Contesting urban infrastructure projects: experiences from the Antwerp Oosterweel link and the Durban port expansion projects

Thursday 15 July 2021, 20:00 - 21:30 (CET)

Practical: Register and get a link to follow this event online via Livestream, for free on the Facebookpage of Stadsform, with or without a Facebook account. People who registered for the full RC21 conference can watch the event on the conference platform.

This is part of the RC21 Conference Sensing the City | Place, People, Power

Introduction

With the contestation of the planned highway through the city of Antwerp (‘Oosterweel Link’), Antwerp has effectively become a laboratory for citizen movements that mobilize against urban infrastructure projects that impact heavily on the liveability of urban regions. But how exactly do civil society actors contest urban infrastructure projects and how does this contestation vary across time and space? In this session we discuss the politics of urban civil society actors by looking at two vastly different cases of civil society contestation of urban infrastructure projects through the eyes of its key players. Desmond D’SA will explain how his South Durban Community Environmental Alliance has been successful at opposing polluting industrial sites in South Durban and the expansion of the Port of Durban. Manu Claeys will discuss how his citizens’ association stRaten-Generaal, together with other citizen movements, was able to change the decision-making on the building of the planned Oosterweel Link.

Speakers

Desmond D'Sa is a South African environmentalist who received the 2014 Goldman Prize. He is known for protesting Environmental justice issues in Durban, South Africa related to access to greenspace and pollution. The region around the city is known as a "Cancer Alley" because of the 300+ industrial facilitates around the city. To address this he found the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance. That network has been successful at opposing other polluting sites, and is advocated to prevent expansion of the Port of Durban. In 2011 his house was firebombed for his advocacy. Raised in the Apartheid era, he was inspired to integrate environmental and social justice issues in his activism. For his work he received an honorary doctorate from the Durban University of Technology. 

Manu Claeys is a writer who lives in Antwerp. He is president of the citizens’ movement stRaten-generaal. In 2005, with stRaten-Generaal he launched an alternative to a planned highway through the city of Antwerp. This initiative led to a broad and long-term public debate about mobility and liveability, urban development and citizen participation, which eventually led to the signing of a Covenant for the Future. In the Covenant for the Future, the Flemish government, the city of Antwerp, the Port of Antwerp and three citizen movements agreed on how to combine mobility and urban liveability in the Antwerp urban region.

This event is organised by the Antwerp Urban Studies Institute in collaboration with Stadsform.