Keynote Lecture: Vitalities of Everyday Life in Congo

Filip De Boeck presented some results of his ongoing collaboration with photographer and visual artist Sammy Baloji. De Boeck and Baloji have been collaborating for the past several years considering changes in how cities and territories are imagined by different kinds of people. They have explored different facets of how massive appropriations of land in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo for various global extraction commodity circuits gave rise to the idea that a major metropolitan area could be constructed from scratch, and the subsequent wheeling and dealing in land rights that accompanied this. They also have explored how old infrastructures in Kinshasa are organized into new neighborhoods and how various new built environments—some, the work of major developers and government and some, the work of individual or popular initiatives—create new forms of urban imagination and modernity.To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the establishment of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, the International Urban Conference drew together leading urban scholars and practitioners from all corners of Africa and the world to take stock of ground-breaking urban research, to explore new avenues for enquiry and collaboration, and to make visible the vibrant state of our broad and heterogeneous field.status: publishe