SOUTHERN AFRICA CITY STUDIES CONFERENCE

Seminar 31 August – 4 September

We are pleased to present the programme for the 2020 Southern Africa City Studies Conference to be held from 31 August to 4 September. This is a free online conference and we would welcome your attendance at sessions that interest you.

The 2020 conference is the fifth event in this series, following earlier conferences in 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2016. These conferences are interdisciplinary forums for urban scholars and are hosted by a network of South African urban research units.  

The Gauteng City-Region Observatory is a co-host of the 2020 conference, along with the Centre for Urbanism & Built Environment Studies (CUBES) and the NRF Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning, both at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. A key motivation for the GCRO’s involvement was to mark the ten year anniversary since our establishment, and we wanted to do so by contributing to a wide ranging forum of this nature. 

As all of us are well aware, the world in which we began planning this conference in 2019 is no longer the world that we inhabit. Until March we were intending for this conference to be a two day event hosted at Wits. When this became an impossible prospect, we were enormously gratified that a large number of researchers were willing to join us in creating an online conference. We also did not, until recently, anticipate having to accommodate the impact of viruses on cities as a major topic. We are therefore grateful that some of the presenters and session organisers will be taking this on, alongside the impressive range of perennial urban studies topics on the programme.
 
We encourage you to scan the topics below, have a look through the abstract book, and if there are sessions that you would like to attend, please do complete the short registration form whereupon you will be provided with the meeting links.  

Southern Africa City Studies Conference Programme

Monday 31 August 
09h00 – 11h00
OPENING PLENARY. Urban Research Agendas 2020 and Beyond
 
11h30 – 13h30
PANEL. Building an Academic Career in Times of Crisis: Responding to Pressures and Needs of Early Career Researchers in Sub-Saharan Africa
PANEL. Covid-19: Reshaping Gauteng and its Governance?
PAPER SESSION. Civic Engagement: Acting In and On Public Space
 
14h00 – 16h00
PAPER SESSION. Economic Growth & Decline
THEMED SESSION. Living the Urban Periphery: South Africa & Ethiopia
PAPER SESSION. Civic Engagement: Co-Production and Participation
 
16h30 – 17h30
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION DISCUSSION. Edge City (Mark Lewis)
 
Tuesday 1 September 
09h00 – 11h00
PAPER SESSION. Large Scale Spatial Interventions
PANEL. The Lockdown Diaries: Cape Town and the Impact of COVID-19
PANEL. ‘Cities of Power’: Challenges and Contemporary Planning in National Capital Cities
 
11h30 – 13h30
CREATIVE WORKSHOP. dARTa I
PAPER SESSION. Land: Markets, Justice, Contestation I
 
14h00 – 16h00
PANEL. Culture, Heritage, Justice and Belonging I
PAPER SESSION. Land: Markets, Justice, Contestation II
PAPER SESSION. COVID-19: Resident and Community Responses  
 
16h30 – 18h30
FILM & DISCUSSION. Solidarity? Revealing the Everyday Lived Reality of Covid-19 in Kliptown, Soweto
 
Wednesday 2 September 
09h00 – 11h00
PANEL. Culture, Heritage, Justice and Belonging II
PANEL. City Level Data Scarcity and Responses
PAPER SESSION. Housing: Interrogating Need and Provision
 
11h30 – 13h30
PAPER SESSION. Climate & Environment: Urban Resources
PAPER SESSION. Innovative Urban Research Methods
PAPER SESSION. Housing: Afterlives of State Housing
 
14h00 – 16h00
PAPER SESSION. Climate & Environment: City Planning and Design
THEMED SESSION. ‘Homelessness’, Social Justice and the City
PAPER SESSION. Challenges to Informal Settlement Upgrading
 
16h30 – 17h30
BOOK PRE-LAUNCH. The Agonistic City? State-Society Strife in Post-Democratic Johannesburg
 
Thursday 3 September 
09h00 – 11h00
PAPER SESSION. Climate & Environment: Urban Metabolism
THEMED SESSION. Measuring Quality of Life in Gauteng, South Africa: The GCRO’s QOL Survey I
PANEL. Narratives of Home and Neighbourhood in State-Delivered Housing
 
11h30 – 13h30
PANEL. Global Circuits in Making Large-Scale Developments: Contradictions and Potential
THEMED SESSION. Measuring Quality of Life in Gauteng, South Africa: The GCRO’s QOL Survey II
ROUNDTABLE. Just and Sustainable Government Housing          
 
14h00 – 16h00
CREATIVE WORKSHOP. dARTa II
THEMED SESSION. Property & Real Estate Processes and Projects in Southern Africa
 
16h30 – 17h30
BOOK PRE-LAUNCH. Densifying the City? Global Cases and Johannesburg
 
Friday 4 September 
09h00 – 11h00
PAPER SESSION. Migrant Urbanism: Arrival Cities and Departure Cities
PANEL. Situated Engagements in Making Large-Scale Developments: Contradictions and Potential in African Urban Futures
PAPER SESSION. Governance: Politics, Power and Finance I
 
11h30 – 13h30
PAPER SESSION. Street Trading
PAPER SESSION. Sharing Space I
PAPER SESSION. Governance: Politics, Power and Finance II
 
14h00 – 16h00
THEMED SESSION. Navigating African Cities: Gender, Identity and Mobility
PAPER SESSION. Sharing Space II
CREATIVE WORKSHOP. dARTa III
 
16h30 – 18h00
ROUNDTABLE. The Quest for Integrity in South African Cities: The Temptations of Planning and Land Development

Full details of paper titles, presenters and abstracts

How to register

GCRO news article: GCRO at the 2020 Southern Africa City Studies Conference