"Faces of the City" series: Collective political subjects in the urban peripheries

Dear All,

Please join us for a seminar in the current "Faces of the City" series.

Date: Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Time:  16h00 – 18h00 
Venue: First Floor Seminar Room, John Moffat Building, Wits East Campus.

Cristina Cielo  (Post Doctoral Fellow with the University of Witwatersrand's Sawyer
Seminar Series on Race, Poverty and Justice) will be speaking on “Collective political subjects in the urban peripheries: What can the Bolivian case
tell us?”

What does the tremendous periurban growth in the cities of the global south mean for contemporary forms of belonging and inclusion? Based on mixed-methods and participatory research, this presentation examines these themes in peripheral informal neighborhoods of Cochabamba, Bolivia, a country whose periurban populations have played a central role in the rise of political alternatives to liberal state and society relations. I look at ways that the urban and state institutions of property and resource management shape particular collective logics and their implicit social relations. More specifically, I describe how institutionalized mechanisms for the regularization of urban land and consumer models of access to water encourage neoliberal subjectivities and individually unequal social relations. In some cases, however, claims to the legitimacy of alternative forms of property and resource management produce distinct (though not necessarily more equal) collective logics and social relations. The talk seeks to stimulate dialogue on the relevance of these cases to contemporary dynamics in South Africa and the region.

RSVP:  Zakiyyah.ayob@wits.ac.za.

Hope to see you there!

Zakiyyah Ayob
Programme Administrator
NRF: SARChI
Development Planning and Modelling
School of Architecture and Planning
University of the Witwatersrand
Tel: 011 717 7642
Fax: 011 717 7624
E-mail: zakiyyah.ayob@wits.ac.za