LCS-GY201: Urban Modernities: Space, Place and Difference

Professor Sue Parnell, Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences and African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town
Dr Bradley Rink, Lecturer and ACDI MSc Course Coordinator, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences and African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town
Dr Sharad Chari, Associate Professor, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and Anthropology Department, University of the Witwatersrand

This course works across scale, and with insights from geography, anthropology and history, to think about the challenges and opportunities of contemporary urbanism as seen from the specific confluence of Cape Town. We explore urban modernities, looking at global processes and connections in the making of the modern TransAtlantic world, to local practices and possibilities shaping neighbourhoods in Cape Town. We The course begins, in a set of lectures from Sharad Chari, with the ‘Black Atlantic,’ tracing ways in which ocean circuits in the Atlantic produced a set of processes, relationships and ways of seeing that are quintessentially modern. We follow these processes to the transformation of Euro-American cities, and to the specific forms of urbanism that they concentrated. We turn to the incredible sense of change and transformation in 19^th century cities, and to ideas of social and spatial change they inspired at the dawn of the 20^th century. In counterpoint, we then reveal the ways in which African colonial cities produced simultaneously both similar and different sorts of urban realities, and expressive forms to uncover some of the different ways in which African urbanism has emerged across postcolonial contexts. South African cities have been a subset and a deviation from Euro-American cities and African cities, and in the next set of lectures by Sue Parnell and Bradley Rink the course explores the interplay of local and global forces in the making and unmaking of urban segregation in South Africa and Cape Town first under colonial rule and then under apartheid planning. Continuing with ideas of past and present and global and local in urban place making we turn in a combination of lectures and fieldtrips to township urbanisms in Langa, the problems and possibilities of memory in the District Six Museum, and the dynamics surrounding queer life in today’s Cape Town. Chari concludes by returning to some of the broader pitfalls and possibilities that are clarified when we rethink urban modernities specifically from Cape Town, from the confluence of the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and when we see South African cities not just as sites of possibility but also as ruins of various sorts: ruins of apartheid, ruins of limitless consumption, ruins of democracy. As theorists of modern cities have long argued, ruins provide a window into a range of struggles that people confront in trying to imagine the cities they would rather live in. As a whole, this course brings together insights drawn from different disciplinary vantage points to rethink contemporary urbanism, informed by both a broad theoretical canvass and local South African insights.

Full course outline|

GY201Prof
Progessor Sue Parnell is an urban geographer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences and is a member of the Executive of University of Cape Town (UCT) African Centre for Cities. Prior to her appointment at UCT she taught in the Wits University Geography Department (Johannesburg) and the School of Oriental African Studies (London). She has held academic Fellowships at Oxford, Durham and has just completed a Leverhulme visiting Professor at UCL. Originally concerned with the historical geography of the South African city, since 1994 and democracy in South Africa her work has shifted to contemporary urban policy research (local government, poverty reduction and urban environmental justice as well as more general debates about formality and informality at the city scale). By its nature this research is not been purely academic, but has involved liaising with local and national government and international donors. She is also on the Editorial boards of many specialist academic journals including Urban Studies, Environment and Planning, Urban Affairs Review and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
Dr Bradley Rink is a human geographer with interests in the creation and performance of urban space, urban culture(s), and the complex interactions that occur in that heterogeneous environment. His current research interests focus on urban life, culture and the related issue of quartering—the material and discursive shaping of urban space around particular expressions of culture. Broadly stated, Bradley is interested in the everyday spaces that are part of urban life and the performance of identities that take place within them.
Dr Sharad Chari works between anthropology, history and critical geography, on the political economy and cultural politics of contemporary India and South Africa. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Tamilnadu in India, on labour, gender, and agrarian and industrial change, and in Durban, South Africa, on past and present struggles next to oil refineries, where the ruins of the past prevent change in various ways. He has taught at the University of Michigan in Anthropology and History, at LSE in Geography and Environment, and will be at CISA and Anthropology at Wits from 2013. He teaches social theory, race, development and urbanism. He is the author of Fraternal Capital (Stanford) and The Development Reader (Routledge) and is completing a book titled Apartheid Remains. Chari is an Editor of the journal Antipode. Recently, he has been devising a new research project on changing formations of ports, proletarians, and the phenomenal life of the 21^st century Indian Ocean region.