Anna Zimmer
Postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Keywords: urban political ecology; governmentality; everyday governance; India; water; sanitation; urban water bodies; urban parks Anna’s research interests focus on urban political ecology, which she would like to take further in the exploration of ordinary cities and the everyday practices and politics found here. In her PhD research on water and sanitation, she has investigated questions of urban governance, governmentality, the everyday state and explored questions of equity and informal housing. Her current project studies environmental governance in small cities of Gujarat, with particular attention to parks, ponds, and solid waste management. More info.
Anthony Levenda
PhD Candidate Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University. Anthony Levenda studies urban infrastructure networks, climate change, urban theory, planning theory, energy systems, and socio-environmental systems drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and urban political ecology (UPE). He is working on his dissertation that investigates urban environmental knowledge production in climate change “experiments” and low-carbon “laboratories” in the US with goals to continue this research in cities around the world.
Emma Colven
Emma Colven is a Geography PhD Candidate at UCLA. Her research examines contestations over flood mitigation and expert knowledge in Indonesia’s capital city.
Erin Goodling
PhD Candidate Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University. Erin’s research interests include the political economy and ecology of cities, politics of sustainability, gentrification/displacement, community organizing and social movements, and popular education. For her dissertation research, she investigates collective action processes related to land use decisions along the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon (U.S.). More info.
Fernando Castillo
Associated Researcher at Centre for Conservation Studies from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. My key interests in urban ecology involve the study of landscapes using biophysical to cultural perspectives with reflection on landscapes from ecology, geography, history, anthropology and political ecology. I also draw upon systems and complexity thinking to understand patterns and processes in urban socio-ecological systems.
Henrik Ernstson
Dr. Henrik Ernstson has developed a core interest in urban political ecology, collective action, and comparative and African urbanism in which he draws on relational social movement theory, actor-network theory (ANT) and postfoundational political thought to unpack the inherently political nature of urban environments. He has also been key in developing network analysis within social-ecological studies. Recent publications include "Provincializing Urban Political Ecology" (2013) in Antipode (with M Lawhon and J Silver), "The Social Production of Ecosystem Services" (2013) in Landscape and Urban Planning, "Ecosystem Services as Technology of Globalization" (2013) in Ecological Economics (with S Sörlin), and "Food and green space in cities" (2013, with S Barthel and J Parker) in Urban Studies. He completed his PhD in 2008 and as of October 2013 he has published 20 peer-reviewed articles in top-academic journals, 16 since 2010. Currently he is the Stig Hagström scholar (2013-2015) of The Wallenberg Foundation at the Department of History, Stanford University with ties to Stanford’s Centre for African Studies. He is the Principal Investigator of two interdisciplinary research projects—Ways of Knowing Urban Ecologies (WOK-UE) and Socioecological Movements in Urbanized Ecosystem (MOVE)—between the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town and the KTH Environmental Humanities…
Jacob Doherty
Jacob Doherty is an anthropologist researching the politics of belonging and exclusion, infrastructural violence, and the materialities of urban environments in contemporary cities. Currently, he's working on a book entitled Waste Worlds: Kampala’s Infrastructures of Cleanliness and Disposability based on ethnographic research in and around Kampala, Uganda's diverse waste streams.
James Evans
Faculty Member, School of Environment & Development/Institute for Development Management & Policy, University of Manchester Profile and more information.
Jonathan Silver
Urban geographer into infrastructure | Sheffield University
Kathleen Stokes
PhD researcher in human geography, University of Manchester. Kathleen’s research considers how initiatives promoting community responsibility for waste management affect infrastructure, labour and livelihoods in South African cities. Her research is part of the Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? project, supported by the UK’s ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research.
Lyudmila Rodina
Lyudmila (Lucy) Rodina is a PhD student, working with Leila Harris, at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and a Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. In her research, Lucy explores the intersection of water governance and climate change in urban contexts using a social-ecological systems approach. More topically, she examines the nascent challenges to the governance of urban water under changing precipitation patterns,extreme flow events, droughts and freshwater quality concerns. She seeks a deeper understanding of the ways in which climate change affects both water resources and existing governance frameworks. What is at stake? How well suited are urban water governance frameworks to dealing with these challenges? Lucy is also interested in systematically investigating recent critical approaches resilience, and to evaluate the ways in which resilience thinking can be successfully applied to urban water governance under climate change. This will help to envision what a water resilient city would look like – a topic that remains relatively unexplored. More info
Mary Lawhon
Dr. Mary Lawhon is an urban political ecologist based at the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at University of Oklahoma. Empirically, her work has focused on waste, alcohol and housing. Conceptually, her works seeks to a) politicize theory and practice, including the politicization of sociotechnical transition theory, and b) provincialize theory and practice, including urban and urban political ecological theory. Her approach is informed by nearly ten years of experiences in South Africa since 2002, including work at the Universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Cape Town, and Pretoria, as well as a lot of informal conversations, long walks, public transportation and volunteering with the NGO Earthlife Africa.
Nate Millington
Postdoctoral Researcher, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town Nate Millington is an urban geographer, writer, and qualitative researcher, interested in the politics of urban environments, public space, and landscape design. His work has appeared in The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning A, Edge Effects, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. He holds a PhD from the University of Kentucky (2016) and a MS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2010). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. In 2014 and 2015, Nate was a Fulbright scholar and visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo, where he conducted research into water governance and flood prevention in the urban periphery. His dissertation considers the dynamics of a multifaceted water crisis in São Paulo, where water scarcity coexists with water excess in the form of regularized flooding. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher with the ESRC-funded project, “Turning livelihoods to rubbish? Assessing the impacts of formalization and technologization of waste management on the urban poor.” This project, a collaboration between researchers at four universities in Europe, the United States, and Africa, focuses on changes to waste governance in southern Africa and the implications for the…
Patrick Bigger
Patrick Bigger is a lecturer of critical human geography at Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on financial practices for managing environmental change, including carbon trading, green debt, and private equity for biodiversity conservation. His research sites range from the Kenyan highlands to global financial centers to better understand how finance is (and isn’t) enrolled in new modes of environmental governance.
Prince Guma
Prince Guma is an urban imaginer, rural optimist and a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. His current research is at the intersection of Urban African Studies, and Science, Technology and Society (STS). His project focuses on the centrality of mobile technologies in Nairobi and how these shape interactions between infrastructural systems, between systems and society, and thereby, the city as a sphere, nexus and junction of and for innovation. Prior work has questioned how forces of urbanity, rurality, postcoloniality and contemporaneity elucidate, obscure, affect or are affected by everyday processes, practices and materialities. He is a research fellow of Harry Frank Guggeinhaim (HFG) Foundation's “Young African Scholars” programme; and IASSCS–Ford Foundation's Emerging Scholars International Research Fellowship Program.
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The last couple of decades have witnessed a series of regional events that have threatened to shift the tides of global politics. For instance, it was not long ago that the notion of ‘Africa rising’ became such a hot story amidst optimistic accounts of a growing middle class, inclusive technologies, sprawling cities, and budding economies. It was also not that long ago that China’s growing clout in Africa and its connections with Europe began to attract extensive attention. This attention has become even more amplified at the global stage with China’s increased economic and strategic positioning through vast infrastructure development projects such as the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative. However, it is the apparent shift toward “‘de-globalization’ and the return of the nation-state” in the West as witnessed by the events leading up to – and beyond – ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’ that has received the most critical attention. Critics have cited a broader shift in global flows and loops, and a purported shift toward decentring and multicentring alongside an increased redistribution of power and influence. They argue that this could potentially lead to a more fragmented reality synonymous with increased multi-polarity in which global institutions and establishments hold lesser legitimacy […]
Our academic culture continues to reward intellectuals who cite big-name, usually white, male, and European theories and theorists. French theorists, in particular, are given special attention. While sympathetic to the compulsion to harness the ideas of great men, one can no longer claim that this is the only way to succeed in the academic publishing world. Though the alternative might garner less attention, Southern theorists (such as Jean and John Comaroff or Raewynn Connell) have opened the way for an alternative way of doing academically accepted, publishable research. It is this framing that I kept returning to as I read Julian Brown’s South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens: On Dissent and the Possibility of Politics. It is at one level unfair to focus on this text when making an argument about over-use of French political theory, but let me focus on it as a specific instance of what I suggest is a wider concern (and note other reviews here and here). Academic work generally takes two different tacks: using a case to contribute to theory, or using theory to explain a set of empirics. Brown’s book falls into the latter as he attempts to use Rancière, whom he defines as the most influential theorist […]
I couldn’t quite figure it out. The entire project of housing provision in South African cities seemed to be marked by an almost obsessive sense of calculation, of rational town planning. Most notoriously there is the waiting list. After apartheid, the South African government embarked on a mass formal housing delivery program. In order to qualify for a home, residents in need must register at a local office and enter the demand database. Then there is the process of enumeration. Local governments don’t like shacklands to be unintelligible, and so they render them legible by assigning de facto addresses to every structure. In both of these processes, we can see at work what the German sociologist Max Weber famously called formal rationality. Yet exceptions abounded. Enumeration rarely kept pace with in-migration from elsewhere in the city, and small land occupations seemed to become large informal settlements in a matter of weeks. And everyone seemed to be on the waiting list for decades, whereas I’d also encounter people who received a house after a matter of years. Residents who slipped through the cracks of formal rationality began to challenge the state, ultimately in the courtroom, pointing to the post-apartheid constitutional guarantee […]
Jakarta is marked by a paradox: the city suffers from both too much and too little water. During monsoon season, heavy precipitation strains the network of canals and waterways that weave through Jakarta’s urban fabric, threatening to overwhelm the city. Rivers swell, sometimes inundating housing constructed along their banks. Water collects in roads, bringing the city’s traffic to a halt. During the dry season, meanwhile, the city struggles to provide surface water to its residents. In the absence of a sufficient piped water supply, residents purchase water from vendors or bottled water at inflated prices, and extract shallow groundwater using wells. Public buildings, hotels, and industries meanwhile often pump deep groundwater. This is where water supply connects to flooding: groundwater extraction has contributed to rapid rates of subsidence making Jakarta one of the fastest sinking cities in the world. This has exacerbated the risk of flooding from the sea. The city’s sea wall now sits only inches above the current water level. Subsidence also makes it increasingly challenging to channel floodwaters through canals and into the sea, necessitating the use of pumping stations. The sea wall at Pluit, North Jakarta in October 2015 Flooding and flood mitigation have become highly […]
Imagine that you just alighted at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, only 25 minutes from Nairobi’s Central Business District. Obviously, the first thing that you will want to do is get connected. At the airport, there are often a handful of enthusiastic mobile telecommunications agents and personnel that are readily on standby, more than willing to introduce you to their product, service or offers. It is at this point that you are often led to a counter or compartment for an authorized agent within the vicinity of the arrival hall. Buying one of the Subscriber Identity Module (or SIM) cards will involve registration and subscription not only for communication services that include calling and Short Message Service (or SMS) texting, but also for moving money through the encrypted SMS and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (or USSD) platforms. These services provide the baseline infrastructure for a wide range of different services that offer unique and innovative mobile-phone based applications and systems. They rely on text and short code and often – in some ways – fall within different categories including M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Orange Money – the most popular of which is Safaricom’s (Lipa Na) M-pesa. For all the systems, registration processes […]
I’m walking through Guet Ndar, a neighbourhood in Saint-Louis, Senegal. We can hear the waves of the nearby Atlantic Ocean. During my last visit, a number of years ago, they seemed perhaps more distant, whereas now they seem almost upon us. We turn a corner near a mosque and look out. What were once streets are now the ocean, the elementary school has become a ruin of collapsed concrete and a new line of buildings stand facing the fierce Atlantic. The fishing settlement of Guet Ndar lays across from the historical centre of Saint-Louis. It operates as a crucial space for the fishing trade across the region, with distribution stretching into the Sahel and as far as Mali. With over 30,000 residents housed in this dense, popular neighbourhood, a strip of sand no more than one kilometre long, and nowadays 200 meters wide, a precarious future has become a lived present. The effects of rising sea-levels from climate change are being experienced in Saint-Louis in ways that foretell urban futures for millions of people living in coastal settlements across the continent. Here, the Atlantic Ocean in Guet Ndar is a paradox. It gives life through the incomes of the fishermen […]
Following Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Accord, a number of US cities signaled their intention to symbolically join the agreement and demonstrate their commitment to avoiding more than 1.5 C warming. Cities have a unique relationship to global climate change as the historical locus of greenhouse gas emissions due to their central role in the global economy. The relationship between cities and greenhouse gases is a result of both industrial production as well as contemporary post-industrial economies driven by consumption. The relationship is scalar too: many cities are representative of both low carbon infrastructure as well as the displacement of GHG emissions ‘elsewhere.’ Cities are linked through chains of finance, the movement of goods, and the circulation of discourses. All these relationships matter for thinking about climate change through the city. Amidst these overlapping networks, the unifying factor is the sheer densities and connections present in cities: of people, of money, and of the infrastructures that, in part, form the city as a functioning assemblage. We are already locked into a significantly warmer future, and the physical impacts of that warming consistently outpace even the most severe projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on […]
The Ways of Knowing Urban Ecologies (WOK-UE) project started in 2011 and finished in December 2016. Amongst other activities, the project proved instrumental in helping to build the Situated UPE Collective from its early days in 2013. Here PI Henrik Ernstson reflects on this now finished research project to exemplify how projects can act as crucial venues for critical social scientists in building collaborations, projects and constellations beyond the peer-reviewed publication. Looking beyond peer-reviewed publications The Ways of Knowing Urban Ecologies Project has been incredibly productive as can be witnessed by its publication list. This includes one PhD thesis, an upcoming edited volume with MIT Press, and a row of high-calibre theoretical and empirical contributions in top-journals based on extensive empirical work in Cape Town and Stockholm, including New Orleans (the latter mainly through the associated MOVE project). To this, the core WOK-UE team—Jane Battersby, Marnie Graham, Anna Storm, Joshua Lewis, Mary Lawhon, Jessica Rattle, Sue Parnell and Sverker Sörlin—also made regular contributions to wider popular science and media platforms. The WOK-UE project also created a lot of activities that were not mentioned in the short final report that I submitted to the Swedish funder Formas. In this post I would like to take the opportunity to list some of those activities since it shows how research projects can be viewed as […]
On the 27th April, over fifty scholars met in Helsingborg, Sweden for a three-day workshop dedicated to waste research in the social sciences and humanities. Organised by Lund University, the ‘Opening the Bin’ workshop sought to critically investigate waste perceptions, materialities, politics, and practices. One of the first workshops of its kind, this gathering provided an unprecedented opportunity for scholars to share research and develop international transdiciplinary connections. Most participants were based in Europe, although several participants joined from further afield – including India, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Over the course of the workshop, paper presentations reflected a variety of social science and humanities disciplines, including STS, history, philosophy, and anthropology. By examining different contexts, infrastructures and conditions surrounding waste, participants also connected waste scholarship to broader academic discussions surrounding urban governance, de-growth, and the circular economy. While diverse in subject matter and approach, these interventions highlighted several recurring themes and questions within contemporary waste research. Given concurrent sessions ran throughout the workshop, these themes were only drawn from sessions I had the privilege of attending. Nevertheless, I believe these themes and questions point to fruitful areas of investigation for contemporary waste scholarship. Themes and questions […]
Unable to attend the American Association of Geographers’ Annual meeting due to travel problems, Mary Lawhon reflects on the retirement of geographer and political ecologist Dianne Rocheleau in this commentary. Drawn from notes for a presentation that unfortunately did not happen due to flight delays, this commentary focuses on Dianne’s generosity as a scholar and her contributions to the development of Urban Political Ecology. I stayed in the airport a lot longer than I otherwise would have, all of Wednesday and Thursday morning, hoping to have a chance to say to Dianne in person and in public a most sincere thank you. But as I finally gave in to nature in its many forms – a storm trumping the wonders of flight, a baby and toddler needing more than airport chicken nuggets – I thought Dianne would certainly have not just understood, but wanted us to go home. So, a few thoughts constructed from my notes instead. First, a list of things I got from Dianne: Academic fashion sense, including unruly curls and a fondness for scarves (though this serves me less well in Florida). Relational thinking and specifically rooted networks (including work with Miriam Chion on rooted cosmopolitanism) The need to listen to […]
The aesthetic politics of graffiti removal in Contemporary São Paulo In this commentary, postdoctoral researcher Nate Millington comments on the aesthetic politics of Graffiti removal in São Paulo. In his first few weeks in office, the newly elected mayor of São Paulo—Jõao Doria, a businessman and reality tv star whose election was primarily a rebuke of the city’s rare flirtation with governance by the Worker’s Party—has spent considerable energy painting over graffiti in the city in the service of what he calls a ‘beautiful city.’ This represents a dangerous moment for those interested in urban life and its virtues and for those who celebrate the capacity of the city to give space to those who seek alternative lives. It is one more instance of the crude reshuffling of the visual, sensorial landscape in favor of one more conducive to global grade and elite forms of aesthetic appreciation. To be sure, Doria’s attempt to clean up the city is one instance in a longer history of the policing of certain kinds of expression. Beset for years by graffiti as well as pixação—a type of tagging specific to Brazil—leaders of São Paulo have long attempted to cohere its landscape through the development of […]
Report from “Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? Project Workshop” with stakeholders at UCT, Cape Town, 17 February 2017 Nate Millington reports from a rewarding and constructive stakeholder workshop in Cape Town on the politics of waste management in South Africa. On 17 February 2017, researchers from the ‘Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish?’ (TLR) project met with researchers and activists associated with the waste sector in South Africa. The purpose of this meeting was to create connections between researchers and learn from local activists and experts. During a wide-ranging conversation that moved from the specific dynamics of research to broader questions about the nature of politics, TLR researchers explained their interests and were given suggestions about how best to conduct their projects. Participants in the workshop included Dr. Derick Blaauw (North-Western University), Musa Chamane (groundWork), Rico Euripidou (groundWork), Dr. Linda Godfrey (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), Dr. Melanie Samson (University of the Witwatersrand), Dr. Andreas Scheba (Human Sciences Research Council), Dr. Catherina Schenck (University of the Western Cape), Caitlin Tonkin (Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation), Dr. Kotie Viljoen (University of Johannesburg), Dr. Harro von Blottnitz (University of Cape Town), and Quinton Williams (Green Cape), alongside the TLR research team. After an introductory presentation […]
Bruce Baigrie and Henrik Ernstson have just published a critique of “eco-estates” in GroundUp (online magazine) based on an initial study in Nordhoek, Cape Town. In this piece we do a first analysis of the making of an “eco-estate” in Cape Town and its social and ecological effects. These “eco-estates” enroll and depoliticise environmental arguments to create a “green” life-style choice for the rich. Often placed on pristine land outside the urban edge, these “eco-estates” represent a deeply problematic and pervasive urban development in South African cities. Not only do they exploit “green” arguments, consumes a lot of space—but they also form part of a “geographical escapism” that re-produces spatial apartheid (Ballard and Jones 2011) and what SA historian Premesh Lalu (2009) has called a “settler public sphere,” a public discourse that makes invisible ongoing violence and the wider reality of a country and neighbourhood of deep and racialized inequality. For the GroundUp version, please go here, which is being reproduced under the Creative Commons licence below. If you like to re-tweet, please consider tweeting this ‘original’ tweet at @rhizomia. To cite this, use: Baigrie, Bruce, and Henrik Ernstson. 2017. “Noordhoek Eco-Estates Protect the Rich from the Reality of Masiphumelele: […]
German Quimbayo Ruiz reports on efforts to develop a Situated UPE approach in Latin America. His co-authored research article in the journal Ecología Política is in Spanish, so spread the message among our Spanish-speaking scholars and activists. (For a PDF copy, contact the authors. For more SUPE posts on Latin America, see here.) Recently I published a paper with Francisco Vásquez about the requirement of a comprehensive framework to understand the political ecology of urbanization in Latin America. The paper built upon the postcolonial perspectives that Mary Lawhon, Henrik Ernstson and Jonathan Silver developed in their Antipode paper in 2014, which was based on their experiences from working in African cities. Our paper summarizes wider debates within urban political ecology, and tries to integrate the analysis of uneven development and urbanisation (see for instance David Harvey, 2012), but from a Latin American perspective. Departing from this line of thinking we strive to develop some grounds for a political ecological research-action agenda in and through Latin American cities and urbanization. We first identify a need to better understand how unequal socio-ecological urban changes in the region can be linked to methods and knowledge production of various social movements and uprisings across Latin American cities and urban […]
Kathleen Stokes reflects on waste management and political ecology in Cape Town. Kathleen is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Manchester with a research focus on community responsibility and labour in waste management. She is part of the Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish Project, which is run in collaboration between the University of Cape Town, the University of Manchester and Florida State University. While attending the ACC’s winter school on democratic practices, I was fortunate enough to meet with a range of people involved in Cape Town’s waste management system. Through these discussions, and my own encounters with the city’s sites of disposal and decomposition, I was struck by the variety of imperatives driving waste management, and the relations between people whose livelihoods depend on the sector. Managing rubbish is a complex affair in any city. In Cape Town, the municipal government is responsible for waste management services, and informed by legislation and policy imperatives from national and provincial government. Within the context of rapid urbanization, enduring inequalities, and state promises of universal service provision, municipal strategies have tended towards neoliberal strategies of contracting out, public-private partnerships, and cost recovery. In addition to contracting service responsibilities out to businesses, […]
The Urban Action Lab (UAL) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda has launched their website. The UAL is run by Professor Shuaib Lwasa and his team of urban researchers and students and the Lab will make a crucial contribution from East Africa to pan-African attempts in facing urban challenges of the 21st century. By Henrik Ernstson Shuaib just sent out an email to a row of urban scholars that are all serious about contributing to urban sustainable and just cities through the particular experiences and challenges of Africa and the South. He writes: [A]fter several years of engaging in urban research, conceptual rethinking as well as solutions-oriented co-generation of knowledge with all of you at various points, we now have an online platform for sharing the knowledge while we continue to galvanise the understanding of urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa. With Uganda and East Africa as the launch pad, the UAL is envisaged to grow into a regional knowledge hub and Centre focused on the various issues in regard to African Urbanism and sustainable urban development. For those going to the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador 17-20 October 2016, the Urban Action Lab will exhibit in the Exhibition Hall. Shuaib Lwasa and PhD student Peter Kasaija, will […]
A couple of weeks back STOMPIE was screened on 25 Feb 2016 as a work-in-progress on how to weave together experiences of hiphop pedagogy with popular theatre. This was a ‘South-North’ collaboration around crafting stories from marginalised areas. Next steps being discussed among the STOMPIE Crew is a ‘Garage Tour’ to find STOMPIE Supporters, followed by a tour of High Schools in Grassy Park. Here is a short background to the project that involves The Heal the Hood Project, Mixed Mense Collective of artists, Teater Reflex, and the African Centre for Cities. STOMPIE is the result of three weeks of intensive collaboration between Emile Jansen (The Heal The Hood Project) and Kent Ekberg (Teater Reflex). They are two pedagogues with long-term experience from working in marginalised urban areas in their respective cities of Cape Town and Stockholm using dance/hip-hop/rap and popular community theatre, respectively. During these weeks they have worked with Leeroy Philips, Stefan Benting and Andre Bozack from the Mixed Mense Collective of dancers, artists and b-boys from Lavender Hill/Grassy Park. On 25 Feb it was showed as a work-in-progress on the “Garage Stage” in Grassy Park for kids and adults. The focus has been on what it means to tell and craft stories from Cape Flats today and the collaboration […]
Check out a 5 minute ‘teaser’ of the film “1 Table 2 Elephants” that we are finalising in 2017. Filmed in Cape Town in 2015, it deals with ways of knowing urban ecologies in postapartheid and postcolonial cities. It’s created by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson, produced in collaboration with KTH and UCT and funded by Formas. Many-layered city-nature Entering the city through its plants and wetlands, the many-layered, painful and liberating history of the city emerges as we meet how biologists, hip hoppers, and wetland activists each searches for ways to craft symbols of unity and cohesion. But this is a fraught and difficult task. Perhaps not even desirable. Plants, aliens, memories and ghosts keep troubling efforts of weaving stories about this place called Cape Town. The film tries to be a vehicle for more general conversations about history/histories, post/de-colonization and the caring for nature, city, people and oneself. Its directed towards a wide audience, from the general public to students and scholars. When ready during 2017 it will be 75 minutes long. Watch the 5 minutes ‘teaser’ below. A wider repertoire for doing urban political ecology The film forms part of an effort to build a wider repertoire of practices on how to approach urbanisation, cities […]
Kibera in Nairobi: Bukonola (Bukky) Ngobi and Joe Mulligan from Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) gives the background to a video about life in Kibera that they facilitated in making. It displays important down-to-the-ground innovative design and infrastructure practices that makes a difference. And that can scale and change the urban fabric. As far as I can see, a lot of people talk about Kibera, but my BIG question is: do they really know what they are talking about? We have a life in Kibera, our children go to school in Kibera, we buy food in Kibera, we get clean water from Nairobi Water, we own our businesses, we are students, we are land owners, we can bank in Kibera, we have good social organisations. The above extract comes from a passage written in 2015 by Ibrahim Maina, a life-long Kiberan and Program Coordinator at Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI). Ibra had been trying to write a blog piece about life in Kibera after reading a wildly inaccurate article about the settlement in a well-known international news outlet last year. Kibera is a poor neighbourhood in the centre of Nairobi which has been described as many things, including “Africa’s largest slum” and one of the “10 […]
“Somos Sur” is a rap and hip-hop song by Chilean-French artist Ana Tijoux. To me it insists that this world needs thinking, analysis and action from the South. The song vibrantly also features Palestinian-British rapper Shadia Mansour and provides hip hop and rap at its best—constructively angry; ruthless in speaking back to power. But also in joining dots; rhythmically it enfolds and unfolds wider geographies of solidarity. So, in solidarity with the people of Gaza, listen to it! Somos Sur, Hip Hop and Cape Flats “Somos Sur” also speaks through its registers of rhythm and movement to our own academic project around situated urban political ecologies (SUPE)—and to southern urbanism; and in making use of experiences and intellectual traditions from ‘the elsewheres’ of this world in order to assemble departure points for critique and radical democratic practice. The song links directly to what I have learnt from my meetings with Capeflatsian hip hoppers Emile YX? and Mixed Mense. Their hip hop and pedagogic work in Cape Town can certainly be described as a democratic practice in that it shifts how, and who can speak into the future of Cape Town. Over the last couple of years I have reported on how their hip hop […]