 Okay, so hello everyone. Welcome to our second lecture in planning series for this term. And today we have Professor Emma Mousley, the professor of geography from University of Cambridge. So Professor Emma Mousley caught a recent research as focusing on global development politics with a particular interest in South South cooperation, India and the UK current work includes editing a special section for international affairs. Sheckman House on India, China, and the Turkish cream on being civilizational states. And a substantial research project with colleagues looking at the rule of private sector consultants and the contractors in development. Professor Mousley is the director of Mark and asking center for global studies and at Norman College at University of Cambridge. So for today's talk, South South cooperation has transformed the global development imaginaries practices and institutions over the last 20 years or so. At the same time, the long standing principles and the framing of South South cooperation. Anti hygiene multi solidarity, no interference, shared identities have come under significant pressure and the shifted in you and explicitly like expert nationalist direction in many cases. We first elaborate on the recent evolution, evolution of this dynamic landscape of development cooperation and draw out the current trends and the directions. Professor Mousley will then explore these things, especially in relation to research and the scholarship around urban partnerships, including the creation of master plans, urban infrastructure norms and projects and the planning and the regulatory technical systems. The lecture will conclude by asking what are urban lands offers in developing South South cooperation today. So please join me welcoming Professor Emma mouse. Thank you very much. Can I ask if you can hear me okay. Yes. Great well look what's on there it is to be giving a seminar. I'm really delighted. I'm going to try and share my screen. Let's see how this goes. Can you now see. If I click it to slide show. Okay, I think I can see that. Is that okay everyone can see it. Yes. Thank you okay so thank you again. So a few explanations. Speaking from home, I have one small dog who's climbed onto my lap and another one on the sofa so if you hear any barking I apologize I'll try and get them quiet quickly. Many thanks to all of my hosts and cash on everyone who invited me. I am not an expert in urban geographies and planning. I'm really looking forward very much to hearing your expertise. But I thought, if we think about. Let me see if I can move this slide on. So the aims today are really a preliminary exploration of some of the interesting intersections between scholarships scholarship on South South Development Corporation, and I'm looking here at the formal world, which I'll explain in a moment. I've said the urban geographies of the global south, and I know that these are very problematic terms, and I'm thinking around the full spectrum of planning policies programs and so on, lives and livelihoods. And so it's a conversation. It's the first time I've given this presentation, and I've been thinking about it for a little while, but it is really very preliminary and I hope that you find it interesting. So, some caveats to start off with. I'm not looking at some of the amazing, very productive and interesting crossovers from south to south by civil society. So a classic example would be slum shack dwellers international. Can you hear me okay. Yes, I can see someone coming to the front is that all right. So, I'm really looking at the more formal realm of state led development corporation. It would be a very different talk if I was looking at some of the more informal civil society transnational networks. And I'm going to use the language of North, South, South, South. This is very problematic. So I hope you'll forgive me the shortcut that I'm using here but I'm very aware of the problematic dimensions of this language. So, what I'm going to do first is provide a development overview and a brief introduction to South, South. I'm very aware that I can't read the room that you may be experts on South, South corporation. So I've made it I hope sufficiently short not to bore the experts and sufficiently detailed to sorry there goes the dog sufficiently detailed that if anyone isn't familiar with it you get a taste of what South South is. And I've really drawn out for areas that I think are emerged for me as I started to think about this question I read a lot about urban theory in the South but I'm not an expert I read it as it comes along. But this was the first time I started thinking about this intersection so for kind of areas that occurred to me and then some scholarly connections and disconnections. And a very quick introduction to kind of the context for this world of what Diane Gillian Hart calls Big D development, the formal intentional efforts to intervene in a region, a country, a community, and to unleash whatever we mean by development. She produced this very famous schematic, which located global development, mainly Western led in both large scale political economy of things like the Bretton Woods regime and then the Dollar Wall Street regime, geopolitics of the Cold War, and then specific dominant development theories from the red developmentalism and both socialism and capitalism somewhat mediated by things like basic needs and the emergence of environmental concerns and feminist concerns, and then the shift in the 1980s to the neoliberal counter revolution, moving forward to the post Washington consensus. So this is a schematic it doesn't say at all, but it's quite useful way of thinking about the big contextualization. So, a few years ago I started to think well what does this schematic miss off. And it is of course a very Eurocentric schematic in some ways because the driver is from the West from the north. If on the other hand we annotate it with South South Development Corporation, which was going on all of this time. We can think about key markers and milestones like the bandung conference, the creation of the non aligned movement. In the 1970s the demand for a new international economic order. Very interestingly I just heard today that there is a social movement that is trying to relaunch the new international economic order, very interesting. My earlier work was involved in sort of recapturing a history of development from the South, which was interestingly not just neglected by rather say mainstream figures and scholars, but also by radical writers and thinkers by critical development geographers and others that I too had been guilty of teaching a rather Eurocentric and researching a rather Eurocentric understanding of development but all of this was going on. So then we get to the question of what's going on now. And this I think is where it gets so interesting the last sort of 1520 years or so. We see much more turbulence and melding between across and within northern and southern actors in development. So both geostrategic collaboration and competition. I think very interesting is the concerns about the right turn of to the new Cold War. There's a new phase of neoliberalism, the Wall Street consensus centrality of financialization, and that intersects with things like industrial policy, the infrastructural turn, the growth of public private hybrid finance and mapped under the SDGs. What then about the urban. So of course the urban makes its way through all of this. And that's the question I asked myself today. Before doing so I'm going to say a little bit about South South Corporation and I do hope that for some of you this is interesting and novel. I'm sure that for many of you it's it's very familiar. So, very broadly speaking, South South Corporation should not be mistaken for foreign aid. It is not a synonym of foreign aid, and some of the mistakes that were made in poorly attributing motives and agendas and outcomes to Southern partners came around because there was an assumption by many commentators in the early years that South South Corporation was just aid done by Southern countries. It does include many of the same things that we would recognize by under the OECD DAX definition of aid. It also goes beyond that in many ways. So South South Corporation can include various forms of loans, grants, debt relief and other forms of export credit and other forms of financial assistance and flows. It can include technical assistance, educational scholarship and training, things that also of course come under ODA under the Western foreign aid definition. It can include sponsored public and private sector delegations, meetings, knowledge transfer, term key projects, infrastructure, status buildings. It can also include diplomatic gestures, military cooperation, humanitarianism and so on. So it's a very, very broad basket. Critically, it actively and explicitly and very determinately overlaps. It blurs and blends with trade, with economic flows, with diplomatic agendas and so on, and it makes no excuse for that and nor should it. So South South Corporation is some bits of it are more definable than others and other times it bleeds out into, you know, when is it trade, when is it private sector investment, when is it South South Corporation and that becomes a very difficult question to answer. So the origins are very important and broadly some of the key origins of this were third world solidarity and I use third world deliberately here in the following Vijay Prashad in his brilliant book, A History of the Dark Nations when he reminds us that in the 1950s and 60s, the third world was a kind of a terminology of hope, of optimism, the third world spirit wants, you know, what would prevail. So solidarity in the third world, of course, key moments were Bandung, which we see here in the picture on the left, various forms of socialism. So not just Russian socialism, Chinese socialism and others Cuban and others. And this is a great, I'm sure many of you have seen this one of the many propaganda posters of the time. And isn't it different from the sort of typical, say British attitude to or French attitude to former colonial possessions the holding hands the conviviality the warmth, the smiles and of course this was all signaling a very different construct of the relationships between countries than the imperial and neo-imperial ones. And then for different regions there were also Gulf politics and OPEC also was a major driver of Gulf ownership. Every country had its own variations of course, Indian corporation with Nepal, which started in the early 1950s, India helped build the East West Highway and Nepal's first airport, and that was also geostrategic. And that was about Nepal's hydro resources but also looking north to China so every country has its own variation. Most South South Corporation was small, even though it's symbolically important that there were some big outliers. One of the examples is the Desara Railway, which was an extraordinary feat of willpower and engineering, and it was a profoundly anti-colonial gesture to help free up Zambia from the stranglehold that at the time the country called Rhodesia had over its copper. So it's a brilliant gesture of anti-colonialism but it was also a demonstration of Maoist China's engineering prowess. Everyone said it couldn't be done and they did it. At the time, the reality of course is always a bit more strategic, pragmatic, there's a lot going on, but the framing was not the same as that of the Western donors. The framing which has continued for a very long time, although I'm going to say it has changed a bit, was not of charity to the poor, but of the opportunity of working with Senegal, Mongolia, Yemen, Costa Rica, wherever. So instead of moral obligation, these were countries that had shared the experience of colonialism, shared the experience of subjugation and they were acting not out of a sort of charitable sense of oh well we must help this poor country but rather of the solidarity of a shared experience. Expertise was based on a very direct experience of pursuing development in poor country circumstances. So for example I spoke with a great man in the Indian Postal Service, Dr Baban, who was leading a project in three East African countries on how to deliver mail to resource poor settings to informal settlements to places that were hit by the monsoon. And his point was that India knew how to do that in a way that say Germany didn't. So it's not sympathy but empathy. And as I've written about at length, the virtue here is not of aid of giving to from the rich to the poor, because the argument is that that is always humiliating. Instead of, there is the virtue of the idea not of gifting but of exchange that this is you both get something Egypt and India get solidarity get the benefits of solidarity. So even if India is giving to Nepal, both countries are made stronger by building up relations between four countries. The virtue then is dignity, the virtue is the is reciprocity, it's not inferior aid to talk about a win-win situation. So, there's a long, long, long varied history but that is very broadly one of the you know the kind of some of the origins and decades that followed. In the 2000s we see a real sea change in South South Corporation. We see a, and I've put this in another paper as we can track it materially, ontologically ideationally, so just say a little bit about each one of those. By material, I could choose absolutely any, any dodgy image on Google images that I liked. We have to be a little bit cautious about these figures because it depends what they're measuring and how. And like I said at the start South South is not always capturable. So, if we try not to see these necessarily as an absolute set of figures but instead as indicative, almost anything will show up this huge increase. This is like a six-fold increase. No, sorry, three-fold increase nearly more than that in very in this case in, I think it's the brick Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and their spending. So, the first is the material capacities in the form of finances, educational scholarships, you name it, it starts to really rise for a lot of donors and we can think about China, Brazil, India, in particular, as really suddenly their booming economies, you know, as the kind of new bricks to expand their material capacities to spend and to drive their South South corporation programs. The second I called ontological and I'm thinking here of things like, you know, the idea of the psychological concept of ontological security. Until the early 2000s, even though there had been a huge amount of activity, a real different history of development corporation from the South, they were just sort of invisibilized. And like I said, I mean there were of course brilliant exceptions people who for decades had been writing about China's role in Africa, about Taiwan's rice projects in the Gambia. You know, lots of people have been writing about them, but I don't think they were particularly visible to many critical and mainstream scholars and policy commentators and so on. By the time you get to the early 2000s, very strongly driven by the economic shift to Asia by the power of the bricks. These countries suddenly become both visible, but also interestingly essential. So a key moment comes in 2011 at the fourth conference on aid effectiveness in Busan in Korea. And a number of countries said they weren't going to turn up in particular China. At which point, I mean normally the recipient countries never came. They, it was just the donor countries who sat together made policy and told everyone how it was going to be. Now, not only were the recipient and Southern donor countries as it were development assistance provider countries invited. But if China didn't come, everybody knew the conference was pointless. And in fact, the British Minister for Development went to Beijing the night before I've heard the rumor and got on his knees and basically begged China to send somebody. So that sort of the Southern particularly the larger Southern providers suddenly went they didn't just became visible they became essential they became credible they became recognized as key parts of the development ecology. The last one of this, of this three this change around the early 2000s is ideationally. That is, that when the largest Southern providers in particular started to expand, they the mainstream organizations like the DAC and the UN basically thought their job was to show them how to become proper donors. They would bring them in to the tent. And the Southern partners resisted and they said no, we do things differently to you. Our donors, our development assistance and relationships comes from a different ethic, a different history, a different positioning. And if we think about the history of development as many people have unpacked, it is a deeply colonial history. At this point, even in Mexico, Chile, certainly the big providers in Indonesia, they all said no, we are continuing to do it our way. And as a sort of a little sometimes you know the most boring details, the most kind of administrative details if you like, are found. This is the Busan outcome document. And the bit involved was at the insistence of the Southern providers who said that their principles commitments and actions shall be a reference for South South partners on a voluntary basis. Now the big powers, the Americas, the German ease the UK's were trying to push them to accept an agreed set of principles and commitments and actions. And the ideational autonomy and leadership indeed of the Southern providers is demonstrated here in that they could refuse this multilateral pressure. Are you all hearing me okay. Am I speaking too fast. Is it comprehensible. This is okay. Okay, thank you. Do please I tend to get faster as I get more excited so please slow me down if I'm speaking too fast. So, just to sort of say a few more words then about South South Corporation in the current period. I would say that what has happened is that the South has been the ideational leader, and for various reasons, we actually now see amongst the so called mainstream so called traditional donors, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, Canada, and all the a shift much more towards the south in how they approach development. In fact so they look more like career, Japan, China, India. So we see a move from foreign aid to blended finance much more public private and hybrid poverty reduction the poverty reduction of the Millennium Development goals has been swallowed up. We've shifted away from being the central purpose of development and economic growth has returned as the central goal of the development industry and the assumption is that poverty reduction then follows. We've seen the infrastructural turn. We now have the Netherlands and New Zealand talking about win win. So the growing respectability of having explicit national interest. Of course, aid has always worked in the national interest for Western donors. But the performance of aid, particularly around the late 1990s the Millennium Development goals was of doing good being good doing good. It's more likely that the that whether you're Australia, you know, even kind of the very Sweden will talk much more about its explicit national interests. And as I mentioned with the financialization term. We see a very important turn away from the idea of aid for an aid as a particular distinctive somewhat independent flow of financing for development in its own little moral sphere. Instead, all of the turn now is towards the idea of state owned enterprises, private sector, public private partnerships, blended finance, and so on. So we see a much, much, much bigger role, the various forms of blended public private finance and this is quite a big deal, but we don't have time to go into it, but it's mimicking the south. It's basically now the UK looks more like China in this regard, then China looks like the UK China hasn't hived off its aid UK's moved more towards a China model. And so just very briefly the narrative has changed. Amongst all development partners, there's more discussion about the opportunity of development of partnerships rather than donor recipients, and of different forms of expertise but which is compatible collaboration win win and mutual benefits. So, you know, I think the, the DAC donors have moved closer to the land, the discursive framing of Southern partners. And I've been talking here about DAC donors and bilateral partners, but the UN is a very interesting site as well in the way in which it's long standing apparatus around South South Corporation the UN has been supporting it, distinctly since the 1970s, but it's grown, it's solidified, it's moved up the UN hierarchy, and it's been funded better. So I did find this quote, and this is for all of you urban planners and urban theorists at last is something urban. And I'll just let you read that for a second about a relatively recent memorandum driven very strongly by COVID around how the UN wants to support a new urban agenda in relation to South South. Okay, so I'm going to go on very quickly I've got a couple more things to say about South South today and then move on to the intersection with the urban. So, in 2022 23 we are now, and where are we at. So, I think a number of Southern partners are experiencing both the fruits of success but also challenges. And that has been slowed down in global growth and the COVID pandemic has impacted on on some we see in Brazil for both domestic and economic global economic reasons a real contraction for example. Massive increase in financing in projects programs and other things has often outstripped the institutional and legal anchoring and it there's been some poor decision making around financing dams and so on so there hasn't the institutional fabric hasn't often kept up with the expansion and resources. Greater visibility. You know in the last 20 years China is all over the news everywhere including in terms of development. Well that brings visibility at home. That brings visibility abroad so here we see a protest that against pro savannah in Mozambique against a Brazilian Japanese triangular corporation program, and also Ethiopian and Indian land activists who came together to protest against some development partnership between the governments of Ethiopia and India. Some of the inherent challenges of development have become more apparent. So some of the early optimism that the Southern partners they knew how to do it, they could get it done. They have the sort of the knowledge the expertise the, the dugout to use the Indian term. Actually it turns out it's, it's harder than you think. So positively in many ways, depending a little bit is that countries like Rwanda countries. Like Laos have become more adapted and better at managing this marketplace of donors and development partners that has consequences for the agenda setting of the big seven partners. And what we I would have argued is that we are seeing is a move away from some of the bandung principles, which were always a framing it wasn't like every country was acting entirely through bandung principles. But there's a move away even from the language of bandung it's not going to disappear, but towards this increasingly nationalistic and pragmatic way. So let me take just the example of Indonesia. Wajuli argues that it's being increasingly framed in terms of the direct benefits it can bring, sorry, to Indonesia. And this is pre Trump. South South cooperation follows an Indonesia first policy designed to complement desk domestic development policies and projects that are increasingly scrutinized on a what's in it for us basis. This is quite different to that earlier origin language of third world is solidarity, where you were thinking about the exchange and the mutual benefit, but the language was more elevated and idealistic. We see a move away from the sort of lack of conditions, you have this money you tell us what to do with it, you know, let's pile in and build these roads and dams towards a much more slightly scarred and careful approach to recognizing that these projects can fail that they can be poor debt that they can be problematic. And so this is from Barnaby die who talks about the fact that India has moved from celebrating its non conditionality to quietly having more interventionist stringent conditions to create an export credit process. So still not micromanaging but becoming more interested in these investments, and in getting its return on investment. So today I think we see powerful Southern partners sharing in leading edge neoliberal innovations. China, India, others are absolutely at the front end of hybrid capital enclave development, financialization including in urbanization and I haven't talked about this but I would say that we're seeing a very concerning closing down for the most part of civil society voice space and action or attempts anyway. We're seeing a remarkable flourishing of new geographies of power and knowledge which I'm going to come to in the urban and around what is a very rapidly changing definition and relationship between this idea of big D and little D development. I'm not there and just, and many of you will know this but the big D little D development is a device for thinking through big D, you know the World Bank, Oxfam. As well as those deliberate interventions and little D as the dynamic background, imminent world and processes of the economy of capitalist relations. And of course they intersect. And I would say they're collapsing in on each other. Now, there's sort of less defined big D. It's also fascinating, just fascinating to see the return of the dinosaurs, the reinvigoration we, we're, you know when I've been teaching for 2025 years on development and things like modernization theory dependency debates started to get squeezed into smaller and smaller space at the start of the lecture course when I teach about post development and Escobar and the SDGs. And all of a sudden we're back, we're back to talking about China reviving modernization Asian modernization. We're back to being concerned about dependency structural transformation or under development but this time China in the in the driving seat and so on. And all of this I've given the shortest and most generalized analysis and many of you will be experts in your own areas and fields and I appreciate that you're very aware that all of this is is much more diverse than I have suggested here. So on to the urban. And, as I said I'm not an urban expert. I'm interested amateur, I would say. So, in the last few weeks, I have added to my urban reading by specifically trying to read into what I see between the urban literatures, of which of course I've only know a fraction. So in sex with South South Corporation, bearing in mind that South South Corporation can mean more or less everything. There's a call that's very clearly South South Corporation but as you move further and further away into trade, private investment, migration of people, exchanges of knowledge it's it you can't always put a clear boundary around it. I try to identify some key features. So one is knowledge technical expertise assistance training of all sorts. And if you remember here that the claim in South South Corporation is that partner countries are have specific expertise so Brazil could go to Mozambique and we successfully transformed the Serrado region, we can show you how to transform this agricultural reason. And it's grounded in empathy similar trajectories. It's very important to say that South South is often the principle is that the recipient decides on their priorities and what they want. And that Southern partners are more likely to provide speed and utility. In the urban context there are absolutely brilliant papers looking at the master plans we can think of Vanessa Watson and the nightmares or dreams. Southern Consultancies Singapore produces many technical reports, the training up of civil engineers and planners, the impact in architecture and design, civil engineering and so on. There's also urban policies and programs. So things like the Brazil leading slum policy in Haiti and using Brazilian security techniques in Haitian slums very controversially. Perhaps a bit more or positively Brazil leading out Bolsa familiar in around the world in including in urban populations. We can think about Cuban doctors in Brazilian favelas or participatory budgeting in Maputo, led by China or I'm trying to remember who the partner was in that I think Brazil again. I'm going to expand on all of these but basically one dimension of South South cooperation and how it intersects with the urban is all around knowledge exchange and the provision of different very, very different forms of knowledge knowledge in construction in planning in programs. We can choose so many different things. I mean, this is a bit provocative in a way because Colombo in Angola is an exceptionally controversial example of a Chinese ghost city with lots of fascinating explorations and why and how this came about. One more positive example comes from Gabriella Carolini's work in Maputo. And she, one reason I like this paper very much is that she really talks about the extraordinary richness and the groundedness of understanding. In this case I think it's Brazilian and other forms of South South cooperation in place that these are not abstract processes they come through particular offices people moments. And I think her opening thing that the novelty or distinctness of South South cooperation as a development paradigm is contestable, which I'll come back to its relevance for urban planning is not. So she talks about sick cooperation and flexibility in implementation. The real value of SSC for urban development is the cultivation of shared power and sense of ownership. It's very different from let's say the World Bank, and some of their urban policies. So knowledge production or expertise shared and can encourage an iterative iterative reform process and adaptive flexibility that leads to deepening of improvements and democratic change. This finding deserves more attention. So who city authorities learn from or cooperate with matters. I'll keep going. Just one last example from within this sort of knowledge and people and programs exchange from a paper by Lidola and I'm going to say this right wrongly but of all heads. And on Cuban doctors coming to work in Brazilian low income settlements and for their lives. Now if you'll notice the picture on the right shows a Cuban doctor or healthcare professional looks she looks like she's strapping a broken arm. And we'll come back to that later because we'll say something about racialization. The second one is finance how this intersects with finance. And as I've mentioned this burden blended it's meant to be recipient led and often less conditionality laden than say World Bank or, you know, certainly IMF or other donors. You can see a huge, again, a kind of a boom in available finance for urban development, but for cities for moles, you name it will come to that in a moment. And it's, and it's provided a marketplace of finance that has really powerfully disrupted the West's stranglehold on development finance and on some of the conditionalities that go with that construction. And the South South claim is that it's cheaper. It's knowledgeable and it's faster amongst many other things. We see various firms, state champions, state owned enterprises, controversially labor. Do you bring over Chinese labor for example to build Kilamba and others or not. All cities are being built. They're apparently about 70 cities are currently being built. We can see there's a knowledge city in Ecuador being built by Korea. Japan is providing models for cities, but also districts moles. And then importantly not just sort of housing, but also industrial units and SEZs. I'll come back to this later there was an industrial urban complex at work here, and then needless to say the very famously the transport the roads, energy infrastructure, including in the in the city region the downs and so on. A different sort of construction is humanitarian. So, one of the things that India is very proud of is the housing it rebuilt after the tsunami in Sri Lanka. And one of the arguments was that the Indians were much, much better at designing tropical houses for Sri Lankan communities. And there is a ghastly example of a German housing initiative against which they compared themselves, where the Germans are very well meaning German lander, literally said that they wanted to create particular settlements from from scratch in the in the in the areas destroyed by the tsunami, that by the shape and nature of the housing and the settlement would create good German burgers, that what was lacking in Sri Lankans was civic pride and consciousness and that by creating these houses they would do that and needless to say that that didn't go down very well, but India could say no we know what we're doing here we've done it. And I've just put economies, but bearing so so one of the strong claims is that the rise of the south, as it's been called, that there has been a rising tide for many southern countries driven by the larger powers but with benefits to all. And we see this in terms of more formal economies, but also, as I'll come to in a moment smaller scale smaller media enterprises individuals and formal informal and hybrid other parts of the urban development planning policy programs literature, not so much is if well there's lots in the urban literature, not very much in the southern literature is around things like cultures aesthetics and consumption. So there's a wonderful rich literature in the urban various urban journals and subfields, and the South South corporation literature doesn't do this so much to think about the many many ways in fact the multiculturalism of Kibera or the favela or the elite housing and people live in the go to the malls and so on. And not just cultures aesthetics and consumption but also the convivialities and the divides. So, again, there is some work in South South corporation. I've always really loved the work of Katya Taylor, who looked at how the conviviality the friendships the romance the differences between Brazilian and Mozambique and development workers who are working together in Mozambique. We also see in the urban literature and much closer attention to things like racism, friendship, sex work, gated and enclaved homes and workplaces and camps. And it's really not very strongly present in the South South literature. And yet, I think this is where enormous amount of the energy and importance of the South South resides. Okay, I think I better hurry up right. So, very, very quickly, a third year undergraduate of mine is looking at Chinese and United States and Taiwan's engagement with Somali land, and she did this nice bit of visual representation. This is the way the United States newspapers depict Somali land kind of rather chaotic scenes, urban scenes poor people and for oddly Mo Farah, a British athlete. China, on the other hand, its journalistic pictures are show a very different urban aesthetic a very different concern with how to present Somali land, as well as, you know, kind of more the sheep and the fair. Interestingly, and I just thought I'd throw this in Taiwan is all about flags flags flags, all about the presenting statehood. So Taiwan and Somali land, both have an interest in projecting their legitimacy and credibility as states. And I think really what I wanted to show you was the urban, the difference in how the US presents and represents urbanization the urban in Somali land, and how the Chinese do it. This isn't urban, but if you haven't come across it already. There is a brilliant set of essays on China's representations of Africa through the film through a set of essays on the film Wolf Warrior. It's really fascinating. And I think it shows you what we could be doing if we were working at some of these more interesting understandings of South South in the cultural realm. Right, so the last few slides. The other one to talk about is what are the implications of South South cooperation South South relations and partnerships for governance. There's a lot of cultural society citizenship and surveillance, and I realize I have not added in Moser there who was in the bibliography at the end of this, who's written a remarkable paper on something called Forest City, which is Malaysian owned, but has been a minor practically, who China is building an enormous city in the straits between Malaysia and Singapore. And one of the most fascinating things about it is its governance. Apparently, even it is not really subject to Malaysian law, but it's not quite Chinese sovereign territory either. And the argument is that the, the, the law will be run by private security firm. We're yet to see how this will actually work out but there are fascinating questions for the implications of, say, urban partnerships, China sponsored sponsoring something like 124 urban partnerships in Africa with working with mayors and governments. So what are the implications then for civil society for surveillance for citizenship and so on. These are open questions I'm not trying to say judge them to be better or worse or good or bad. These are the important questions to come together, I think, in the urban and South South. Might we say then that South South is helping decolonize urban planning development programs. I think the jury is not strong on this. On the other hand, there is unquestionably a real fracturing of northern lead development hegemony. That's very welcome. Is there what post decolonial scholars have called epistemic disobedience. Is this engage with it in more nuanced ways. Is this something that one could describe as Asian modernity or planning. Or, is it that a host of other players Turkey, Kuwait, Korea, China and others are sort of moving in Dubai into the realm but fundamentally inhabiting the same modernist logics. There's lots to ask ourselves about decoloniality. And then this is the penultimate slide. Unquestionably, the urban is being drawn into geo economics and geopolitics. And we see this through things like financing and infrastructure and the new Cold War. So the launch of the European Union's global gateways, it is an open challenge to the Belt and Road industry, Belt and Road. And that I realize I put more X's instead of authors and there's a new papers emerging on the urban in the Belt and Road, which are really interesting. And we see unquestionably some of this new city development in particular, the master plans, big urban imaginaries and futuristic ideas are projections of soft power. And I think with the geo economic is the state capital hybridity and state entrepreneurialism in building ties to create things like global production networks and so on. To conclude then I absolutely rattles through a quick history of South South corporation, and then just raised lots of questions about these literatures. What struck me about reading these literatures thinking and asking myself specifically where is South South corporation is that there are some really great people writing about it. Gabriella Carolini, certainly people who are specifically asking how is South South driving these urban processes, how's it been resisted what are the implications. I'm surprised that the disconnect between my sort of scholarly world and the urban theory planning policies world. And I think this is a failing of my literature, my, my, my thing. Modern work is actually much more generative, much more interesting, much more attentive to some of the vibrancy of ordinary lives in ordinary cities as it were, taking off in much more multifaceted multi cultural ways with new peoples, sometimes filled with friction, whereas the South South literature to me still seems a little bit inattentive to the urban to the everyday to the small D development. And I think the more conversations we have, the better, particularly for my field of work. And I have most of the references there that I have often. So please stop sharing if I can. Okay. Thank you very much for the lecture. And now we will open the floor for discussion. So for those who are participating by June, you can post your questions by chat. And at the meantime we will also accept questions from people who are attending here. Are there any questions. So, I can start it by one question I have. And I think that's a responding to the conclusion you were driving about the urban study and the development studies and you mentioned the possibilities. This need was small D development in like South South Corporation status literature. But like my thinking is that you mentioned this new emerges or state that development. My question would be to build a dialogue between those two fields. Do you think it is based on need to also for the urban study stars to rethink about the state leader development. Because this is such like a big driver now, and to consider the influence of urban international development urban studies. What's your view on this. Thank you. Thank you. I should say my dogs have just decided to wake up and they said that they would like me to play with them now so I'm sorry if you hear any barking. Yeah, I just think that I think that the literature on South South and I'm Blake I'm talking about myself here might have got a little bit too captured by the sort of development studies focus on what we call big D development. Even though, I don't, this is maybe a little bit harsh. I'm not saying that it isn't there. But when I'm reading the, say, urban literature, the urban theorists. It's so much more attentive to, to the generative complexity dynamism, things going on in, you know, a whole array of urban settings. Of course it's not just Africa, or Latin America is now Paris, it's Athens elsewhere. So I think that what's interesting is both of these fields, and the underlying reality is very, very dynamic. So that world of big D development is changing fast, particularly around finance. The idea now that northern donors are really trying to drive private sector investment, PPPs and other things so they are getting down into the kind of the, the real capillaries of economies. Southern, the scholars of particularly Southern but all global development need to go there with them. And I think that we all need to be looking more at business, small and large, formal and informal at the reality of urban planning with finance. So if you, I'm sure, will know about the, ultimately the fails project of Moda Fontaine, just outside Johannesburg so big Chinese developer, who a private developer, who nearly lifted off a huge, huge project to build a vast kind of area just north of Johannesburg as a new district of the city. But what's interesting to me was that he was a private investor. He wasn't primarily funded by the State Bank of China, one of the development backs he was, he went to the Bank of China, and then other funding to, you know, and this, this where the real energy it seems to me of the real nature of South South Corporation is it is in the private sector. It's in individuals for better for worse. We need to be working more closely together I think I think there's a lot to unpick as this. And maybe everyone, you feel like you're already on it and I'm being left behind which I think might be true. So I can, I can see a lot of positivity from thinking through South South Corporation as both everyday small development but recognizing the larger structures within which it's taking place which is what I sort of study. Thank you. Yeah, that's a very interesting response to yet to emphasize the role of the private sector in this process. Thank you. And we have question from Andrea. So she's asking, I'm curious about how to governments and the politics enable and the hinder South South Corporation. Yeah, do you mean on the like as it were the recipient the partner side. Andrea, can you clarify whether it's the recipient side of the government or like, you know, the one providing side. I'm just thinking about how different when different forms of government with different political ideologies different governments stability in different countries how does that, like play a role in whether that cooperation happens at all. Not sure if that's clear. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, so in the principles of South have corporations always a lot of respect for the partner government that the partner government sets the priorities decides makes the, you know, has the leadership of the program, because it the idea is that this is not north south which we know is often very hierarchical, very imperialistic. So, South South is meant to be more, you know, more respectful in practice. It's, there's a big debate over the way in which partner governments have or have not been empowered by Southern partnership. And I think most people would say that they have been to some extent. There's no question that Rwanda that Paul Kagami could turn around and say, Well, you want us to do this but why should we because we can, you know the, we can get money from China so we don't have to do what you tell us. But most, I think, partner countries are keen to keep the marketplace open they don't want to exchange one development finance monopoly for another. They've tended most countries to trying to insist that that money from Brazil or Indonesia or Chile doesn't replace aid. And so then there are some, you know, questions about whether South South encourages and enables greater capacities and longer term structural transformation, more focus on what matters for that country. But there's also lots of concern and occasionally critique that say it keeps powerful people in power as elite bargaining, and so on. Sorry, it's a very rambling answer. It's a big, a big question. There's, there's a lot going on for sure. But there's no question that for the vast majority of countries around the world, this last 20 years, what the UN calls the rise of the south has really been both transformational. But sometimes you've we've exchanged American and Canadian mining corporations for Chinese and Chilean ones. So, there is both the similarity and the change in some cases. Okay, so do you have any more questions. So we have a question here. So we will ask the student to come here so just wait a second. Thank you for your talk, Professor Monsley. I guess I have a question on maybe. So we do know that with South South cooperation, at least from the way you sort of outlined it that there's a sort of rise of the southern state. You know, diplomatically, economically sort of engaging with the world, but at the same time. So there's been a sort of drawing back of the state within southern states. You know, in sort of going from a developer of land, or sort of regional planning into just a facilitator to kind of almost clear the field for, you know, flows of this private investment. So I'm just wondering whether, you know, your work sort of engages with that or like, maybe if you have some comments on how you see these two dynamics playing with each other. That makes sense. That's a great question. And this, and then if right back at the start I showed that change around financialization state capital hybrids PPP so I think what's really interesting is the way in which there's, I think in many ways, northern and southern powers are converging around these new models of blurred and blended state capital. They're very geo economically driven for both. So on the one hand you see a sort of, not exactly a retreat of the state in the Washington consensus way, but a new winning a kind of a new forms and acceleration and energy around the idea of state capital hybridity. So the state de risking private investment, the state, helping facilitate and create facilitate and manage blended finance impact investing week and we see that for all sorts of different sorts of state. I mean, I think everyone in the room probably knows more about what the implications are for sort of planning and development but I was just looking to pay for the privatization of urban planning for example. So if you're a, you know, I'm just plucking this out there if you're Uganda and you're looking at this kind of increasing recourse to public private partnership and consultancies and private sector planning and so on. So it may be the sort of so called traditional planners of the UK or France, or it could be Korea, or Singapore, or Dubai. So, so these new actors are able to, you know, are working and driving a world of state capital hybridity. Yes, thank you. So we have another question from student here. Hope you can hear me. Can you hear me okay. I can I can. Okay, great. This is the problem. So my question goes back to the conversation you had around the discursive frameworks which I really appreciated. And I'm wondering how have those discursive frameworks been incorporated differently in the ways that government except the language that they use when they're adopting financing in the South South cooperation like framework has it. Do you see a difference in the, in the way that that language is framework given the merging of the discourse. Nowadays, as opposed to when it was very clearly a Western discourse versus a South South discourse of how the aid that financing is provided. Yeah, so what's interesting is I don't really know in more urban examples or contexts. So, and this is this is what I'm interested about this kind of like disconnect. And yet of course, this question in urban context is critical and probably one of the major parts of the kind of, you know, what's happening. There's, there's loads of stuff about agricultural development or trade more broadly but there isn't specifically in relation to the urban. So, there's lots of stuff around both different sorts of approaches to conditionality and environmental and social standards. And then quite a variety. And, but also, as I was mentioning, I think a suggestion that South South cooperation is now getting a bit more concerned about things like the return on investments and things like that. I'm not sure if I've answered your question sorry, is that what you meant by framework. I was just thinking in terms of when a government chooses to accept financing from another southern government is this, do they refer back that dispersive framework that it's being presented in or is that left outside of the discussion is the framework just important in how the, the gifting entities is describing their work or does the receiving and incorporate that same language as they're kind of promoting these different developments. So that's a really great, great question. So, there's a paper by Revo Redo and Brill, which looks at this Moda Fontaine. And although it wasn't a formal South South cooperation project it was full of the sort of this big mega project, sort of grand scale Chinese, you know ambition and so on. And they argued that it very quickly just became ordinary urban planning, just, you know, it very rapidly became whether you say it's bogged down, or framed or experienced through everyday ordinary planning. And they argue that there's too much sort of valorization of the idea of Chinese this or Korean that that really, in this case, it was just another investor who found what quite quickly became like all other investors. I mean, not doing the paper great justice but that's their point and I think. So there's very often reference to this being South South I mean different, more virtuous, better more convivial. And I think actually many of those things are true. What clearly happened in both urban projects and others is that that language of shared experience knowledge of each other, you know, conviviality is profoundly and, you know, there's lots of friction around racism. And so I showed you that picture of the Cuban doctor, but the paper that I cite here, the donor and what is says that many very very poor people in Brazilian favelas did not want to be treated by a black doctor. They saw that as inferior, even though, as we know, Cuban doctors and health care workers are often extremely well trained and knowledgeable and so on. And there's lots of discussion around racial frictions and other plenty of other frictions in the system. So the real, this is sort of the discourse is the reality, and I think in the urban context, really interesting questions about what point you're just another external actor it doesn't matter if you're Dubai, or the Netherlands, you're still in, you know, there's more that is more in common than this discursive difference. But I suspect that that's, I mean it's all out there there's so many different examples and ways of looking, and it is absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much. Any more questions from the audience here or on zoom. Okay, if not, we'd like to thank you again Professor Emma mostly for the lecture, and therefore the conversation on this topic. Thank you very much. Thank you.