African Centre for Cities

The African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town was established in 2007 with the explicit intention of opening up interdisciplinary scholarship on cities of the Global South, from an African vantage point. Since its inception, the ACC has explored alternative forms of knowledge production in order to enrich the range and scope of academic inquiry, but also to engender a permanently unsettled epistemic feeling within the routines of the organization. The experiment is a constitutive part of the larger debates on Southern urbanisms. It is centrally concerned with some fundamental questions: How best can meaningful knowledge about the urban be produced? What should we produce knowledge for? And what do these questions mean for the politics of knowledge production in the Global South?