Rike Sitas
Biographic Data
| ID | 1000616 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rike Sitas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rike |
| FAMILY NAME | Sitas |
| SIGNATURE | SITAS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3516-3400 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Serious fun: Exploring arts-based serious games in urban food (in)security research
Fintech 'frontiers' and the platformed motorcycle: Emergent infrastructures of value creation in African cities
Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa's…
Cultural policy actions towards urban sustainability: Research and practice collaborations
When Trans met Discipline: Scenes from an arranged marriage
Transdisciplinarity is all the rage! This spirited statement, or announcement even, rings true of the contemporary intellectual landscape. The amalgamated term/concept proposes a means to breakdown traditional boundaries, encourage collaboration outside of staid academic spaces and in doing so become a key driver for innovation. Many have bought into this promise. However, amidst the fervour for the promise of fluidity of knowledge and interdisci…
From heritage conservation to heritage justice in Cape Town
Alliances, allyship and activism: The value of international partnerships for co-producing just cities
This paper provides a distinctive analysis of the value of international intermediation alliances for co-production, based on the way they operate in practice. While much attention is paid to ideal or normative models of co-production, there is less understanding of the complexities that pervade co-production practices in specific contexts or how this shapes outcomes. Despite longstanding critiques and reflection, international partnerships can r…
On Urban Re‐arrangements: A Suite in Five Movements
This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re‐arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons
Movement 5. Sensing the Affective Lives of Arrangements
This final movement explores whether thinking with re‐arrangements can help us account for that which is hidden, unseen or nested in the recesses and folds of urban practices. And if so, how we might then talk about and account for elusive parts of an arrangement that both exert an influence and are influenced. This essay uses sensibilities as an entry point into the intangible interactions between subjects and (re)arrangements
Movement 3. Navigating Urban Arrangements
The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re‐worked as people navigate fractured, ever‐shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledges become contained within and (re)constitute embodied archives
Movement 2. Formalizing Arrangements: Re‐signification and the Making of Governable Spaces
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re‐signifying both subjects and spaces
Movement 4. Breath Sigh Tempest: On the Temporal Dimensions of Re‐arrangements
The fourth movement explores the temporal relationship between arrangements and re‐arrangements, addressing the question of how an obdurate and ‘sticky’ temporal order may give way to palpable re‐arrangement of the ways in which subjects experience time. Eschewing a concern with linear homogenous time, it addresses the processes of re‐arrangement by understanding the dynamics of grave events, hauntings of the past, subtly changing rhythms of ever…
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis: A Southern perspective on the frontiers of platform urbanism
The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infrastructures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a mere site of accumulation and exploitation. In this article, in contrast, we offer a more ambivalent a…
Wakanda Phambili!: African Science Fiction for Reimagining the Anthropocene
This chapter develops and articulates an African futurist approach to framing and meeting the challenges of social-ecological futures. It advocates a broader conception of futures as lived practice embedded within specific places (e.g. Africa) and their histories, and explores how such practice can form an alternative model to current (Western) climate and environmental scenarios. It proposes that narratives from non-Western cultures offer more n…
Cultural policy and just cities in Africa
In the vastly unequal contexts typical in African cities and amidst the poly crisis of rapid urban development, it is vital to understand how cultural heritage intersects with urban planning, design and development. Although integrating cultural heritage into the urban agenda is crucial to developing sustainable cities, the ways in which culture is being defined by and asserted in global policies such as the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Devel…
Becoming Otherwise: Artful Urban Enquiry
Cultural heritage entanglements: Festivals as Integrative Sites for Sustainable Urban Development
Whilst the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable urban development has been increasingly recognised in policy frameworks at multiple levels, there remains a lack of understanding about how global and international goals land in different places. This paper specifically addresses this question through a study of 18 festivals across the Global North and South. We argue that festivals are integrative sites in which tangible and intangible h…
Creative Cities, Graffiti and Culture-Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima ('Play Your Part)
Creative cities and culture-led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite-centric economic development agendas tend to trump 'civic creativity' ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture-led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus …
Mapping (for) resilience across city scales: An opportunity to open-up conversations for more inclusive resilience policy
There are growing calls, across a continuum from international agreements to social movements, for strengthening urban resilience alongside reductions in inequality and poverty. Although there is broad agreement on what the term resilience means in general, different perspectives exist on how the concept should be implemented locally and controversies around its transformative potential continue. While differing social and institutional factors a…
Democratic Renovations and Affective Political Imaginaries
Both the state and radical civil actors tend to perceive and define ordinary citizens in circumscribed ways; as rational actors who need to be persuaded through rational argument about why their participation is necessary for the democratic functioning of society. The assumption is that once people have been exposed to compelling arguments and incentives, they will activate their engagement with politics. Despite South Africa's embracing of parti…
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis: A Southern perspective on the frontiers of platform urbanism
The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infrastructures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a mere site of accumulation and exploitation. In this article, in contrast, we offer a more ambivalent a…
Democratic Renovations and Affective Political Imaginaries
Both the state and radical civil actors tend to perceive and define ordinary citizens in circumscribed ways; as rational actors who need to be persuaded through rational argument about why their participation is necessary for the democratic functioning of society. The assumption is that once people have been exposed to compelling arguments and incentives, they will activate their engagement with politics. Despite South Africa's embracing of parti…
Becoming Otherwise: Artful Urban Enquiry
Fintech 'frontiers' and the platformed motorcycle: Emergent infrastructures of value creation in African cities
Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa's…
Cultural heritage entanglements: Festivals as Integrative Sites for Sustainable Urban Development
Whilst the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable urban development has been increasingly recognised in policy frameworks at multiple levels, there remains a lack of understanding about how global and international goals land in different places. This paper specifically addresses this question through a study of 18 festivals across the Global North and South. We argue that festivals are integrative sites in which tangible and intangible h…
Creative Cities, Graffiti and Culture-Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima ('Play Your Part)
Creative cities and culture-led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite-centric economic development agendas tend to trump 'civic creativity' ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture-led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus …
Mapping (for) resilience across city scales: An opportunity to open-up conversations for more inclusive resilience policy
There are growing calls, across a continuum from international agreements to social movements, for strengthening urban resilience alongside reductions in inequality and poverty. Although there is broad agreement on what the term resilience means in general, different perspectives exist on how the concept should be implemented locally and controversies around its transformative potential continue. While differing social and institutional factors a…
Alliances, allyship and activism: The value of international partnerships for co-producing just cities
This paper provides a distinctive analysis of the value of international intermediation alliances for co-production, based on the way they operate in practice. While much attention is paid to ideal or normative models of co-production, there is less understanding of the complexities that pervade co-production practices in specific contexts or how this shapes outcomes. Despite longstanding critiques and reflection, international partnerships can r…
Movement 3. Navigating Urban Arrangements
The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re‐worked as people navigate fractured, ever‐shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledges become contained within and (re)constitute embodied archives
On Urban Re‐arrangements: A Suite in Five Movements
This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re‐arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons
Movement 2. Formalizing Arrangements: Re‐signification and the Making of Governable Spaces
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re‐signifying both subjects and spaces
Cultural policy and just cities in Africa
In the vastly unequal contexts typical in African cities and amidst the poly crisis of rapid urban development, it is vital to understand how cultural heritage intersects with urban planning, design and development. Although integrating cultural heritage into the urban agenda is crucial to developing sustainable cities, the ways in which culture is being defined by and asserted in global policies such as the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Devel…
Democratic Renovations and Affective Political Imaginaries
Both the state and radical civil actors tend to perceive and define ordinary citizens in circumscribed ways; as rational actors who need to be persuaded through rational argument about why their participation is necessary for the democratic functioning of society. The assumption is that once people have been exposed to compelling arguments and incentives, they will activate their engagement with politics. Despite South Africa's embracing of parti…
Mapping (for) resilience across city scales: An opportunity to open-up conversations for more inclusive resilience policy
There are growing calls, across a continuum from international agreements to social movements, for strengthening urban resilience alongside reductions in inequality and poverty. Although there is broad agreement on what the term resilience means in general, different perspectives exist on how the concept should be implemented locally and controversies around its transformative potential continue. While differing social and institutional factors a…
Cultural policy and just cities in Africa
In the vastly unequal contexts typical in African cities and amidst the poly crisis of rapid urban development, it is vital to understand how cultural heritage intersects with urban planning, design and development. Although integrating cultural heritage into the urban agenda is crucial to developing sustainable cities, the ways in which culture is being defined by and asserted in global policies such as the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Devel…
Becoming Otherwise: Artful Urban Enquiry
Cultural heritage entanglements: Festivals as Integrative Sites for Sustainable Urban Development
Whilst the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable urban development has been increasingly recognised in policy frameworks at multiple levels, there remains a lack of understanding about how global and international goals land in different places. This paper specifically addresses this question through a study of 18 festivals across the Global North and South. We argue that festivals are integrative sites in which tangible and intangible h…
Creative Cities, Graffiti and Culture-Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima ('Play Your Part)
Creative cities and culture-led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite-centric economic development agendas tend to trump 'civic creativity' ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture-led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus …
Wakanda Phambili!: African Science Fiction for Reimagining the Anthropocene
This chapter develops and articulates an African futurist approach to framing and meeting the challenges of social-ecological futures. It advocates a broader conception of futures as lived practice embedded within specific places (e.g. Africa) and their histories, and explores how such practice can form an alternative model to current (Western) climate and environmental scenarios. It proposes that narratives from non-Western cultures offer more n…
From heritage conservation to heritage justice in Cape Town
Alliances, allyship and activism: The value of international partnerships for co-producing just cities
This paper provides a distinctive analysis of the value of international intermediation alliances for co-production, based on the way they operate in practice. While much attention is paid to ideal or normative models of co-production, there is less understanding of the complexities that pervade co-production practices in specific contexts or how this shapes outcomes. Despite longstanding critiques and reflection, international partnerships can r…
On Urban Re‐arrangements: A Suite in Five Movements
This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re‐arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons
Movement 5. Sensing the Affective Lives of Arrangements
This final movement explores whether thinking with re‐arrangements can help us account for that which is hidden, unseen or nested in the recesses and folds of urban practices. And if so, how we might then talk about and account for elusive parts of an arrangement that both exert an influence and are influenced. This essay uses sensibilities as an entry point into the intangible interactions between subjects and (re)arrangements
Movement 3. Navigating Urban Arrangements
The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re‐worked as people navigate fractured, ever‐shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledges become contained within and (re)constitute embodied archives
Movement 2. Formalizing Arrangements: Re‐signification and the Making of Governable Spaces
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re‐signifying both subjects and spaces
Movement 4. Breath Sigh Tempest: On the Temporal Dimensions of Re‐arrangements
The fourth movement explores the temporal relationship between arrangements and re‐arrangements, addressing the question of how an obdurate and ‘sticky’ temporal order may give way to palpable re‐arrangement of the ways in which subjects experience time. Eschewing a concern with linear homogenous time, it addresses the processes of re‐arrangement by understanding the dynamics of grave events, hauntings of the past, subtly changing rhythms of ever…
Silicon Savannahs and motorcycle taxis: A Southern perspective on the frontiers of platform urbanism
The rise of digital platforms in urban Africa has been rightfully critiqued as an example of global techno-capital seeking new frontiers of profit among precarious lives and from fragile infrastructures. However, this techno-pessimistic reading of so-called "platform urbanism" leaves us with a bleak outlook on the future of the African city as a mere site of accumulation and exploitation. In this article, in contrast, we offer a more ambivalent a…
Cultural policy actions towards urban sustainability: Research and practice collaborations
When Trans met Discipline: Scenes from an arranged marriage
Transdisciplinarity is all the rage! This spirited statement, or announcement even, rings true of the contemporary intellectual landscape. The amalgamated term/concept proposes a means to breakdown traditional boundaries, encourage collaboration outside of staid academic spaces and in doing so become a key driver for innovation. Many have bought into this promise. However, amidst the fervour for the promise of fluidity of knowledge and interdisci…
Serious fun: Exploring arts-based serious games in urban food (in)security research
Fintech 'frontiers' and the platformed motorcycle: Emergent infrastructures of value creation in African cities
Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa's…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (11 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (6 works)