Events

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.

Subscribe for the weekly updates and details of each seminar via e-mail here: https://shorturl.at/EfUfq.

This quarter (11 February - 25 March 2025), the series is being run by CUBES and a provocation is posed to presenters to engage in some way with ‘Faces of the State in the City’. This invokes presenters and discussants to think through questions of state spaces, statecraft, bureaucracies and governance. This quarter’s series also aims to connect scholars and practitioners across geographies and disciplines to promote transnational dialogues, debate and collaborations.

In the first event of the series, Camila Saraiva, associate researcher at the Center for Favela Studies (CEFAVELA) at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), presented a historical and institutional analysis of the governance of informal settlements through in-situ upgrading policies in three Latin American cities: São Paulo, Medellín, and Buenos Aires. This was followed by a discussion from Marie Huchzermeyer, Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University who drew parallels to the South African context. The presentation’s recording is available here.

In the second event, CUBES’ own Mfaniseni Sihlongonyane, Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at WITS, argued that the shifting nature of the Swazi Tribute Labour System in eSwatini represents a form of planetary urbanism. This was followed by some brief written reflections and questions by Solomon Benjamin, Professor in the Humanities and Social Science Department in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. The presentation’s recording is available here (passcode: s9%nE%7%).

In the third event, Zhengli Huang, Research Associate at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield unpacked some of the main mechanisms of China’s infrastructural investments and their impacts on urban development in Africa, arguing that China’s infrastructure-led development model is not transferred to Africa in a complete and orchestrated manner but rather through a network of state capital apparatuses.  Evance Mwathunga, Associate Professor at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College, followed with a discussion. The presentation’s recording is available here (passcode: *TbqY55f).

Below are the next events of the series:

4 March | The varied (topological) power plays shaping smart city policy mobility in India – Harsh Mittal (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani). Discussant: Andrea Pollio (Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, Politecnico di Torino and African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town)

11 March | The Right to the City in Brazil from a Law Perspective: political struggle, constitutional and legislative processes, and production of space – Ana Maria Isar dos Santos Gomes (Observatório das Metrópoles). Discussant: Mandisa Shandu (Oxford University)

18 March | Authoritarian Algorithmic Management: The double-edged sword of the gig economies – Fikile Masikane (University of Pretoria). Discussant: Katie Wells (Groundwork Collaborative and Georgetown University).

25 March | Between struggle and ambiguity: experiences of peripheral feminisms in two African cities – Priscila Izar (School of Architecture and Planning, Wits University). Discussant: Nthabiseng Motsemme (Centre for Sociological Research and Practice, University of Johannesburg)