Rike Sitas

• University of Cape Town

Transdisciplinarity is all the rage! This spirited statement, or announcement even, rings true of the contemporary intellectual landscape. The amalgamated term/concept proposes a means to breakdown traditional boundaries, encourage collaboration outside of staid academic spaces and in doing so become a key driver for innovation. Many have bought in...

Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, spe...

Too often policies are thought of decrees, immovable objects, binding forces, and something that is delivered and received rather than made and negotiated on an ongoing daily basis. This chapter reflects on a five-year collaboration between the African Centre for Cities and the City of Cape Town’s Arts & Culture Branch, focusing on what it means to...

This paper provides a distinctive analysis of the value of international intermediation alliances for co-production, based on the way they operate in practice. While much attention is paid to ideal or normative models of co-production, there is less understanding of the complexities that pervade co-production practices in specific contexts or how t...

Despite the economic challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, venture capital (VC) investments in African startups have remained resilient, surpassing $5 billion in 2021 and experiencing a staggering 264% growth compared to the previous year. Notably, more than 60% of these investments were directed towards fintech companies. The surge in finte...

The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infra-structures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a m...

The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re-worked as people navigate fractured, ever-shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledg...

The fourth movement explores the temporal relationship between arrangements and re-arrangements, addressing the question of how an obdurate and ‘sticky’ temporal order may give way to palpable re-arrangement of the ways in which subjects experience time. Eschewing a concern with linear homogenous time, it addresses the processes of re-arrangement b...

This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re-arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in u...

The twin reality of Africa as the world’s demographically youngest and most rapidly urbanising continent should, by default, make it a hotspot for youth-centred urban research. And yet, the voices of young Africans remain grossly absent in public discourse, policy debates and mainstream research on issues that directly affect them. This lacuna prop...

While technological innovation is often associated with cities like San Francisco or Bangalore, several African cities are experiencing an agglomeration of ICT related companies. Both Kigali and Nairobi have been dubbed ‘Silicon Savannahs’, celebrated for their adoption of smart city programmes and projects. In these two cities, this research explo...

This is a chapter in a book commissioned by Prince Claus Fund. It focuses on the power of art in the city of Douala, Cameroon, by drawing on research conducted with doual’art, a cultural non-profit organization active since 1991. doual’art has harnessed the power to transform public space across different neighbourhoods by fusing artistic and infra...

Creative cities and culture‐led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite‐centric economic development agendas tend to trump ‘civic creativity’ ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture‐led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as...

In the vastly unequal contexts typical in African cities and amidst the poly crisis of rapid urban development, it is vital to understand how cultural heritage intersects with urban planning, design and development. Although integrating cultural heritage into the urban agenda is crucial to developing sustainable cities, the ways in which culture is...

This chapter discusses three comparative projects that were all, at least partially, created through the replication of research across the Mistra Urban Futures cities. A typology of six possible models was developed, illustrating how comparative transdisciplinary knowledge co-production could take place across multiple cities, and the second of th...

This article draws together conceptual threads from public space, public art and public pedagogy literature in order to ‘deepen and widen the analytical and political edge’ of artful forms of urban enquiry as discussed by Pinder International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3), 730–736, (Pinder 2008, p. 233). The article argues that in or...

There are growing calls, across a continuum from international agreements to social movements, for strengthening urban resilience alongside reductions in inequality and poverty. Although there is broad agreement on what the term resilience means in general, different perspectives exist on how the concept should be implemented locally and controvers...

Whilst the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable urban development has been increasingly recognised in policy frameworks at multiple levels, there remains a lack of understanding about how global and international goals land in different places. This paper specifically addresses this question through a study of 18 festivals across the Glob...

A new report produced by the Urban Institute with partners at the African Centre for Cities explores how festivals are integrative sites between tangible and intangible heritage in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. Professor Beth Perry has been working with a network of academics and practitioners in South Africa, Kenya, Sweden, the...

Both the state and radical civil actors tend to perceive and define ordinary citizens in circumscribed ways; as rational actors who need to be persuaded through rational argument about why their participation is necessary for the democratic functioning of society. The assumption is that once people have been exposed to compelling arguments and ince...