Monthly Archives: March 2011

Shigeru Ban disavowing novelty

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A reporter for The New York Times posed the question to Japanese designer Shigeru Ban: “Katrina. The Asian Tsunami. Haiti. Every time a natural disaster of this order occurs, designers present innovative ideas for shelters that never get built. Why not?”

Shigeru Ban replied: “We don’t need innovative ideas. We just need to build normal things that can be made easily and quickly. A house is a house”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/garden/24qna.html

See also paper in ‘Design for Need’ re. disaster relief.

Introduction

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My name is Ralph Borland, and I’m an artist, curator and researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa. I was a researcher with HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town (UCT) from March 2021 – February 2023. I have held two postdoctoral fellowships at UCT, first with the Public Culture CityLab at the African Centre for Cities (2012 – 2014) and subsequently on the international research project Global Arenas of Knowledge (2014 – 2017) which investigates ‘Southern Theory‘. My independent interventionist art project for several years is African Robots and SPACECRAFT. This site houses my PhD thesis, and my continuing research – for more information, please see the About page. This is my journal, where I keep track of items of interest to my work. You can use the ‘Categories’ menu in the sidebar to navigate through posts – ‘Objects‘ for example. Please feel free to send me links to examples of interesting objects and ideas or anything else related to my research – you can contact me here. Subscribe to this blog by clicking here. For my wider work please visit ralphborland.net and follow me on Instagram @ralphborland and on Twitter @ralphborland

Postdoc

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I have been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cape Town, first with the Public Culture CityLab at the African Centre for Cities (2012 – 2014) and subsequently on the international research project Global Arenas of Knowledge (2014 – 2017) which investigates ‘Southern Theory‘ (you can see a review of a related book ‘Africa-centred Knowledges‘ co-authored by my research leader Robert Morrell here). I interviewed climate change researchers in the Energy Research Centre at UCT, and co-authored a paper from our research ‘Southern Agency: Navigating Local and Global Imperatives in Climate Research‘ published by MIT Press’ Global Environmental Politics in August 2018.

Most of the posts in this category of my website are from my postdoctoral fellowship with the African Centre for Cities (ACC), which ‘seeks to facilitate critical urban research and policy discourses for the promotion of vibrant, democratic and sustainable urban development in the global South from an African perspective’. I worked on issues around public art, design and culture, especially in the context of Cape Town as World Design Capital 2014. My position was the ‘Max-Planck/ACC Super-diversity Postdoctoral Research Fellowship’, funded by the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Gottingen, Germany.

Below are posts from my Journal related to my postdoc work.