Keynote speakers
Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
Dr. Caroline Wanjiku Kihato is a Visiting Researcher at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and a Global Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington DC. In 2011, she received a MacArthur grant on Migration and Development and spent a year as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), Georgetown University, Washington DC.
Her career has involved both teaching and conducting research in the academy and the non-profit sector in South Africa. Between 2006 and 2013 she worked for Urban LandMark as its southern African program coordinator. She was previously a Policy Analyst at the Development Bank of Southern Africa and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand.
She worked for six years as a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies. Her research and teaching interests are migration, gender, governance, and urbanization in the global South. She is part of a team developing an assessment tool to strengthen municipal responses to humanitarian crises in Nairobi, Kampala and Johannesburg.
She is the author of Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Life in an in-between City (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Urban Diversity: Space, Culture and Inclusive Pluralism in Cities Worldwide (Johns Hopkins).
Photo: Henrik Sandsjö
Edgar Pieterse
Professor Edgar Pieterse is Director of ACC, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. In his research and teaching he extends himself across theoretical and applied concerns. As an urbanist, Edgar Pieterse is deeply fascinated by the drama of cities everywhere and at different moments in time, including the future, the past and science fiction invocations. Simultaneously, he endeavours to remain grounded in the tough and messy realities of cities invariably always on the move working with materialist and aesthetic optics.
His work is rooted in two South African cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town but also track the fortunes of African cities as part of larger discourses on sustainable urban transitions and Southern urbanism.
Read more about Edgar Pieterse
