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Sophie Oldfield

  • Professor
  • Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning
Curriculum Vitae (CV)

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Academic Research Areas

  • Cities
  • Collaborative practice
  • Community-based planning and development
  • Housing
  • International studies in planning
  • NGOs
  • Participatory and collaborative planning
  • Social policy
  • Urbanism

Sophie Oldfield is internationally recognized for her research on cities in the Global South through her theoretical and primary research. From 2016 to 2021, she held the University of Cape Town and the University of Basel Professorship in urban studies. Passionate about fieldwork, theory, and practice, Oldfield’s work is grounded in empirical and epistemological questions to engage debates on informality, planning, and governance in African cities. She has a track record of excellence in pedagogy and collaborative research practice, challenging how academics work in and between “university” and “community.” Commitment to this collaborative approach lies at the heart of her research and writing on cities of the Global South. She holds degrees in geography from Syracuse University and the University of Minnesota.

a woman with short brown hair and a black backdrop

Academic Research Areas

  • Cities
  • Collaborative practice
  • Community-based planning and development
  • Housing
  • International studies in planning
  • NGOs
  • Participatory and collaborative planning
  • Social policy
  • Urbanism
Various home structures and groups of people standing together.
Building Bit-by-Bit celebrates and shares collaborative research, organized by Oldfield, with research teams that drew together master's students from University of Cape Town and University of Basel with Hazeldean-Ekupumleni researchers.

It's a fantastic time to be a southern urban scholar. We have an invitation to think and work differently, to draw on interdisciplinary approaches to face and engage the crises and creativity that define cities across the world.

Publications

  • Knowing the City: Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy

    S. Oldfield, A. Selmeczi, C. Barnett. 2024. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

  • High Stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theory in Partnership

    S. Oldfield. 2023. Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

  • Feminism, praxis, and urban knowledge production

    S. Oldfield, A. Selmeczi. 2024. In: L. Peake, A. Datta, G. Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (eds) Handbook on Gender and Cities, New York: Edward Elgar Publishing.

  • Southeastern approaches to studying the urban

    S. Oldfield. 2023. In: O. Yiftachel and N. Mammon (eds) TheoriSE: Debating the Southeastern Turn in Urban Theories. Cape Town: African Centre for Cities,: 67–71.

  • Becoming 'Unlawful': Homeownership, housing bureaucracy, and the production of precarity in Eastridge, Cape Town

    S. Oldfield, G. Anand, A. Selmeczi. 2023. In: M. Rubin, S. Charlton, H. Klug (eds) Urban Governance Through Housing, University of Witwatersrand Press.

  • What is Critical Urbanism? Urban Research as Pedagogy

    K. Cupers, S. Oldfield, M. Herz, L. Nkula-Wenz, E. Distretti, M. Perret. 2022. Zurich: Park Books; Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Inhabiting the 'posts'

    S. Oldfield. 2021. Dialogues in Human Geography 11, no. 3: 474–77.

  • Step, Step, Breathe: Running the City

    S. Oldfield. 2019. Agitate: Unsettling Knowledges Volume 2.

  • In everyday housing struggles: Experiments in collaborative research

    S. Oldfield. 2019. In: A. Roy H. Malson (eds) Housing Justice in Unequal Cities. Los Angeles: Institute on Inequality and Democracy: 23–28.

  • Between the Academy and Activism: The Urban as Political Terrain

    S. Oldfield. 2015. Urban Studies 52, no. 11: 2072–86.

Selected Awards, Grants, and Fellowships

  • Society of South African Geographers Fellowship

    2020

  • Distinguished African Scholar, Cornell University

    2018

  • British Academy Newton Advanced Fellow

    2015–18

  • University of Cape Town Social Responsiveness Award

    2014

  • Mandela Mellon Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

    2010

Selected Exhibitions and Presentations

  • Claim, Occupy, Contest

    “The Anthropocene, Environment, Modernity,” University of Louisville, USA, April 8, 2021.

  • Urban Theory in Partnership

    “Zurich Human Geography Colloquium,” University of Zurich, Switzerland, December 8, 2020.

  • Urban Vocabularies

    “TheoriSE: Southern Eastern Frontiers of the Urban,” University College London Urban Laboratory, November 1, 2019.

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