Viviana Pupeza, Dipl.-Ing, MPhil

PhD student

I am an urban historical geographer, interested in large-scale infrastructure projects in the African city. My doctoral research entitled Cape to Cairo’s Railway Station Towns Cape Town, Kimberley, and Bulawayo: Sites of Black Resistance, 1890-1910, explores the historiography of railway-operation-related urban transformations.

Biography

Career

• 2020 – present, PhD student in Geography and Studienstiftung Scholar, University of Cambridge
• 2023, Carlo Schmid Programme Scholar and Intern at UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa, Harare, Zimbabwe
• 2017 – 2018, Teaching and research assistant, Urban Studies Institute, Universität Basel
• 2013 – 2016, Architect in Zürich and Basel, Switzerland
• 2012, DAAD-IAESTE Fellowship for internship in architecture, Amman, Jordan

Qualifications

• 2018 – 2020, MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge (First class, and distinction on dissertation)
• 2007 – 2013, Dipl.-Ing., equivalent to BSc and MSc, in Architecture, Leibniz Universität Hannover (First class)

Awards and scholarships

• 2020 – present, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Doctoral Scholarship
• 2024, William Vaughan Lewis Fund for fieldwork
• 2023, Carlo Schmid Programme, scholarship for UNESCO internship
• 2021, Royal Geographical Society fieldwork support, Albert Reckitt Award and Dudley Stamp Memorial Award
• 2020, University Fieldwork Fund for fieldwork
• 2020, Royal Geographical Society’s Planning and Environment Research Group second prize for the best dissertation
• 2019, The Boak Student Support Fund for fieldwork
• 2019, Clare Hall Tutor’s Awards for fieldwork and thesis completion
• 2018, Urban History Association, Graduate Travel Fund for conference
• 2012, DAAD-IAESTE Fellowship for internship in architecture
• 2011 – 2012, ERASMUS Fellow, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
• 2010, Lavesstiftung, Acknowledgement Lavespreis for best façade shading system

Research

My project explores the territorial transformations of Cecil Rhodes’ project, Cape to Cairo (CTC), for a railway between the Cape Colony and Egypt from the 1890s. My research on CTC brings together infrastructure literature on colonial railway historiographies, the spatiality of colonial cities, and forms of African resistance. Centred on racialised railway planning in Southern Africa, my study focuses on discrimination in CTC’s railway station towns, and urban reconfiguration through unanticipated African practices of adaptation, accommodation, and resistance between 1890 and 1910.

I aim to demonstrate not just what the CTC sought to achieve, but how its partial coming to fruition led to spatial contestation resulting in new urban spaces of African identity-formation. African engagements with the railway and its towns subverted early railway-related land development legislation in Cape Town, Kimberley, and Bulawayo. My thesis seeks to show, first, to what extent CTC’s colonial vision manifested in the formation and interconnection of the railway towns of Cape Town, Kimberley, and Bulawayo. Further, I expect to reveal what role the emerging dispossessed African proletariat played in the early station environments of CTC. Finally, I hope to prove what forms African adaptation and resistance to CTC and its station environments took. To highlight unheard voices, my methodology consists of archival primary research in the UK, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The outcome, I hope, will contribute to decolonising Southern African railway historiography and historical geography.

Before beginning my doctoral studies, I earned my Master of Philosophy in Architecture and Urban Studies (2020) at the University of Cambridge. My thesis, Government Railways in the 1900s. A Resource for Resistance, involved independent extended fieldwork in Cape Town, and was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Planning and Environment Research Group second prize for the best dissertation submitted in 2019.

Prior to Cambridge, as research assistant within the Urban Studies Institute (Universität Basel), I investigated global urban history from the early modern period to the present.

Workshops

• 2024, [work in progress] co-organisation in collaboration with UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa and the University of Zimbabwe
• 2023, General History of Africa, organised by UNESCO Headquarters
• 2021, Decolonial Research Lab: How to decolonize a research project, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
• 2011, Urban revitalisation project developed in a team for a multi-cultural urban square in Torino, organised by IZMO in cooperation with Politecnico di Torino

Conferences and presentations

• 2023, HERstory: Heroines in the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, rapporteur at conference organised by UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa in collaboration with Ministério dos Combatentes of Mozambique and the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre, Maputo, Mozambique
• 2023, PhD presentation to non-academic audience at UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa, Harare, Zimbabwe
• 2021, Government Railways in the 1900s. A Resource for Resistance, Annual Conference Royal Geographical Society, Historical Geography Research Group
• 2019, How the Pan-African newspaper The South African Spectator served the Coloured elite in exerting resistance to social control resulting from the railway operation in Cape Town in 1902, European Conference of African Studies, paper accepted
• 2018, Cape Town to Kimberley Until 1890: Railway–Operation–Related Urban Transformations, poster presented at the Urban History Association Conference, Columbia, South Carolina, US
• 2018, Cape Town to Kimberley Until 1890: Railway–Operation–Related Urban Transformations, Clare Hall Lunchtime Talks, Cambridge

Teaching

• 2021 – present, supervisor for Part IA: Paper 1A The Historical Geography of Globalisation, Paper 1E Contemporary Urban Geographies; Part IB: Paper 4 Citizenship, Cities and Civil Society, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
• 2024, undergraduate and postgraduate modules on historical geography methodology, University of Zimbabwe
• 2017 – 2018, Histories of Urbanisation, module of MA in Critical Urbanisms, Universität Basel
• 2014, co-organisation of a student trip for 25 students from the Leibniz Universität Hannover to the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

External activities

• 2018 – present, member: Cambridge University Geographical Society, Cambridge University Railway Club, Royal Geographical Society, Royal Historical Society, British Association for Victorian Studies, Economic History Society, Postcolonial Studies Association, Urban History Association, Society of Architectural Historians and European Architectural History Network
• 2021, Academic Representative of the Faculty of Earth Sciences and Geography
• 2018 – present, Cambridge University Lawn Tennis Club
• 2018 – 2019, External Officer and member of the Graduate Student Body at Clare Hall
• 2018 – 2019, Academic Representative of the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art
• 2018, Ski leader for school students in Graubünden, Switzerland