Experimenting / Experiencing the City

The Urban Experience / South Africa & Elsewhere
11-20 May 2017

Through crossed perspectives, Experimenting / Experiencing the City will try to tackle both the risk and the interest of a multi-disciplinary approach to question the city. It aims to open the debate around the notions of “city” and “urban” in the complex relationship that unites them, to study the links between integration, exclusion and citizenship in an era of globalisation and complex urban identities.

Among other approaches, the notion of spatial justice can help to look at these issues. The use – and definition – of public space or public art needs to be questioned. The housing options offered to city-dwellers, particularly the middle classes, need to be viewed and interrogated: what forces drive the market and orient the shape of the city?

Experimentations and experiences from South Africa, Mozambique, Brazil, India, and elsewhere, will be presented and confronted. Debates will gather academics, who question and conceptualize the city, urban actors (from street vendors to developers), who make the city, and artists, who live and share their experience of the city. Artistic works and events – performances, photos and films – will be expanded to the workshops and echo and enrich the discussions.

> Full programme
> Abstracts

Screening / Viewing the City

11-14 May 2017

• Documentary Film Festival / The Bioscope Independant Cinema
  

Discussing / Debating the City

15 May 2017

• Roundtable 1 / How does the notion of ‘spatial justice’ assist in understanding contemporary urban dynamics?
• Roundtable 2 / What would “just” governance of street trading look like in Johannesburg?

16 May 2017

• Roundtable 3 / Public spaces and art
• Performance / Experiential sunset slow run with Anthea Moys
• Public debate / Art in public spaces: for what and for whom?
  Conducted by artist Lawrence Lemaoana & geographer Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch

18 May 2017

• Roundtable 4 / Housing of the middle classes: real estate actors’strategies and urban stakes
• Public debate / Housing of the middle class
• Book launch / Agnès Deboulet (ed.), Rethinking precarious neighbourhoods, Etudes de l’AFD 2016,  with Alan Mabin, Agnès Deboulet & Irène Salenson

Photographing / Walking the City

20 May 2017

• Photo exhibition / Along the Corridors by Mark Lewis
• Book launch of #8 in the series Wake Up, This is Joburg (Fourthwall Books) by Mark Lewis & Tanya Zack

Discussing / Debating the City // Elsewhere

• Debate / Cape Town / Urban and social mobility in Cape Town
• Debate / Durban / Envisioning Durban as a walkable and transparent city
• Seminar / Maputo / Justiça espacial, desafios fundiários e imobiliários nas cidades da África Austral. Abordagens comparadas Moçambique/África do Sul