(Un)learning the city through crisis: lessons from Cape Town

ABSTRACT

Scholarly research has shown the importance of moments of crisis, in particular the direct aftermath of urban crises, as opportunities to learn about urban vulnerabilities. However, if it is widely assumed that learning is important, in particular for resilience-building, we still know very little about how such learning occurs in a moment of crisis. This paper starts addressing this gap, arguing that moments of crisis constitute a specific type of ‘learning space’. This proposition is taken forward through the analysis of a large-scale (social and humanitarian) urban crisis in the city of Cape Town. The paper maps out the emergence of multi-stakeholder knowledge networks throughout the crisis management process and explores the extent to which these were embedded into city-wide learning infrastructures after the crisis. It shows that moments of crisis represent an opportunity for ephemeral transsectorial knowledge coalitions to come about around issues that are made visible through the crisis itself. This can also be seen as an opportunity for potential learning spaces to open up.

KEYWORDS:

• City learning
• urban crisis
• urban knowledge
• urban resilience
• Cape Town

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go first and foremost to the participants who took part in this study and provided insights and help in tracing the complex ramifications of anti-migrant violence in the South African context. We would like to thank Keri Facer for organising this special issue and for inviting us to contribute, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. This research was supported by an internal grant from the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at University College London.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a related discussion of urban risk traps and the cumulative effects of everyday risks on informal settlements’ vulnerabilities, and of how these can be overcome through knowledge co-production and community-led mapping, see Allen, A., Koroma, B., Lambert, R. and Osuteye, E. in collaboration with Hamilton, A. (technical platform assemblage) and Kamara, Macarthy, J., Sellu, S. and Stone, A. (coordination community-led data collection) (2018) ReMapRisk Freetown. Online platform produced for Urban Africa Risk Knowledge (Urban ARK) [https://www.urbanark.org/].

2. Alongside those identified by McFarlane, such as urban tactics (although urban crisis can definitely open up temporal and institutional opportunities for tactics to be deployed) and urban forums (which are more institutionalised, learning platforms).

3. Although they do not directly discuss crisis as a learning space, interesting discussions of everyday risk, adaptation strategies, and tactical learning processes in the face of continuous exposure to climate change-induced urban risks can be found in Jabeen et al. (2010) and Pelling and Wisner (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Enora Robin

Enora Robin is a PhD candidate in Urban Policy and Planning at UCL STEaPP. Her work focuses on the politics of urban expertise at various scales of policy making.

Clémentine Chazal

Clémentine Chazal is an affiliated researcher at UCL (Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy) and IFRA-Nigeria (French Institute for Research in Africa) focusing on urban and sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa, the building of socio-ecological resilience strategies, and innovative governance systems.

Michele Acuto

Michele Acuto specialises in urban governance and the ways cities and city networks interact with questions of world politics. At the University of Melbourne he directs the Connected Cities Lab.

Rocio Carrero

Rocio Carrero is an environmental scientist with expertise in climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, scenarios, and spatial modelling.