INFRASTRUCTURES FROM ABOVE AND BELOW - LECTURE SERIES IN URBAN STUDIES
7pm, Regenzzimmer 111, Kollegienhaus, Petersplatz 1
"AFRICAN HAIR-BRAIDING AS EPISTEMOLOGY", MPHO MATSIPA, WITS CITY INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND, JOHANNESBURG
African hair braiding on Bree Street in down-town Johannesburg offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, infrastructures, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding networks constitutes a soft infrastructure that disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of African urban studies itself.
Mpho Matsipa is a researcher at the Wits City Institute at University of the Witwatersrand. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. She has worked as a curator of Studio X- Johannesburg, a Columbia University experimental urban research platform that explores the future of cities. Her current interests are African urbanism, race and spatial justice.
The lecture series “Infrastructure from Above and Below” is organised by Urban Studies at the University of Basel in collaboration with the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum, and with generous support by the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel.
Regenzzimmer 111, Kollegienhaus, Petersplatz 1
