Jointly hosted by The Academy of Science of South Africa and the British Academy, the workshop brings together early career researchers based in the UK and South Africa who are able to contribute multiple disciplinary and cross-regional insights from the humanities and the social sciences to our understanding of urban life. The symposium runs from the 21st-23rd February, in Gauteng, South Africa, and Ed Charlton presented work in a session on ‘Space and Habitats’.

Ed Charlton is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at LSE Cities. His current project is entitled ‘Metropolitan Melancholia: Articulating Loss in the Contemporary City’. 

On 21 February, Ricky Burdett, Director of LSE Cities and Urban Age, presented the third publication in the Urban Age series, ‘Shaping Cities in an Urban Age’. Featuring 37 essays by leading policy makers, practitioners and scholars, ‘Shaping Cities in an Urban Age’, brings together authoritative research and fresh insights that explain the complexities of urbanisation. The presentation was jointly hosted by Ivorypress and Phaidon Press.

Sisto Andama, a participant of our 2017-2018 Executive MSc in Cities cohort, launched the findings of the Amaravati Taskforce at the Happy Cities Summit in Amaravati, India today. The formal handing-over ceremony was attended by Chandrababu Naidu, Rt. Hon Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and Dr. Sreedhar Cherukuri, Commissioner of the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA), as well as other APCRDA and government officials. The report, entitled “Amaravati 2050: Strategic planning for sustainable housing, transport and financing” was prepared by a group of participants that have been working with the local government in Amaravati since June 2018 as part of the urban infrastructure and strategic planning course of the Executive MSc in Cities. The taskforce identifies three strategically important planning challenges for this rapidly growing new capital city and suggested ways in which Amaravati might deal with affordable housing provision, improved public and active transport, and more sustainable financing as it grows from a collection of villages into a new capital of 3.5 million inhabitants by 2050. Following the public launch, sessions to discuss the findings of the Taskforce Report in more detail with the APCRDA staff will take place later on this week.