MAK Center LA, Urban Future Manifestos from Robert Ransick on Vimeo.

South Park South Africa from bayol on Vimeo.

Available from March 2010: Cape Town is undergoing a growth spurt driven along by both public and private sector investments. In the process a new city is being fashioned in front of our eyes but there are very few book length perspectives on the direction and meaning of this growth. This is particularly alarming given the many intractable problems that stare the city in the face and which require more considered and informed responses. The starting point of this initiative is that the nature and direction of Cape Town’s physical metamorphosis is unsustainable and culturally questionable if not inappropriate. However, amidst the expansion of real estate, a number of very important counter currents are afoot (as plans or interventions or sometimes, only dreams) which represent both a critique of unimaginative urban growth and hold the seeds for putting Cape Town onto a unique and culturally resonant growth path; a precondition for creating a more inclusive, vibrant and sustainable city at ease in its own skin, perched at the southern tip of Africa. The purpose of this book will be to showcase bold urban development initiatives by the both the state and the private sector with the aim of shifting public ideas and discourses about the kind of Cape Town we should be imagining and nurturing; a city that works explicitly with many unresolved contradictions and tensions but also strives to give expression to a number of core values such as sustainability, social justice, integration and creativity. Contributing authors to the volume include: Mokena Makeka, Gita Goven, Barbara Southworth, Andrew Boraine, Luyanda Mpahlwa, Nisa Mammon, Lucien Le Grange, Iain Low, Karen Press, Jane Alexander, Ashraf Jamal, AbdouMaliq Simone, David Dewar, Mark Swilling. The volume is edited by Edgar Pieterse.

Book Launch and Exhibition opening
Date: 6 April 2010
Time: 5:30 for 6pm-7:30pm
Venue: Cape Institute for Architecture
Panel Discussion about the City with Edgar Pieterse (Editor & Director:
African Centre for Cities, Max Price (Vice Chancellor: University of Cape
Town), Mokena Makeka (Architect), Bruce Calland

Debate One: Leadership and the City
Date: 19 April 2010
Time: 5:30 for 6pm-7:30pm
Venue: Cape Institute for Architecture
Participants: David Schmidt (Contributor/Consultant), Mark Swilling
(Contributor/Director: The Sustainability Institute), Luyanda Mpahlwa
(Contributor/Architect)

Debate Two: Designing Futures
Date: 6 May 2010
Time: 5:30 for 6pm-7:30pm
Venue: Cape Institute for Architecture
Participants: Gita Goven (Contributor/Architect), Robin Carlyle (MEC for
Transport & Public Works), Barbara Southworth (Contributor/Urban Planner)
Moderated by Edgar Pieterse

Title: We cannot Continue to Die like This
Year: 2007
Medium: Video Montage
Duration: 1min15sec
By: Babak Fakhamzadeh and Ismail Farouk
Web: www.sowetouprisings.com

Avalon Cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in South Africa and is the final resting place of many political and cultural activists. The cemetery is about 170ha in size and is managed by the City of Johannesburg’s City Parks division. At the entrance to the cemetery, a memorial with the words, “Never Never Again” inscribed on it pays tribute to those who lost their lives in the Soweto uprisings of 1976.

Avalon Cemetery is facing severe pressure. With the death rate is increasing by 10% per year and more than 200 funerals occurring each weekend, the cemetery is running out of space. Compounding the problem is the Aids pandemic. With more than 6.5 million of the country’s 47 million people infected with HIV, demand for space is increasing. Every weekend, convoys of buses carrying mourners bring the Old Potchefstroom Road to a standstill. This has resulted in special traffic marshals being deployed to deal with the traffic congestion every weekend. Cremation is not considered appropriate for most people so City Parks are encouraging families to consider the “second burial” option, where several members of a family are buried in the same grave.

“We Cannot Continue to Die like this” is a short animated movie which responds to the pressures experienced by the cemetery because of the increase of funerals as a direct result of AIDS related deaths. The film frames the dense weekend funeral traffic in relationship to the 1976 memorial located at the entrance of the cemetery. This is done to bring about awareness to the current day struggle our society is experiencing. History is represented by the memorial to fallen heroes of 1976 – history will demand to know where our leaders are now, when this preventable disease continues to kill millions of people.

Highlands Hill in Yeoville is an important public space where African Indigenous religious practices dominate. This spiritual hill provides open space for hundreds of worshippers to gather in prayer on a daily basis.

Much of the religious activity occurs in contravention of the regulations set out by the city parks utility company who manage the space. City Parks have signposted the hill as a ‘no prayer’ zone. It seems the city does not recognize the inherent spiritual value of the space and often enforce the ‘no prayer’ regulation by threatening to arrest worshippers for loitering. Much of the hill is earmarked to be redeveloped as housing for inner city residents.

‘God’s Land’ attempts to bring much needed attention to the spatial justice issues being experienced on Highland’s Hill. By altering existing exclusionary signposts on the hill, the work attempts to point to the conflict between the spiritual needs of the local community vs. the needs of mainstream development.

I’ve been invited by the University of Ghent to give a lecture exploring the importance of informal economies in global cities.

In the context of a visit and social-cultural project in Ledeberg Ghent, the lecture treats the importance of understanding informal economy, socio-cultural practices and interventions in urban renewal projects, and the links between cities in the Global South and North.

The lecture is a cooperation between the City of Ghent (Arts Department and the Office of North-South Co-operation), Africalia, Hogeschool Gent, Kask, and research groups MENARG en CRG at the Department of Third world Studies at the University of Ghent.

Unfortunately, my blog was one of the 0.5% and so the end of ftp support has meant the end of the blogger platform for ismailfarouk.com. The problem presented my web guru, Babak fakhamzadeh with a serious challenge and after some extremely geeky dreams, he concluded that migration to the Wordpress platform was the solution.

So its my absolute pleasure to launch the new ismailfarouk.com website – now using the Wordpress platform. There are some significant functional changes to the site but Babak has retained the overall look and feel of the old website. So far, the migration to Wordpress has gone fairly smoothly, thanks to dedicated support from Mastababa.

1001 thank you’s to Mastababa – Still the coolest traveling web guru by far!

“Following on the heels of the first African Cities Reader, we remain as convinced as ever that the youthful demographic, informality and non-conventional insertion in global circuits by African urbanites is a starting point for a sustained engagement and retelling of the city in contemporary Africa. The cultural, livelihood, religious, stylistic, commercial, familial, knowledge producing and navigational capacities of African urbanites are typically overlooked, unappreciated and undervalued. The aim of the African Cities Reader is to bring their stories and practices to the fore. The Reader seeks to become a forum where Africans tell their own stories, draw their own maps and represent their own spatial topographies as it continuous to evolve and adapt at the interstice of difference, complexity, opportunism, and irony.

The second installment is organised around the theme: “Mobilities and Fixtures”. It seems apparent to us that African cities are quintessentially defined by incessant mobilities. And as people make their way in cities that are incapable of dealing with their presence, they continuously come to terms with the fact that the way of the city is a game of hide-and-seek… nothing is easily navigable; little is what it seems at first sight; and urban life becomes centred on a capacity to read the street, faces, gestures, ambience, odours, noises, danger and of course, most importantly, opportunity. Discernment demands a capacity to stay on the move, in circulation, whether by foot, rumour, sms or insertion into multiple social networks. It is therefore possible to access and explore the phenomenology of the African city through perceptive pieces that account for these dynamics…”

The African Cities Reader seeks submissions for its second issue (2010) organised around the theme: “Mobilities and Fixtures”.

Moving from this exploratory vantage point, the African Cities Reader remains open to multiple genres (literature, philosophy, faction, reportage, ethnographic narrative, etc), forms of representation (text, image, sound and possibly performance), and points of view. The African Cities Reader insists on embodying the rich pluralism, cosmopolitanism and diversity of emergent urbanisms across Africa. Thus, the Reader invites and undertake to commission writing and art by practitioners, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields across Africa in all of her expansiveness.

Submissions will be accepted until Wednesday, 31st March 2010, and should be submitted electronically in Word format and low-res jpg to the email address below. Submissions may vary in subject matter and will be assessed on their relevance to theme. All work should accompany a short abstract, biography and relevant contact details.

For further information contact:

Jennifer Bryant
africancitiesreader@chimurenga.co.za
T) +27(21)4224168
www.chimurenga.co.za
www.africancentreforcities.net
www.africancitiesreader.org.za