Our events
Feminising Urban Struggle face to face seminars in São Paulo, Johannesburg and Dar es Salaam
CUBES, in partnership with academic institutions in Brazil, Tanzania and the Netherlands is hosting a seminar series that explore the multiple and diverse urban struggles of marginalised women in transforming their peripheral territories in different contexts of the Global South, particularly, Southern Africa and Latin America. The series seeks to strengthen critical debates based on intersectionality, transdisciplinarity and lived experiences’ methods and methodologies and promote the exchange of knowledge about women’s struggles and practices in peripheral territories, generating new knowledge(s) and partnerships in solidarity, between researchers, practitioners, and female leaders.
The series opened with a three-day online international seminar (6 to 8 November 2023). It brought together over one hundred scholars and three keynote speakers, Verónica Gago, Faranak Miraftab and Adriana Allen, to debate critical feminist urban research and explore new epistemologies at the intersection of gender, women’s urban struggles, and the production of peripheral territories. Materials resulting from the the on-line seminar, including proceedings, sessions’ recordings and youtube videos prepared for the seminar can be found here.
There are three upcoming face-to-face seminars:
The São Paulo seminar will be on 12 to 15 March 2024. The event opens at the SESC Research and Training Center - SESC CPF. (Registration and program for the 12th here) with speeches by participants from South Africa and Tanzania, university professors and community leaders, who will talk about their struggles and research based on female protagonism in specific territories. The event on 12 March will be broadcast on the YouTube channels of LabCidade (in Portuguese) and HIS (in English), from 3:30pm SA time (GMT+2).
In the following days, March 13th to 15th (registration for visits and program here), a smaller group of participants will visit territories marked by the action and struggle of organized women’s groups in renovation of occupied housing buildings, housing collectives, agroecological projects, solidarity kitchens, among others, in the city of São Paulo’s central, East and South regions. These visits will include conversation circles, involving local and guest community leaders, mediated by researchers who are immersed in the territories. The conversation circles are intended to strengthen scientific-academic cooperation through the exchange of knowledge between national and international researchers, national students and female leaders working in their territories.
The Johannesburg seminar will be on 12 to 16 April 2024. The event opens at the School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP) at Wits University, Johannesburg and continues on 13, 15 and 16 April with visits to communities and territories in Tshwane and Johannesburg. The Dar es Salaam seminar will immediately follow, on 17 to 20 April. The event will open at the Institute of Human Settlements Studies at Ardhi University in Dar es Salaam, followed by three days of field visits.
The seminar series is coordinated by Dr Priscila Izar (CUBES), Professor Paula Freire Santoro (Department of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo and LabCidade FAUUSP), Dr Elinorata Mbuya (Institute of Human Settlements Studies – IHSS, Ardhi University, Tanzania) and Carolina Lunetta (Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies – IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands).
Click here for the keynote speakers of the virtual seminar in 2023.
African Urbanisms: Critical Engagements, Transformative Practices, Alternative Futures
Organised by the Wits-TUB-UNILAG Urban Lab. The call for sessions closes 21 January 2024. The conference is hosted by the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, 23-26 October 2024.
Faces of the City seminars
Faces of the City is a seminar series run jointly by CUBES, the South African Chair for Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SC&CP), the Gauteng City Region (GCRO) and the School of Architecture and Planning. The series is scheduled 16h00-17h30 on Tuesdays during term time. The seminars are offered online, with some seminars blended to allow for face-to-face interaction.
To join the mailing list for weekly programme updates, please sign up using this link. The weekly programme is posted here.
Wits-TUB-UNILAG Urban Lab Conference 2024
The Wits-TU Berlin-University of Lagos Urban Lab project is organising a conference at Wits University in Johannesburg 23-26 October 2024 focusing on Urban issues on the African continent. This will collaborate with networks such as the African Association of Planning Schools, the African Urban Research Initiative and a network of urban research entities at South African universities.
Southern African Cities Studies Conferences
Since 2009, the SACSC series has provided an interdisciplinary forum for researchers examining urban issues in Southern Africa. The most recent conference in 2020, was hosted by the CUBES, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning, in association with a network of South African urban research units.