Henrik Ernstson
Henrik Ernstson is developing a situated approach to urban political ecology. He is Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Manchester, and Honorary Associate Professor at African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town. For more information please visit my university profile page.
Jonathan Silver
Urban geographer into infrastructure | Sheffield University
Nate Millington
Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies, University of Manchester. Nate Millington is an urban geographer, writer, and qualitative researcher, interested in the politics of urban environments, public space, and landscape design. He is currently a Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, where he is conducing research into the political ecologies of climate change adaptation in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. His work has appeared in The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning A, Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Edge Effects, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. He holds a PhD from the University of Kentucky (2016) and a MS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2010). In 2014 and 2015, Nate was a Fulbright scholar and visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo, where he conducted research into water governance and flood prevention in the urban periphery. His dissertation considers the dynamics of a multifaceted water crisis in São Paulo, where water scarcity coexists with water excess in the form of regularized flooding. From 2017-208, Nate was a post-doctoral researcher with the ESRC-funded project, “Turning livelihoods to rubbish? Assessing the impacts of formalization and technologization of waste management on the urban poor” at the University…
Mary Lawhon
Dr. Mary Lawhon is an urban political ecologist based at the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at University of Oklahoma. Empirically, her work has focused on waste, alcohol and housing. Conceptually, her works seeks to a) politicize theory and practice, including the politicization of sociotechnical transition theory, and b) provincialize theory and practice, including urban and urban political ecological theory. Her approach is informed by nearly ten years of experiences in South Africa since 2002, including work at the Universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Cape Town, and Pretoria, as well as a lot of informal conversations, long walks, public transportation and volunteering with the NGO Earthlife Africa.
Anna Zimmer
Postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Keywords: urban political ecology; governmentality; everyday governance; India; water; sanitation; urban water bodies; urban parks Anna’s research interests focus on urban political ecology, which she would like to take further in the exploration of ordinary cities and the everyday practices and politics found here. In her PhD research on water and sanitation, she has investigated questions of urban governance, governmentality, the everyday state and explored questions of equity and informal housing. Her current project studies environmental governance in small cities of Gujarat, with particular attention to parks, ponds, and solid waste management. More info.
Wangui Kimari
Wangui Kimari works as the participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, a community-based organisation in the poor urban settlement Mathare. The organisation strives for social justice by means of community engagement and the use of social movement platforms.
Alejandro De Coss
Alejandro De Coss is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Alejandro is an urban sociologist, researching the urbanisation of water in Mexico City through an ethnography of the workers and engineers that maintain, repair, and manage its water supply system. He is interested in the study of urban infrastructures, and how these intersect with questions of capital accumulation, environmental transformation, and the state. In this research, Alejandro is thinking through new materialist and critical urban political ecology approaches from the standpoint of labour as practice and process.
Kathleen Stokes
PhD researcher in human geography, University of Manchester. Kathleen’s research considers how initiatives promoting community responsibility for waste management affect infrastructure, labour and livelihoods in South African cities. Her research is part of the Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish? project, supported by the UK’s ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research.
Prince Guma
Prince Guma is an urban imaginer, rural optimist and a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. His current research is at the intersection of Urban African Studies, and Science, Technology and Society (STS). His project focuses on the centrality of mobile technologies in Nairobi and how these shape interactions between infrastructural systems, between systems and society, and thereby, the city as a sphere, nexus and junction of and for innovation. Prior work has questioned how forces of urbanity, rurality, postcoloniality and contemporaneity elucidate, obscure, affect or are affected by everyday processes, practices and materialities. He is a research fellow of Harry Frank Guggeinhaim (HFG) Foundation's “Young African Scholars” programme; and IASSCS–Ford Foundation's Emerging Scholars International Research Fellowship Program.
Lyudmila Rodina
Lyudmila (Lucy) Rodina is a PhD student, working with Leila Harris, at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and a Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. In her research, Lucy explores the intersection of water governance and climate change in urban contexts using a social-ecological systems approach. More topically, she examines the nascent challenges to the governance of urban water under changing precipitation patterns,extreme flow events, droughts and freshwater quality concerns. She seeks a deeper understanding of the ways in which climate change affects both water resources and existing governance frameworks. What is at stake? How well suited are urban water governance frameworks to dealing with these challenges? Lucy is also interested in systematically investigating recent critical approaches resilience, and to evaluate the ways in which resilience thinking can be successfully applied to urban water governance under climate change. This will help to envision what a water resilient city would look like – a topic that remains relatively unexplored. More info
Beth Oppenheim-Chan
Beth Oppenheim-Chan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town. Her research in Mozambique focuses on civic engagement in city life, and the intersection of responsibility, assistance, and identity in the Global South. She is also currently also working on a British Academy Newton-funded project entitled “Food, Ethics & Identity in the Post-Apartheid City,” a multi-city study of consumption and its relation to ethics in South Africa.
Sophie Webber
Sophie Webber is a Lecturer in Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sophie studies adaptation and urban resilience projects in South East Asia and the Pacific with a focus on their knowledge claims and financial practices.
Fernando Castillo
Associated Researcher at Centre for Conservation Studies from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. My key interests in urban ecology involve the study of landscapes using biophysical to cultural perspectives with reflection on landscapes from ecology, geography, history, anthropology and political ecology. I also draw upon systems and complexity thinking to understand patterns and processes in urban socio-ecological systems.
Joel Ongwec
Joel Ongwec is a documentary film maker and creative researcher based in Kampala.
Gloria Nsangi Nakyagaba
Gloria Nsangi Nakyagaba is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the university of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on urban sanitation, energy and sustainability.
Suraya Scheba
Suraya Scheba is a lecturer in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Sciences and postdoctoral researcher at the African Centre for Cities (ACC), at the at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on socio-ecological dynamics that shape urban environments, with a concern to explore the dialectic between inequality and struggles for equitable futures. She is currently working on a project studying the Cape Town water crisis, concerned to explore the dynamic intersections between crisis and infrastructure in shaping water governance configurations.
Jacob Doherty
Jacob Doherty is an anthropologist researching the politics of belonging and exclusion, infrastructural violence, and the materialities of urban environments in contemporary cities. Currently, he's working on a book entitled Waste Worlds: Kampala’s Infrastructures of Cleanliness and Disposability based on ethnographic research in and around Kampala, Uganda's diverse waste streams.
Lené Le Roux
Lené Le Roux is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma in the United States. Trained as an urban planner, her research interests include southern urban theory, place and place-claiming, critical pedagogy and South African cities
Patrick Bigger
Patrick Bigger is a lecturer of critical human geography at Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on financial practices for managing environmental change, including carbon trading, green debt, and private equity for biodiversity conservation. His research sites range from the Kenyan highlands to global financial centers to better understand how finance is (and isn’t) enrolled in new modes of environmental governance.
Medhanit Ayele
I am an urban enthusiast with an academic background in Architecture and Urban sciences along with journalism experience. I am passionate about urban analytics. I have worked in Urban Research organizations as well as with different media houses such as the BBC, researching, and reporting on Urban challenges in the African context.
Mwangi Mwaura
Mwangi Mwaura writes from Nairobi Kenya where he is actively in community work and research on different aspects of urban habitation. He disseminates for wider publics through newspaper opinion pieces, policy briefs and academic outlets.
James Evans
Faculty Member, School of Environment & Development/Institute for Development Management & Policy, University of Manchester Profile and more information.
Emma Colven
Emma Colven is a Geography PhD Candidate at UCLA. Her research examines contestations over flood mitigation and expert knowledge in Indonesia’s capital city.
Erin Goodling
PhD Candidate Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University. Erin’s research interests include the political economy and ecology of cities, politics of sustainability, gentrification/displacement, community organizing and social movements, and popular education. For her dissertation research, she investigates collective action processes related to land use decisions along the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon (U.S.). More info.
Zachary Levenson
Zachary Levenson is a sociologist studying the politics of housing in post-apartheid South Africa. He’s currently working on a book entitled Delivery and Dispossession: Evictions, Occupations, and Housing Provision in Post-Apartheid South Africa based on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town. His work has appeared in Contexts, International Sociology, and Catalyst, among other places, and he is a regular contributor to Africa Is a Country. More broadly, he asks how political sociology allows us to reimagine urban sociological questions. He is currently based at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a fellow at the Institution for the Study of Societal Issues.
Sumit Vij
Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands
Anthony Levenda
PhD Candidate Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University. Anthony Levenda studies urban infrastructure networks, climate change, urban theory, planning theory, energy systems, and socio-environmental systems drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and urban political ecology (UPE). He is working on his dissertation that investigates urban environmental knowledge production in climate change “experiments” and low-carbon “laboratories” in the US with goals to continue this research in cities around the world.
María Angélica Mejía
I have a double major / Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Economics; following one of my personal-life passions I received a diploma accrediting a minor in Architecture and City. I have a strong interest in how nature can contribute to more fair, sustainable and creative urban environments. Academically, I’m keen on taking further the intersection of both urban and environmental studies, as well as working for a more supportive science-policy interface. I’m from Bogotá, Colombia and currently based in Berlin, Germany. #urbanecology #globalsouth #valorardiversidad
Timos Karpouzoglou
Timos Karpouzoglou is a researcher at KTH, Division of History of Science, Technology & Environment. Timos primarily focuses on the socio-technical character of water systems, actor relationships with water systems, and the urban political ecologies of water infrastructure. His research is informed by fieldwork in South Asia, East Africa and Latin America.
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Modern flood infrastructure has failed in its promises. Is it time for a modest approach? Authors Sumit Vij, Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands Timos Karpouzoglou, Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Sweden Mary Lawhon, University of Edinburgh, the UK This commentary works through how urban flood infrastructure operates and evolves in Guwahati, India. The piece marks the limitations of modern infrastructure, making a case for heterogeneity – combining technologies, actors and power relations that shape the unpredictable nature-society relationships. We draw upon the conceptualisations of heterogenous infrastructure configurations and modest imaginary to explain the alternative approach of how the world works and, therefore, what modern infrastructure can(not) do. A modest imaginary is not an antithesis of modernity but a different way of understanding the world rooted in uncertainty and an inability to predict and control nature. Adopting this imaginary has implications of the kinds of technologies one believes might be useful— and here we tease out how regime actors shown their interest in small, cheaper, locally emerged technologies. Suraj (pseudo name) was born and still resides in Guwahati at Tarun Nagar, a low-lying area prone to urban floods. He and his ancestors have witnessed a profound urban change in Guwahati, […]
Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious transport projects set to resolve the mess that is road traffic in the city. Such projects include the construction of the Thika superhighway, several by-passes and the controversial expressway, an elevated toll road connecting the affluent sides of Westlands, a business and residential area, with the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Recently inaugurated, the expressway has been termed a road for the rich. In these developments, evictions and demolitions of houses and sometimes entire villages with no compensation are a norm that continues to highlight that Bulldozers are a de facto planning tool of the city. Of surprise, however, is that the mess seems to never be resolved and what follows are often incremental fixes on the newly constructed infrastructures. This has been the case for the Thika Superhighway, where some modifications made in its short life of 10 years include the removal of speed bumps and a plan to have a BRT system. The BRT case is particularly telling for its incrementalism. In 2019, for example, the innermost lanes were marked as preferential lanes for the expected BRT buses, and in 2021 there […]
From the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi: Where is the water for our people? And what challenges do they face trying to make sure they can get enough for their families everyday? Our Art for Social Change campaign made a song about water struggles, and it features powerful commentary and activists from across Nairobi. Big up to the artists and to Hood Creation for the images and sound. We are also grateful to Mary Lawhon and the Examining nature-society relations through urban infrastructure project (project number: P19-0286:1) for the support! See the video above!
Reflection on Uta-Do African Cities Workshop Medhanit Ayele Whatchu gonna do? Vs. What are you going to do about it? Or the Swahili version of dear Kenyans ‘UTA-D0?’ Or አዪ..ታዲያ ምን ታረገዋለህ? …. ወይስ …. ምን ልታደርግ ነው? በሚሉት ጥያቄዎች መሀል ያለው ልዩነት Of the Ethiopians. All refer to the power tension defining one’s response when faced with a discomforting act. The African city is a place of Conflict, Tension: whether to succumb to a system that one considers unjustified or to fight back, enraged, at times while standing Alone. Heading back home in the late evening, faced with paying twice the taxi fare? whatchu gonna do? Pay twice the taxi fare? or negotiate back. Pulled back by traffic police: bribe off to head your day? or go through the mind-boggling bureaucracy fighting back? Criminal activities rise in your neighborhood: Do you tell your kids to come home much earlier? Do you dismiss your evening plans? or you fight back to earn the safety of the night? Witness the government conduct unlawful practices: do you fight back? or slide along the tide decently, calling upon the perks of getting out of the way. And many more conflicts with much more […]
Uta-Do | 2022 | Nairobi Gloria Nsangi Nakyagaba (University of Oklahoma) Mary Lawhon (University of Edinburgh) In May of 2022, thirty or so scholars, artists and activists (and many self-identifying as a combination of these) joined together for a week of discussion and reflection in Nairobi at UTA-Do: African Cities Workshop. Our week began with a reflection on the phrase that brought us together, and its myriad meanings. Uta-do can be said in a tone of resignation: it might be what is said when a boda-boda driver wants to renegotiate a fee, when a cell phone disappears, when the bumpy road makes you late. But this is not the uta-do mentality that brought us together. Instead, for most of us, we came together to think through the proactive version of uta-do: what are we going to do about the cities in which we dwell, research, and learn? This question has been posed through a developmentalist lens to those in and engaging with African cities for generations, and in that sense, there is little new to the idea of needing to ‘do something’. But the workshop UTA-Do followed the question of ‘what are we going to do’ with a reflection on […]
Arianna Tozzi, Irene Leonardelli, Enid Still, and Sneha Malani describe their work with counter-mapping. Using rivers and the flows of water and pollution as entry points, they capture urban-rural interdependencies in their rich and multi-faceted website Troubling Waterscapes. Here they provide a background to their counter-mapping project. This project began with a friendship between three PhD researchers, and an artist/practitioner, with a common interest in water and agriculture, and a desire to explore creative methods of engaging with our research topics. ‘Troubling Waterscapes’ was developed as an online exhibition for the bi-annual POLLEN conference in September 2020: Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration. Rather than classic academic presentations and panel discussions, where words and theoretical concepts dominate, we invited participants to think with and through water in creative ways. We used ‘troubling’ as a praxis of questioning dominant narratives of resource commodification ‘from above’ and victimhood ‘from below’, inviting the audience to think through the complexities of the uneven socionatural relations that surround us. Our story begins in Pravah, the fictional name for a rural village in Maharashtra, India, where Irene lived during her PhD research, learning from the farming practices of women growing flowers to supply to markets in the nearby city of […]
Emmanuel Awohouedji, a Benin environmentalist and educator, shares his experience of building and teaching a curriculum focusing on environmental problems and issues for middle and high schools in the Republic of Benin. This type of teaching is missing in Benin and requires overcoming administrative, structural and material hurdles—but also provides rich experiences for others to learn from. My pedagogical work in the Republic of Benin refers to the planning and implementing of a comprehensive environmental education curriculum that can help young students understand and have a growing interest in—and impact on—their surrounding environments. For the last two years I have developed this curriculum and while much is left to do, it is clear that this curriculum is missing in Benin today. Despite efforts in the early 2000s to implement environmental education, today none of the seven subjects taught in secondary classes or the nine taught in high school have a serious focus on environmental issues. Considering however the changes affecting the Beninese environment, the impacts of environmental issues, climate impact on water, food, energy, health, ecosystems, various sources of pollution (Boko, Kosmowski and Vissin n.d.), and the legislation related to environmental protection, this form of environmental education is relevant. Through working with my students I […]
How do we face the challenge of existing, obdurate built environments and infrastructures (and imaginaries and imperatives built upon and around them) in responding to the threat/s of climate change? Are such materialities as obdurate as is often imagined, and if so, to what degree? With what stakes, and with and for whom, do we engage this obduracy?
A recent Tweet [1] about the injustice of the rental housing stock in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, had me revisit my understanding of South Africa’s housing conundrum. My early career passion on urban slums and city spatial planning threw me into the abyss of just how difficult it is to provide dignified housing for all. Without major overhaul of the world economy, alongside systematic global redistribution of wealth, achieving spatial justice has proven a mammoth task. To be sure, the Bill of Rights of the South African Constitution (1996) states: ‘everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing’. While this leaves enough room for interpreting what ‘adequate’ is, there is a general public consensus in South Africa that living in a shack is not it. As I will show in this piece, creating an informal settlement or putting up one’s shack is part of the on-going struggle for adequate housing and property rights in South Africa. Many have heeded the call by Lefebvre (1996[1968]) and argued that the ‘right to the city’ is the access to social freedoms required to achieve spatial justice (Dikeç, 2002; Mitchell, 2003; Harvey, 2008; Huchzermeyer, 2014). Few have discussed the particular and paradoxical conditions […]
Accra is a city of storage. While walking across its busy roads, one can spot a myriad of objects used to transport, store and sell water: Water is sold at the traffic light in tiny plastic ‘sachet’ bags, plastic or metal containers mounted on trucks are used to transport and sell bulk water, and residents carry and store water in plastic buckets or in large plastic containers known locally as ‘polytanks.’ Despite the widespread presence of storage facilities, these find only limited space in analysis of the politics of urban water in Accra and elsewhere. Indeed, the attention is often concentrated on the circulation of water through large-scale networks of pipes, and on the history, uneven geography and intermittent working of networked infrastructure. Yet, as Millington (2018) recently showed for São Paulo, attending to the role of technologies of storage is important to understand the functioning of urban water systems and the relations between water use at the household level and water provisioning at the urban and regional scale. In contexts of drought and rainfall uncertainty, as in São Paulo, focusing on storage facilities plays a crucial role in understanding residents’ everyday experiences of scarcity, revealing their differentiated capacities to […]
Most of my students have no idea what the difference between capitalism and socialism is. Let me say that differently: most of my students have emotional responses to those words. Some have strong instincts about which is good and which is ugly. But in terms of an ability to define and give distinguishing examples, maybe a few here and there walk in with this ability. (And given the conflation of terms in U.S. American public discourse, it seems hard to blame them). Some have taken introduction economics courses. If I were in charge of general education requirements, I’d make sure that student learn not (only) about mathematical principles, but about the logics of different economics systems. Until that point (!), I accept it means I have to do this work before I can teach about environment and society. One year, when still teaching from a textbook, I put capitalism up front. We spent a week dedicated to Marxian environmental critiques. I quickly found that does not work for my politically diverse classroom. Instead, I now break the ideas down, avoiding the most evocative terms until the building blocks are in place. We slowly talk about markets, explaining what markets do […]
What does it mean to teach a situated class? The easiest answer to this is to include ‘local’ examples. But for me, being deeply situated in my teaching has also meant starting from and responding to what the students know and helping them make sense of their own world. (In contrast to the typical academic textbook which is structured to present an academic field to students; it’s also in contrast to teaching what students ask for, for they often don’t know what they don’t know.) After teaching from the well-used Robbins, Hintz and Moore volume, and asking my students at the University of Oklahoma to write weekly response papers, I realized that the course I was teaching simply wasn’t setting the students up to do much with the content. I tried tweaking and supplementing, but eventually resolved to write my own quasi-textbook and work through a series of real-world explanations for environmental problems. The open, online format (ok, it’s not yet open; I want to test-run it first) is also hoped to better enable place-situated approaches by making it easy to swap out examples and case studies. I now have 10 weeks of text that presents different explanations for the […]
Building discussion around infrastructural labour and livelihoods By: Alejandro De Coss and Kathleen Stokes ** Many thanks to participants in our session. While we have endeavoured to capture key points, we also appreciate this summary should not be taken to not reflect everyone’s views. ** On April 18th, 2018, scholars from around the UK met for the symposium “Infrastructures for Troubled Times”. Hosted by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics & Responsible Futures at the University of Brighton, the event sought to challenge and question the apparent neutrality of infrastructures, understanding them as “increasingly complex, multi-scalar and interconnected, affecting and effected by climate change, patterns of global economic debt, financial management and resource extraction/use.” As part of this symposium, we organised a session on “infrastructural labour and livelihoods” which stemmed from the perspective that human work and labour is necessary to the development, repair, and maintenance of infrastructures. Despite this, we find that labour is rarely explored in depth in contemporary debates around infrastructure’s role in shaping social and material worlds. Our session wanted to question the role of human labour in developing and maintaining infrastructures, and understand how such contributions are perceived and valued – particularly as […]
Temporalities of Crisis: On Cape Town’s Day Zero By: Nate Millington and Suraya Scheba Cape Town is currently facing a water crisis. While Day Zero, the day when the city’s water would have been cut off, is apparently no longer a possibility in 2018, scarcity remains a concern. Arguing that water will only get scarcer in the years to come, the Cape Town municipal government response to the water crisis has been to invest in considerable efforts to reduce water consumption, including charging for excess usage and the continued rollout of water management devices for residents deemed to be over users. Additionally, the city has called for the acceleration of augmentation schemes, including desalination and groundwater access. Drawing from climate science and longer term strategies of demand management, the City of Cape Town is attempting to situate reduced demand within a changing climate. Day Zero Cancelled. Photograph by Nate Millington. In response to the possibility of citywide water cuts, commentators and journalists engaged extensively with Cape Town’s ongoing water dynamics. Many suggested that the city is a harbinger of things to come in a future marked by climate change and climate uncertainty. Critical to these analyses was the oft-repeated phrase that Cape […]
The history of Mexico City can be told through the ways in which water flows both into and away from it. 500 years ago, the then capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain was a city undergoing an unparalleled transformation. The conquest of the indigenous lands was set to change not only the politics, economics, and society of this territory, but also its environment. Once covered by five interconnected lakes, two freshwater and three brackish, the Spanish set to desiccate the basin, transforming it into a valley. They did this through canals, tunnels, and other water infrastructures, built by the hands of thousands of workers, mostly indigenous and forcibly conscripted to carry out this labour. By the beginning of the 20th Century, the desiccation was almost achieved, except from some lacustrine areas south of Mexico City that were left. The Mexican capital could finally enter modernity, cleared of the waters that hampered its economic development and made it sick, according to the elite in power. Diego Rivera’s mural “Water, Origin of Life on Earth”, within the old River Lerma water deposit After the problem of desiccation was apparently solved, a new set of issues appeared. Mexico City was now facing […]
As part of the African Centre for Cities‘ International Urban Conference, Kathleen Stokes and Nate Millington organized a series of sessions dedicated to thinking about the relationships between labor, infrastructure, and politics in cities of the global south. We received numerous papers from scholars working in cities all over the world, from Accra to Delhi. Below, we highlight the presentations that were given in order to highlight the work being done by researchers interested in situating urban political ecological research through sustained engagements with cities of the global south. Old engines, pipes, pumps, and cables at a SACMEX workshop. Photograph by Alejandro De Coss. In his presentation, Maintaining Mexico City’s Lerma water supply system: an ethnography of labour and infrastructure, Alejandro De Coss (Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science), looked at the ways in which the Mexico City water system is maintained and repaired. In particular, he focused on the Lerma System, an inter-basin transfer built between 1942 and 1951, which still supplies the city with approximately 14% of its daily water use. During the course of one year, Alejandro worked alongside the repair and maintenance teams of the Mexico City Water System in two different sites. One was the Lerma […]
In this commentary Kampala based photographer and film-maker Joel Ongwech reflects on his participation in a recent exhibition at The Square Gallery in the city Most of my work has started with research and then developed into film or photography through a situated approach that allows me to really get to know my subjects and the contexts in which they live in this city. For this particular project, it all started through my involvement as a researcher on a project led by Will Monteith at the School of International Development at University of East Anglia and Shuaib Lwasa at the Urban Action Lab at Makerere University in Uganda. As a researcher, collecting data in the form of multiple interviews across the cities helped develop my perspective on refugee life in the city. I then looked into these collected stories from an artistic perspective. So when the opportunity for participating in the OPEN DOORS exhibition came along I did not hesitate to apply since I had already a good understanding about the refugee situation in the urban city of Kampala and was keen to develop an artistic response. My photographic investigation focused on Elvis, a 27 year old Congolese refugee who moved to Kampala from […]
‘Maybe, it’s okay for the big people [rich/elite] to live by the sea. But, for us [kampung residents], our rights have run out.’ –Interview with Kampung resident, 11 July 2017, Kampung Kerang Ijo. For traditional fishing kampung (urban villages) along North Jakarta’s coast, there have always been livelihood uncertainties. Residents daily manage how many fish they will catch or how much they will sell for. They monitor the sea for the ebb and flow of tides, knowing that coastal floods are both common and sudden. Yet, kampung residents face new uncertainties about how much longer their way of life may be viable, as they are squeezed out and overshadowed by mega-projects. Kampung cluster between large developments, open spaces, rivers, and formalised housing throughout Jakarta. They are usually high density, and are hubs of informal economic activity. In addition to encroachment from the increasing spread of high rise developments, residents in the north of the city are also subject to urban transformations that are intended to mitigate flood risks. One of these projects is the Great Garuda Seawall Project (GGSW; see this recent post), a partnership between Dutch firms and Indonesian ministries to construct a giant seawall that will close Jakarta […]
In Maputo, absence is felt in the infrastructure. I spend several months away from the city, and the skyline has changed. Banks and technology companies replace old lots that belonged to a friend of a friend’s grandmother’s best friend. Old traditional Portuguese bakeries, or pastelarias, are now serving single espressos alongside Chinese food restaurants and small household-run delis which cater to the expat community. In many ways, Maputo is not unlike similar cities in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. Foreign investment has made it a complicated ecosystem of growth and continued inequity. This plays out on streets housing multimillion dollar apartments that look down over roads which are repaired by hand – little to no machinery is available. Informal market stalls, once relegated to the periphery, are now dominating sidewalks along the main thoroughfare of Avenida Julius Nyerere. While this brings convenience, it also brings gossip. The gossip from the middle and upper classes living in older, established neighbourhoods of the city focuses on the unsightly nature of having people selling things on the side of the road. “During the Portuguese’s time, this would never have been allowed.” “Everyone seems to think they have the right […]
In 2015, the National Research Institute of Colombia “Alexander von Humboldt” (commonly known as Instituto Humboldt), promoted Urban Nature: Platform of Experiences, a book project giving voice to diverse sets of knowledge that come into play when addressing and managing biodiversity and ecosystem services in Colombian cities. Over 80 authors presented 40 case studies across 11 cities. In 2016, the first edition (Spanish) was launched in Bogotá, Colombia and the second edition (English) has just been published. This post is based on my experience as editor of Urban Nature, but it is also an invitation to the readers of Situated UPE to learn more about Colombia and our cities. It’s a well-worn phrase—but Colombia is diverse. Accounting for 14% of the Earth’s biodiversity, it is listed as one of the world’s “megadiverse” countries. It stretches from a Caribbean coastline to the deep forests of the Amazon basin, and from there to high mountains and a coastline on the Pacific Ocean. You also find over 1100 municipalities (municipios), including five large cities with one to eight million people, a wide group of mid-size cities (100,000-500,000 people), and rapidly growing smaller towns (<50.000 people). The Constitution of Colombia recognizes over 700 indigenous […]