Contribute to Situated Urban Political Ecologies (SUPE) — New website

We have just started our build-up launch of website on Situated Urban Political Ecologies (SUPE). The aim is to create a platform for exchange and collaboration. We, being Jonathan Silver, Henrik Ernstson and Mary Lawhon, write on this the webpage:

The SUPE-Platform provides a collaborative space for a number of researchers from different institutions, working in African cities and focused on developing urban political ecology within the context of these urban spaces. The SUPE-Platform emerged from ongoing debates and work at the African Centre for Cities between 2011 and 2013 that brought together a shared desire to generate new contours of UPE across African urban environments. 

This resulted in a number of outputs including; papers, conference sessions and presentations, a journal special issue and an ongoing reading group. From this beginning and interactions with a range of scholars, activists and policymakers, discussions began to focus on ideas about creating a wider platform for collaboration that could disseminate ongoing research, provide a space for debate, to organize workshops to develop skills, and to bring in other partners to develop new research projects and explore radical and critical perspectives on African urban environments.

Perhaps key to this development has been the desire of the collaborators to provide a range of learning opportunities for young researchers across African universities. These are students interested in critically examining urban environments who could use the SUPE-Platform to develop critical skills needed to interrogate these dynamics. Whilst there is a vibrant culture of urban scholarship in Africa, compared to other global regions university departments engaging in these issues are often under-resourced and struggle to link into global networks of knowledge exchange and development.

Out of these currents and imperatives the SUPE-Platform was born in Durban, June 2013, designed as a ambitious, long term and international collaboration that aims to:

• To generate critical understandings of African urban environments that span multiple different contexts.
• To provoke debate and discussion concerning urban theory in African cities, particularly in the fields of urban political ecology and environmental justice.
• To support the development of early career urban researchers at African universities.