Assembling the sustainable city: from sedimented injustices to just urban futures
31 May – 3 June 2023
European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) 2023 (Cologne): African Futures
Convened with Dr Jon Schubert, University of Basel.
Call for abstracts: In the context of enduring ecological and imperial injustices, what might sustainable urban assemblages look like? How do techniques of planning, expertise, finance and service delivery intersect with material landscapes and everyday practices of city-making to shape ideas about desirable urban futures?
Sponsored by Africa: Journal of the International African Institute.
From collapsing buildings to climate risk, Africa’s growing urban populations face situations of material, existential and environmental precariousness. Yet cities are also spaces of aspiration and possibility. This raises urgent questions of what desirable urban futures might look like.
Discussions of, and strategies for, sustainable urban futures are still dominated by developmentalist growth paradigms and reductionist, apolitical conceptions of vulnerability and resilience. Such approaches overlook the injustices that are sedimented into the fabric of the city, from the material traces of colonial violence to class struggle, to the social and ecological devastations wrought by Africa’s asymmetrical insertion into global economic flows. In a time when imperial, extractive and environmental injustices are still to be reckoned with, and facing the the double impasses of universalist policy prescriptions and reductionist celebrations of ‘informality as opportunity’, this panel explores questions of urban sustainability, justice and solidarity.
Thinking about good urbanism requires reconciling (analytically and practically) everyday practices of producing the city (socially, spatially, and economically), with grand designs and systems (urban planning and regeneration, infrastructures and services, modes of financing). This gathers diverse actors, from planners, administrators and engineers to funders and ‘ordinary citizens’, into a common field of action that must also negotiate contingent assemblages of bodies, infrastructures, climates, and challenging historical endurances. We invite paper contributions that explore how techniques and practices of urban future-making (e.g. planning, expertise, risk analysis) intersect with enduring injustices, landscapes and everyday practices of making cities work.
Our panel is sponsored by Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. We will have some resources to support attendance, please contact us for more information.