Vanessa Watson (University of Cape Town):

'African Urban Fantasies: new postcolonial frontiers'

Africa’s strengthening economic growth and rising urban middle class has come to the attention of global property development and architecture firms seeking new regions for profit-making. This has unleashed a wave of new urban ‘plans’ in Africa, promising that Kinshasa, Lagos or Nairobi can also look like Dubai, Singapore or Shanghai. These new urban fantasies seek to erase the reality of these cities where the majority of the population are still extremely poor and live informally. Terms such as ‘smart cities’ and ‘eco-cities’ find their way into these new fantasy visions, but in fact the images presented suggest cities that are unsustainable in the extreme. New urban plans are pointing the way to what will be ‘splintering urbanism’ at a regional scale, as brand new ‘satellite cities’ offer a solution to the problem of building in current cities of slums.

Understanding the complex ‘conflict of rationalities’ which shapes emerging urban Africa requires attention to both land developer and local political ambitions as well as the struggle for survival which is the daily reality for most urban dwellers. Placing this within a postcolonial frame offers one way of understanding the global and local relations which underlie these processes. But recognizing the interplay between resistance and complicity of poorer urban dwellers in such processes is also important. A concern for the future of African cities demands an ethical response. Alternative futures and urban visions exist. Given the expected rate and scale of urbanization in Africa, along with climate change and resource depletion threats, there is an urgent need to challenge the kind of urban futures currently on offer from international property developers.

About the speaker

Vanessa Watson is Professor of City Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. She holds degrees from the Universities of Natal, Cape Town and the Architectural Association of London, and a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand, and is a Fellow of the University of Cape Town. Her research over the last thirty years has focused on urban planning in the global South and the effects of inappropriate planning practices and theories especially in Africa. Her work seeks to unsettle the geo-politics of knowledge production in planning by providing alternative theoretical perspectives from the global South.

She is the author/co-author of seven books, some fifty journal articles and numerous chapters, conference papers and keynotes in the field of planning. Her book: Change and Continuity in Spatial Planning: metropolitan planning in Cape Town under political transition (Routledge), won national and university book prizes. She is an editor of the journal Planning Theory, and on the editorial boards of Planning Practice and Research, the Journal of Planning Education and Research and Progress in Planning. She was the lead consultant for UN Habitat’s 2009 Global Report on Planning Sustainable Cities and is on their global reports Advisory Board. She was chair and co-chair of the Global Planning Education Association Network (2007-2011). She is a founder of the Association of African Planning Schools and is a founder and on the executive of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.

Dates for future seminars:

03 June, 14:00 – Paul Jenkins (University of Edinburgh)

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