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DPU participates at the ASAUK 2012
12 September 2012
Members of the DPU recently attended the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) conference in Leeds, where they chaired and presented at two panels on informality.
One panel focused on exploring informal economic knowledge, while the other zoomed onto governmental responses to informal ways of living and working in urban areas.
Le-Yin Zhang focused on urban cooperatives in Ethiopia; Barbara Lipietz spoke about municipal responses to informality in the Johannesburg CBD; Colin Marx used a range of sources, including feminist thinking on the value of work, to provide a contrast with the views of Collier, de Soto and co on formalisation.
Michael Walls talked about Economic Knowledge as an entry point to understanding informality, with reference to a research proposal DPU members are developing looking at that subject in Somali cities.
There were some 135 panels in the conference, about 400 presentations over two and a half days (6-8 September).