News

The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), located in Johannesburg, South Africa, has recently advertised the position of head of school for the School of Architecture and Planning.

The Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS) and Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) recently held a small function to celebrate the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two institutions. The function was attended by representatives of AAPS, SDI, Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC), University of Cape Town, as well as the African Centre for Cities.

Research Committee 21 (RC21) of the International Sociology Association, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS) and the University of Amsterdam invite applications for 25 places on the second collaborative School on Comparative Urban Studies, to be held in Amsterdam from 1 to 12 July 2011.

It is with great pleasure that we welcome the Yaba College of Technology (located in Lagos, Nigeria) to the Association of African Planning Schools. Several representatives of the College attended the SAPI Planning Africa Conference in Durban (South Africa) in September 2010, where they contacted the AAPS secretariat and indicated their wish to join the Association.

UN-Habitat recently announced the publication of ‘The State of African Cities 2010: Governance, Inequality and Urban Land Markets’, the latest report in the series.

The Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS) hosted its second bienniel conference on African planning education from 5 to 8 October 2010, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The conference sought to consolidate the AAPS agenda around the revitalisation of planning education on the continent.

AAPS hosted a panel discussion on African planning education at the South African Planning Institute (SAPI) ‘Planning Africa’ conference, held at the Durban International Convention Centre, South Africa, from 12 to 15 September 2010.

In preparation for the upcoming AAPS 2010 conference on planning education (to be held from 5 to 8 October in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), a background paper has been prepared to inform debate around planning curricular reform in Africa.

The AAPS will host its second conference on planning education in Africa, from 5 to 8 October 2010 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The first conference was held in Cape Town in October 2008. This was an historical event in that it enabled the first face-to-face meeting of AAPS members since the Association’s beginnings in 2002.

The School of Architecture, Planning and Housing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban, South Africa), in association with the KwaZulu-Natal Institute for Architecture, will host a conference themed ‘2010 and Beyond: Architecture & The City’. The conference will take place from 14 to 16 October 2010 in Durban, South Africa.

The African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town is seeking to appoint a senior urban practitioner/scholar with responsibility for the editorship of a series of State of Cities Reports (SOCRs) as part of the State of Cities in Africa (SOCA) Project.

The annual journal Regional Development Studies encourages the submission of articles from researchers in the following aspects of regional development in developing countries: human security, environmental management, disaster management, as well as local and regional economic development.

Urban LandMark is a South African-based initiative that aims to shed light on how urban land markets work, and why they are often dysfunctional. Through the ‘making markets work for the poor’ approach, Urban LandMark hopes to influence urban policies and practices as a means of improving poor people’s access to well-located land.

The AAPS has an opportunity to convert this website into a wiki, which will essentially be an interactive resource from which you can download documents, have discussions, ask questions of a number of experts and generally do what you can on Wikipedia, Facebook and other social networking sites. More general information on wikis is available by clicking here (from Wikipedia, very appropriately).

The African Centre for Cities (ACC), located at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) now offers a postgraduate programme dedicated to issues surrounding the design and management of urban infrastructure.

The Commonwealth Association of Planners (CAP) is to launch a Young Planners Network at its Biennial Business Meeting to be held in Montreal on 1 October 2010 ahead of the Canadian Institute of Planners' annual conference.

In early July 2010 another highly successful AAPS case study workshop came to an end. The venue was located in Nungua village, on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana. As with the previous workshops, held in Dar es Salaam and Johannesburg respectively, the proceedings in Accra were dedicated to promoting the use of the case study research and teaching methodologies amongst African planning educators.

The South Africa-based non-governmental organisation Urban LandMark will run a conference from 1 to 2 November 2010, with the theme ‘Rethinking emerging land markets in rapidly growing Southern African cities’.

The fourth South African Planning Institute (SAPI) Planning Africa Conference will be held in Durban (South Africa) from 13 to 15 September 2010. The overall conference theme is ‘Beyond Crisis: Opportunities and Actions’.

The Association of African Planning Schools welcomes another Tanzanian planning school to the network, taking the total AAPS membership to 40 schools.