Intersections on the periphery: The Good City in a Time of Crisis
Cape Town, South Africa, 27th – 28th November 2023
Bangalore, India, 15th – 16th January 2023
The intersection of rapid peripheral urbanisation, profound climate impacts, and sharply growing inequalities has placed our existing conceptual frameworks and approaches in disarray. While we have a rich body of research examining each of these domains independently, we lack two vital understandings. First, how do we make sense of the intersection between these processes, particularly at the rapidly growing urban periphery? Second, what does understanding this intersection mean for working towards ‘the good city’?
Peripheral expansion has emerged as a dominant mode of urbanization today, reshaping urban lives, economies, socialities, and ecologies. We identify four key forms of peripheralisation: one, as a result of deliberate intervention by state or private actors including corridors, magnet cities, new towns, or programmes of massive suburbanization; two, off-shoot growth from larger urban centres which might include expansionary real estate speculation on the urban edge; three, the formation of peripheries through often gradual settlement of and autoconstruction by new and typically lower-income migrants, and the diversity of activities that emerge in unplanned and underserved areas such as urban villages; four, the marginalization and lack of research on certain types of urban residents who exist at urban peripheries (Keil, 2017; Brenner and Schmid, 2011; Guney et al, 2019; Caldeira, 2017; Holston, 2009; Holston and Caldeira, 2008; Pati, 2022; Tucker and Hassan 2021; Tucker 2023).
This seminar series offers a platform for a series of open-ended conversations that will enable participants to ‘step back’ and reflect, in an open-ended, dialogic way, to make sense of this intersection between peripheral urbanisation, climate change, and inequality, and what can do about it.
We will hold 2 seminars of 15 participants each at the University of Cape Town and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. The first workshop in Cape Town will focus on different ways of knowing or understanding peripheral urbanisation. We invite a wide set of stakeholders and perspectives on the periphery, as well as scholars working with a variety of methodological approaches. In addition, we will start theorising the links between peripheral urbanisation, climate change and sharply growing inequalities in the first workshop.
In the second workshop in Bangalore, we will deepen the theoretical and conceptual work initiated in Cape Town, to think about ways of linking peripheral urbanisation, climate change, and inequalities, and what these mean for our ideas about the ‘good city’. For this workshop, we invite scholars whose work lies at the intersection of at least two of the above three trends.
Interested candidates can apply to only one workshop. Please indicate whether you wish to be considered for the first workshop (Cape Town), or the second workshop (Bangalore). The deadline to send in a 350 word paper proposal is 10 September 2023. Attendance will then be confirmed by 29 September 2023. Please send proposals and queries to peripheries.usf@gmail.com.
Meals during the workshop will be provided for all participants. Where possible, local accommodation will be provided. We have a small amount of funding to support the travel of some participants to Cape Town / Bangalore. This will be used to prioritise travel for early career scholars. The remaining participants will be required to fund their travel costs for attending the workshop. Online participation will be considered for a small set of participants that are unable to travel. Funding for the workshops is being provided by the Urban Studies Foundation.
Let us know if you have any questions.
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