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Monday 09:00 - 17:00 Tuesday 09:00 - 17:00 Wednesday 09:00 - 17:00 Thursday 09:00 - 17:00 Friday 09:00 - 17:00

The City Agency

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The City Agency

THE CITY The City was founded by Zahira Asmal in February 2010. Our work is amorphous, curious, and celebrates multiplicity. The City is a space for all.

Working out of Cape Town, South Africa, The City celebrates diversity and debate on a cross-continental scale. The City investigates the dynamic cultural, social and spatial activities shaping our contemporary urban consciousness. Through publications, curated experiences and strategic connections, The City disseminates information to targeted groups in the private, public and civic sectors. Harne

ssing a global network of visionary designers, thinkers and communicators, we develop innovative solutions to social, cultural and spatial challenges. We are motivated by the belief that imagination is the key to a shared future.

25/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
27 July 2025
6:00 PM

Ceremonies in Everyday Urbanity
Natasha Ginwala, Firi Rahman, and Pamudu Tennakoon

In this session, we explore the aural and material records of Colombo as a socially diverse, post-war coastal metropolis with rapid development that has been politically motivated and that includes elite colonial nostalgia and disenfranchisement of working-class communities. It is also a city that has experienced recent revolutionary uprisings. In this space, we focus on prompts to remember, to ground ourselves in spatial memory, by immersing ourselves in:

· A neighbourhood archive (developed by the Ashray Project during the 2022 edition of Colomboscope, led by Firi Rahman of We Are From Here
· Pamudu Tennakoon’s research, which looks into particular built and living architectures as well as contemporary cultural practice to engage city mnemonics—un-building and re-building of urban fabric

We then invite the audience to map their rituals and personalised homage to specific areas, seasons or moments of festivity, delicacies, and situated memory of neighbourhood locales in the city.

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We Are From Here
Ashray, 2020-21
Sound recordings, drawings, maps, photographs and objects installation view at Colomboscope 2022
Language is Migrant
Supported by EUNIC
Image Courtesy of Colomboscope
Photo credit: Shehan Obeysekara
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

23/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
24 July 2025
2:15 PM

Sujit Sivasundaram, Professor of World History, Cambridge University

“Colombo: Wetland to Indian Ocean City”

In this talk, Sujit Sivasundaram will reflect on the history of the city of Colombo and its place in the Indian Ocean world. Why did this wetland become an engineered harbour? And why was Colombo taken over by so many outsiders and imperialists? And what practices of labour and coercion lie beneath the transformation of this wetland to a major transhipment port? Colombo is a mirror to such wide swathes of history which characterise global South cities, and it is also a good site from which to consider its southwestern neighbour, Cape Town.

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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

23/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
24 July 2025
1:00 PM

Naazima Kamardeen, PhD, Chair of Commercial Law and Head of Department of Commercial Law, Faculty of Law, University of Colombo

“Digitalisation of Colonial Cultural Objects: Preservation or Oppression?”

There is a growing trend of cultural objects held in museums being preserved through digital means. The advancement of technology has enabled more interactive forms of digitalisation, which sometimes have the effect of rendering the physical object redundant. Digitalising is an accepted extension of ownership, according to the rules relating to copyright. However, in relation to colonial cultural objects where the ownership is disputed, or where a source country is requesting the return of such objects, the ethical dimensions of digitising need to be explored further. This presentation will highlight some of the legal and ethical implications of unilateral decisions taken by museums holding such objects to make digital copies prior to return.
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

22/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
24 July 2025
10:30 AM

Slavery and Forgetting in the Indian Ocean World
Nira Wickramasinghe, Professor of South Asian Studies, Leiden University

Why did slave ancestry fade away in colonial Asia, while propelling collective memories of descendants in Atlantic and Caribbean territories? In the Indian Ocean world, slavery was central to the East India Companies established by various European powers throughout the Indian Ocean world from the 16th century onwards. People were enslaved and shipped from one VOC territory to another, where they were made to work on public works and in houses, as well as, less frequently, on plantations.

Southeast Asians and Indians formed a large part of Sri Lanka’s enslaved population in the 17th and 18th centuries, while 15,000 others transited in Sri Lanka en route to Mauritius and the Cape. Forgetting and remembering enslaved ancestries took contrasting routes, from the start of the Dutch slave trade throughout the abolitionist waves of the 19th century. This paper will offer some thoughts on the need to think of slavery pasts through multiple forms of forgetting as ‘selective remembering, misremembering and disremembering’.
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

21/07/2025

EXHIBITION EXPLAINED (Part 1)

"There Was Something Here Before"
This interactive exhibition by urbanist Zahira Asmal introduces the interlocking layers of past, present, and planned future experience—both hyper-mediated and hidden—that constitute contemporary Cape Town. Concise and metaphorical, its layered design visualises the structural DNA of a city that continues to reproduce spatial apartheid.

Palimpsest

The exhibition reveals the city as a palimpsest—made, shaped, and layered with time, politics, economics, and the movement of people. As the gradient shifts from the macro level of the city to more intimate, micro details, you are invited to go beyond the dominant sensory mode of sight into a more polysensory register, to encounter the hidden and unseen stories of the wider Cape Town city-region. As the textures of the exhibition shift, so does its scale, moving from cityscape to archive, to the intimacy of home.
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There Was Something Here Before
18 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for more information.

21/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
22 July 2025
10:30 - 17:00

Making Memory
Masterclass led by With Buddisha Weerasuriya, Hasini Haputhanthri, Johann Peiris, Shayari de Silva, Dr Tanuja Thurairajah, Tashiya de Mel and Zahira Asmal

In this Masterclass series of expert presentations, we explore memory-making as future-making—the various ways in which a society can make memories that may be shared for generations to come. How do we make memories when our spaces, histories and societies have been decimated by colonialism, war and genocide? What can we learn through archaeology and the archive? And what roles are played by photography and storytelling, as well as architecture, art, and design? We discuss entrepreneurship and the centring of cultures previously on the margins, in shaping society and making memories that have the capacity to influence society in positive ways.

In the contexts of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and civil war, memories and identities that did not reflect reality were produced through myth-making. How do we unravel these fictions to make more inclusive stories that represent our democracies and inclusive futures? How do we expand outward from the sphere of individual and collective memories of lives, families and proximate cultures, into the entangled terrain of the national and the transnational? We think through finding commonality in memory, so that a connection may happen.

For registration, please contact Chryshane Mendis (Netherlands Embassy) on [email protected]
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance
Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

Image Credit: تمارك نف خیشلا فسوی by Zahira Asmal

21/07/2025

‘There Was Something Here Before’ is an interactive international exhibition on slavery and the urban heritage of Cape Town by renowned urbanist and researcher from South Africa, Zahira Asmal, which is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Sri Lanka. The exhibition will be open to the public free of charge from 18 to 27 July, every day from 10 a.m. onwards at the 1st Floor of the Clock Tower Building, Independence Arcade, Colombo 7.

Read The DailyFT for more: www.ft.lk

17/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
20 July 2025
10:30 AM

Beyond the Frame

Zahira Asmal in conversation with Johann Latiff and Tashiya de Mel about photography.

Photography—both contemporary and archival—plays a definitive role in shaping the culture and identity not just of individuals, but of cities. What stories do photographs tell, and what narratives remain outside of the frame?

The scope of social documentary photography is vast, ranging from recording people going about their everyday lives, to events and gatherings, street life, the built and natural environment, politics and current affairs. Which visual representations are circulated, which challenge the hegemonic view and which remain forever snapshots in the private sphere of the family album? What vistas and visual constructions of the picturesque are favoured in packaging and marketing the city as an economic entity, and what narratives are marginalised and rendered invisible through these aesthetic choices and codes? This conversation will explore the continued politics of the colonial gaze in practices of place-making as well as in the mediation of current global affairs.
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025

Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Image credits: Johann Latiff and Tashiya de Mel

Follow the link in our bio for more information on the exhibition and public programme.

17/07/2025

EXHIBITION WALKABOUT

Zahira Asmal will give guided tours of her exhibition, “There Was Something Here Before”
No bookings required.

“As I have explored cities—new and ancient—I have often wondered: what makes the city? Who makes the city? Almost always, we are regaled with facts and fictions about the leaders and the villains. Yet not the people that make the city day to day. This exhibition is my effort to narrate these stories and their lingering imprints in the present.”
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Map courtesy of the Western Cape Archives and Records Services.

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

16/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
19 July 2025
2:30 PM

Film Screening: Being Here. Stories of Home, by Sharni Jayawardena

Sharni Jayawardena in conversation with Iromi Perera, Vraie Balthazaar and Zahira Asmal

Filmed in 2023, Being Here follows the lives of four working-class Sri Lankan women and the place they call home—Colombo. The documentary explores the realities of living in a city aspiring towards ‘world-class’ status. The research that inspired and informed this film was undertaken from 2020 – 2022 by Asha L Abeyasekera, Iromi Perera, and Vraie Balthazaar as part of the UKRI-GCRF-funded multi-country study ‘Navigating the grid in the world class city: poverty, gender, and access to services in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka’.
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

16/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
19 July 2025
10:30 AM

Film screening: Mother City, directed by Miki Redelinghuys and Pearlie Joubert

Known as the ‘Mother City’, Cape Town lies resplendent between the iconic Table Mountain and the icy Atlantic ocean. Mother City charts a defiant grassroots social movement against city and provincial officials and property developers in one of the world’s most unequal cities.

The story starts in 2016 when the government sells prime land, earmarked for affordable housing, to a private developer. This careless disregard of the desperate housing needs of Capetonians gives rise to a social justice movement, Reclaim the City, that campaigns for desegregation and calls for affordable housing.

Following the personal story of activist Nkosikhona Swartbooi over a period of six years, Mother City documents this David and Goliath battle in a city still disfigured by spatial apartheid.

The Mother City film screening will be followed by a conversation with Zahira Asmal, Firi Rahman, Iromi Perera, and Varuna de Silva about city-making and societies.

For more information on the documentary, check out the link below
https://www.instagram.com/mothercitydocumentary/
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

15/07/2025

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME
19 July 2025
12:30 PM

Is Cape Town made for everyone?

Set in a landscape of immense natural splendour and abundance, Cape Town is a city of extremes that elicits constant shifts between the idealistic/sublime and the painful/enraged. In Cape Town, one of the world’s most socially and economically unequal cities, not all cultures are regarded and commemorated equally. Many of the city’s inhabitants are descendants of slaves who share a common inheritance of displacement, bo***ge and exploitation. Capetonians have been divided in their lived experiences and they have emancipated themselves through hard-won civil rights. In recent years, protests on campuses and across the city have turned violent, with student and civic activists demanding not just more equitable service delivery, but also greater visibility and presence in the centre of the city.

In this discussion about Cape Town, connections to Colombo will be traced. What may we learn about both cities? Topics of city-making, gentrification, history, memory, exclusion and inclusion will be unpacked in relation to urban cultures and future making.
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There Was Something Here Before
Public Programme
19 - 27 July 2025
Free Entrance

Arcade Clock Tower
Independence Square
Colombo 07

Follow the link in our bio for the full public programme.

Address

Cape Town

Opening Hours

Monday	09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday	09:00 - 17:00
Wednesday	09:00 - 17:00
Thursday	09:00 - 17:00
Friday	09:00 - 17:00

Website

http://www.thecityagency.co.za/, https://linktr.ee/thecityagency?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=c26fc2e6-ed38-4

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