ask, like Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty of how to “provincialize Europe”—re-inserting the ‘localness’ of European thought to allow for experiences of urbanization and scholarship from different regions to take hold and influence theory-making. If Europe and USA is merely a province in the world of knowledge-making, then how have other regions thought and enacted their cities? […]
By Jonathan Silver What do communities do if politician after politician fails to deliver their election promises of new homes, electricity supply or clean water. In 2011 I joined activists in Cape Town who are articulating a new response to the crisis of service delivery in the city. It is early on Saturday morning in Khayelitsha, one of South Africa’s fastest growing townships located on the windswept and sandy Cape Flats area of Cape Town. Amongst the government constructed houses and informal settlements that make up the township the Cape Town of five star hotels and Michelin starred restaurants seems even further away than the 10 mile journey to get to this vibrant part of the city. With municipal elections less than a week away campaigners from the main political parties, the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA), are out in force in their brightly coloured t-shirts handing out leaflets, waving flags and attending rallies in the hotly contested race to control one of South Africa’s largest local authorities. The City of Cape Town is currently under DA control but the margins are slim and Khayelitsha could provide a key battleground for the parties. Like townships […]
Henrik Ernstson takes a look at a cultural mobilization against a backdrop of contestation in one part of Cape Town. This Saturday, on September 28, 2013, Emile YX? and his multiple crews of dancers and rappers will again mobilize to stop a shopping mall from being built at Princess Vlei, a park and wetland in Cape Town, South Africa. Just as they did for the first time a year ago on June 16, 2012 on Youth Day. Since their last appearance, Emile YX? and the group Mixed Mense has released a collection of songs all tuned into struggle. One soft-singing tune with hard-spoken words will most certainly be popular at the Vlei on Saturday. “Save Princess Vlei—No Mall” is a song in direct defense of the Vlei where the lyrics melts memories of apartheid geographies with a proud Coloured, Khoi and Black identity to create a voice that points out how strongly loaded with politics and deep difference Capetonian urban nature inherently is: “They again attend to mall and rape us. From our legacy and common ancestry. Here they plan to concrete away our memory. The enemy, a dictatorship disguised as a democracy, a corporate mockery stealing people’s property. […] Stolen land is […]
Rethinking urban ecologies of the global South We’ve have just published a new article in the geography journal Antipode on “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism“. In this article we argue that the ecologies being shaped through the new and rapidly emergent forms of urbanization that we witness in the global South and developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America provide both opportunities and challenges to how we theorize the urban. It requires both a better understanding of the biophysical systems in these places, but also a greater attention to everyday informal activities and how power and decision-making operates in these cities. The paper argues that although frameworks like those of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) have provided great tools during the last decade, these are based on the experience of EuroAmerican urbanization and focus on networked infrastructure systems like water, sanitation and electricity. Jonathan Silver states that “To use a particular framing of infrastructure as a lens made sense in New York, London or Stockholm. Here the modernist promise of urbanization of universal access was strong. But in cities like Lagos or Kampala this would fail to account for many experiences and actors that shape the city and who […]
Mary Lawhon teaches urban geography at University of Pretoria. In this first of a mini-series of commentaries Mary reflects on the experience of teaching her first undergraduate module. I’m in the middle of teaching my first urban geography course in the global South. I inherited half of the 14 week class too late to change the textbook, but with some flexibility about how to teach it. At first, I thought the text was going to be a pretty big stumbling block. Not just because my skin prickled when I read in the table of contents that the second half of the book was dedicated to “Third World Cities”. Silver lining, at least the global South gets mentioned, if not by a name I could feel comfortable using in class. But even as I began hunting for a text to supplement and/or use next year, I struggled. These days, it seems many texts have special sections on the global South, and there is even a reader coming out in 2014 about cities in the South. It seems we have “won” the fight to include Southern cities in the texts, but I’m stuck mulling over whether this division is really what we […]
During November Jonathan Silver will be undertaking new research as part of his role in the LSE Cities ‘Urban Uncertainty‘ project. Below he gives a brief commentary of the work. This work aims to examine the challenge of securing the necessary financing for infrastructure investment in small- and medium-sized cities, such as Mbale, Uganda. Since the establishment of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), carbon markets are supposed to be an important pathway through which municipalities like Mbale seek to connect into flows of finance for infrastructure investment. Yet carbon trading has been criticized by a growing coalition of NGOs, activists and scholars who suggest that a global climate change strategy based on market mechanisms is predicated on a series of problematic framings of the “environment,” the “market,” and the “globe.” The research seeks to explore the tensions, uncertainties and contradictions inherent to carbon financing models such as the CDM through a detailed investigation of one particular clean development investment in Mbale: a waste-to-compost facility designed to aid waste management in the city and support wider mitigation efforts. Examining the multiple and multi-scalar uncertainties involved in such a project—from speculative markets for carbon through to the experiences of displaced waster pickers—the […]
During 2014 we are organizing a series of special sessions on “Pluralizing the Approaches to Urban Political Ecology in a ‘World of Cities’”. The aim is to discuss how we in the coming decade can create a broad and rich repertoire for unpacking urban political ecologies in a ‘world of cities’ that can handle and take into account a broad experience of urbanization across the world. This effort is part of the SUPE Platform’s longer commitment to contribute to the field. The first special session will be in February 27 – March 1 at DOPE, the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference in Lexington. Please see instructions below on how to send in an abstract. Similar sessions will be organized in March 27-29 at the Southern African Cities Conference in Johannesburg**, and in August 24-29 at the Royal Society of Geographers with IGB in London. But the first session will be at DOPE. We really hope you can join us in Lexington! /Henrik, Jon and Mary **Note: In Johannesburg the organizers divide talks into session so we might not get as clear gathering here, but we will still aim to connect with other presenters. —- Call for Papers (CFP) for special session at DOPE, Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference […]
The first time I realised there was something funny going on was when we were discussing shebeens- informal drinking spaces usually found in townships. I asked my students “where do you find shebeens” and they answered “in the rural areas”. It threw me. In the moment, I didn’t realise what they meant, but figured the students just didn’t quite understand what I meant. We agreed on the townships as a key location and moved on. Then I graded their first test. Many of the students, without prompting, referred to the townships as “rural areas”. And for the first time, I really started to get some of the concerns that Southern urbanists have raised about Southern cities not being “real” cities. My students thought the same thing- that the formerly white parts of the metropolis were the real city. And despite higher densities in the township, it didn’t really count. Curious, I asked them in class what “city” meant to them. Of course, they’d been taught textbook definitions at the beginning of the class, but had long rejected density and urbanity in favour.I admit, I hadn’t really planned what to do next. What I wanted was to get on my soap box, tell them […]