3rd UROLab | 2 – 4 November 2016

GOVERNANCE, THE URBAN YOUTH + TRANSFORMATION

EMERGENCY ISSUES

With regards to the current shut down of Wits University as a response to the “fees must fall movement” we would like the workshop to look into the following themes:

Theme:  

The Urban Youth, who governs, owns + lives in the city [Braamfontein] from 1994 [democracy], to 2004 [Braamfontein Regeneration Development Business Plan], to 2016 [Municipal Elections], to 2019 [National Government Elections]. 

The workshop will look back to look forward and ask, what role does city planning + spatial education play in absorbing the voices of the many who live, work + play in Braamfontein, and whose knowledge should be drawn from?

On Monday 19 September 2016, Blade Nzimande's (Minister of Higher Education) announced a optional fee increase from 0 - 8%, which lead to national protests and a shutdown of Wits University by the end of this week, when petrol bombs were located on campus, representing a threat to students, admin staff and academics, as well as to the public around the edges of the Wits urban campus.

Sub themes + questions:

What is the role and responsibilities of the academic institution to protect student interests?

What are the initiatives purported by the current Braamfontein masterplan in the creation of places or events that are truly inclusive and welcoming to a wide array of gender, racial and ethnic classes, and ages, and the potential to have sustained organisation and political influence from within a transient community.

What are the lessons learnt from 2004 to now and how may these be enhanced for 2024 for a more inclusive city?

On several levels, this case can lead to discussions of themes central to the Urban Orders focus: urban economic policies and the opposition responding to these; planned gentrification; spatial ex- and inclusion; rhythmic orderings; leaving and returning to the city core; classes and social groups over layering each other in space.

The case will provide a great arena for observing what kinds of 'urban orderings' that are activated in and through the gentrification process; the momentary interweaving of the social, the political and the aesthetic that such urban dynamics give rise to: and so we want to consider how to capture these empirically and, indeed, conceptually and how to potentially allow these to work back on the socio-political landscape from which they emerged (as an interventionist strategy). 

Braamfontein is displaying a wide range of stakeholders related to this story: the students, the university as both public institution and investor, local businesses, the developer firm Liberty, the BID-project team among others, all having strong agenda that in a way keeps the space in a kind of equilibrium or “lock-in”, a tension where an ordering process is highly contested among very present agents. This spatial ordering complex includes weekly “festivals”, where groups from other locations and urban groupings – artists, gay people, tourists, and affluent consumers – are flooding the quarter, just to disappear when shops and bars close. This rhythmicity is part of the contestation and ambivalence of Braamfontein.

Site:

Braamfontein, under investigation re: current protest movements and related security issues.

Voices:

The broader question of Governance, the Urban Youth, the University + Transformation

Fees must fall is just a symptom.  We have to challenge the structural and the structural is the neo liberal policy and economic policy that are running this country, and the government is committed to protecting.  The more they keep the majority of the black children out of schools, the more this neo liberal, this capitalist will survive.

Joseph Mathunjwa, AMCU President http://ewn.co.za/Topic/Amcu-president-Joseph-Mathunjwa 

The fact of the matter is that our universities right now are anti poor and anti black.  And what the Vice Chancellors need to be saying, what we would like them to say, is that they support what the students are saying and engaging in what they are going to do about it.  Because right now Vice Chancellors have become Blade Nzimande spoke people.  Vice Chancellors have taken the side of the status quo.  They are in fact gate keeping this unjust system.  And so to expect students not to raise issues with them, and the hypocrisy that comes from that, to support a system where the most marginalised and the poor are made to fight for the crumbs at the table of the privileged, which is exactly what kind of propaganda does, is completely unintellectual and irrational.

Shaeera Kalla, former wits SRC President https://twitter.com/shaeera_k?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

The biggest issue is the commodification of education.  The fact is that the system currently is allowing those to get the education, not that they deserve, but what they can afford.

Fasiha Hassan, Secretary General, Wits SRC https://www.wits.ac.za/students/src/

The truth is that the stakes are hugely high.  We do need tertiary education.  We want our universities to be as good as anywhere is in the world, although we want them, to a sense, to have a flavour, which is of this country rather than some third rate model of a USA kind, that is accepted.  What is perhaps not accepted is, how do we get to point where people who are capable to be at university and should be there, do not have to worry about the fact that they have to pay.  It is disgraceful that in fact people who can’t afford to, who have the talent, should be denied the vindication of those talents of theirs.  How do we get there?

Judge Dennis Davis https://www.enca.com/news-team/judge-dennis-davis

The fees issue is a manifestation of a broader polarisation that is happening in society, and the world as a whole.  So what you seeing is the inequality in the society, the inequality in the world has polarised our respective societies, and those respective societies are now beginning to manifest a whole series of social struggles and fees is one manifestation of that, particularly in the university system.  It is not surprising that it happened there, partly because you got young students, you got education, which is a big issue.  But these are about access to the universities and how do I feel comfortable in the very university I am located.

Adam Habib, Vice Chancellor, Wits University https://twitter.com/AdHabb?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

It is time to recognise that the norm of human presence in South Africa is “black”. That recognition is central to understanding where real agency for shaping the future of South Africa is overwhelmingly located, and that “blackness” becomes so normal it ceases to exist.

Njabulo Ndebele, 10^th Annual Helen Joseph Lecture, 17 Sept 2016 http://www.njabulondebele.co.za/2016/09/they-are-burning-memory/

If you are black and are from the rural areas it is very difficult to identify with the space of the university.  The cosmopolitancy that is there, it assimilates whiteness more than it gives identity to black people.

Kafense Mkhari, Fees Must Fall Activist, Wits Student