Ecotones 7
Reconfiguring, Repurposing the City: Urban Ecotones in the Global South
28–30 October 2021 – Cape Town, South Africa
After conferences at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Université de Poitiers and Université de La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016 and 2018), at the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences of Calcutta (Kolkata, India, 2018), Manhattanville College (NY, USA, 2019) and Concordia University (Montreal, Canada, 2019), this international scientific event at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, will be the 7th round of this conference cycle.
Ecotones
An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” programme (2015–2021) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and renewal between several communities. This interdisciplinary conference at UCT will focus more specifically on colonial and postcolonial cities as “ecotonal” dialectics between places and nonplaces (Augé).
Cities can be imagined as estuaries made of the sedimentation of drifting populations over a long period of time. They are powerful matrices of aggregation and segregation transforming and transformed by people coming from various horizons. As permanently renewed moving sites of uniting differences (Lefebvre), cities are lived experience and constantly defined by their margins. Perhaps more than other spaces, they empower people’s identities and generate shared social references, yet in different and unequal ways. Cities of the South often include affluent populations living in distant suburbs and gated communities while subalterns may remain captive in city centres. Conversely, cities of the North tend to expel lower and middle class at their margins while estate price in their core can only be afforded by wealthier populations. In that regard, cities are “situated”, endowed with thick historical and environmental forces shaping the populations living in their confines. But cities are also hubs connected with long-distance elsewheres. They are privileged sites of disjunctive flows in the global cultural economy (Appadurai), crossroads of a strikingly new interactive system of real and imagined topographies. And while growing postcolonial cities are privileged loci for the emergence and negotiation of new identities, increasing transnational mobility and migratory movements turn even smaller urban geographies into complex “contact zones” (Pratt): sites of both fruitful entanglements and novel forms of segregation.
Conference organisers
Markus Arnold, University of Cape Town
Hedley Twidle, University of Cape Town
in partnership with
Corinne Duboin, Université de La Réunion
Arnaud Richard, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Ecotones programme coordinators
Thomas Lacroix, CNRS (CERI – Sciences Po Paris).
Judith Misrahi-Barak, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Maggi Morehouse, Coastal Carolina University
Ecotones 7 