In this guest post, Dr Gilbert Siame, Dr Camila Saraiva and Dr Kristian Saguin discuss their international workshop on gendered and just urban futures in Africa, which was supported with a Knowledge Mobilisation Awards grant from the USF.
As USF researchers, we co-organised this international workshop to promote intellectual and policy dialogue on gendered and just urban transitions in Africa. We believed that this workshop could significantly contribute to a path-finding dialogue between research and policy on gendered and just urban futures in Africa. We believe that trans-local learning for a just urban Africa can be facilitated between Africa-focused urban research and research on topics that concern gender and justice in urban contexts outside of Africa.
Speakers were drawn from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. We were keen to establish and promote networking, mentorship, memories, and exchange among different funding categories of USF scholars to ensure that USF-funded research contributes to an enduring and expanded research-policy dialogue on urban futures. We expected that the workshop would provide a rare opportunity for participating UFS scholars to collectively interface with policy actors and communities in Africa, to define pathways and opportunities for gendered and just urban transitions. It also served as a platform to start the writing process of a comparative journal article on methodological aspects of just urban transitions in Africa.
In our proposal, we outlined the consensus among actors that the future of Africa lies in its cities. However, while African urbanisation is rapidly unfolding, much of the process involves informal sector activities and socio-spatial economic relationships. The vibrancy of the informal sector is hard to ignore, with the World Bank estimating it accounts for over 80% of current urban jobs, acting as a backbone of urban activity. The urban informal economy and housing are particularly common among working urban women (92.1%), who are important actors in all efforts designed for poverty alleviation and care in local communities.
We argued that critical reflection and exploration of pathways for just and gendered African urban futures needs to start by centring women and other underserved groups (such as youth and disabled people) in urban planning, informal settlement upgrading, urban management, and urban service delivery. By factoring in gender and socio-spatial justice issues, future urban spaces on the continent will be better able to truly accommodate and empower those groups who are presently underserved or whose actions on the ground are not visible to the public and in popular discourses. To realise these normative just goals of urban futures in Africa, research, knowledge mobilisation and dissemination need to integrate pathways for hybridised and durable urban governance forms that seek to proactively mobilise, engage, and facilitate equal participation of most underserved groups in urban transition processes and projects.
Throughout the workshop, organisers and speakers shared their research outputs and policy recommendations with major actors in urban development in Africa. As well as achieving South-South learning, promoting international intra-Africa networking opportunities for USF Fellows and knowledge mobility, USF Fellows shared their work with civil society organisations like Slum Dwellers International (SDI) and Habitat for Humanity International and Habitat International Coalition; international organisations like UN-Habitat; as well as with national and city governments, citizens, researchers, and media. By making USF-funded research available to relevant urban actors through creative formats, by connecting actors, and by facilitating research-policy fusion, we hoped that opportunities would emerge for more grounded research on gendered and just urban futures in Africa.
Key Messages
In the final event of the two days, Professor Zarina Patel (Editor-in-Chief, Urban Forum) gave a talk summarising the workshop’s key messages. Zarina celebrated the event as a powerful coming together, learning ‘with and from one another’ across South-South, the continent of Africa, disciplines, and stakeholders. What follows is an edited excerpt of her speech:
What is the good life?
Who defines what it is to live right?
What is the work? Who needs to do it? Who is doing it?
When does change need to happen?
What are the challenges?
What is the role of hope?
The deepening inequalities that exist in African and southern cities are well-rehearsed. The numbers, the materiality, and governance systems. We know the pictures, the figures, the headlines. It’s easy to fall into the negative narrative of Africa (Korah). What is clear is that what happens in Africa matters – not just for Africa, but the sheer numbers and the delayed urban transition mean that what happens in Africa matters globally. The challenge of Just Urban Futures in Africa is not an African concern, but a global concern.
The reality on the ground is clear – the urbanisation of poverty and continuing vulnerability – we are faced with a polycrisis – interconnected and intersectional. The important message is that the time is now to reverse these trends. In addressing this urgency, we need to identify the opportunities and alternate narratives. Cities are in the process of being made and remade – they are dynamic, not static. Disruptions are openings that create opportunities. How can we mobilise the opportunities that technology and media provide us with, creating different ways to mobilise? How can we upscale the many good examples, experiments and local-scale innovations that are emerging across the continent?
A second key message is that informality is here to stay – we are not going to eradicate slums. To quote Dr Wilna Nchito: We cannot remove the people from the slums but need to remove the slums from the people. This is a material challenge, but also a metaphorical one. Peripherality is not just geographical, whereas being peripheral is also the extent to which something is prioritised. How can we rethink the order of slums and systems of informality? How do we reimagine informality as order, as a solution?
Part of changing this narrative is to illustrate that what works for the poor will also work for the rich. The key message here is to bring slums and informality to the centre, both conceptually and practically. Practically: we need to challenge policy frameworks (globally and locally), which stubbornly hold onto visions of ‘the city’ based on unrealistic Global North ideals. A rethinking of the ‘good life’ and of ‘the city’ or ‘cityness’ is urgent in ways that bring dignity and opportunities for present urban dwellers to lay the basis for hope in alternate futures. We need a clear message about how we go about this rethinking: we need different ways of knowing and learning about our cities.
Academics and policymakers typically know very little about functionality and dysfunctionality in informal areas – we have all heard about the dearth of knowledge and data on urban systems. Ironically, it is the women, the youth, who are held at the margins or peripheries of decision-making who are the real knowledge holders. We must improve our systems of knowledge-generation, not for the sake of data or reporting, but to be transformative.
Transdisciplinary and co-production methods have been identified as ways forward to include a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. Across Africa, we have had much experience with this, long before these methods became popular in the Global North. Many of us in this room will have participated in transdisciplinary activities, which are often the most intuitive method for working in capacity-constrained contexts. This entire event is transdisciplinary in action – meaning-making together. The time has come to use insights gained from Africa and other post-colonial contexts to inform a critical engagement with transdisciplinary research: we have much to offer both the practice and the theory, which remains largely shaped by the Global North.
New knowledge and insights are not alone enough for transformative change. Power relations are never erased, even in knowledge co-production projects. Beyond partnerships, power also has an invisible temporal and spatial reach. We need to recognise where and how power is exercised, and its effects. Colonial histories impact spatial form, legislative frameworks that foreground the elite and perpetuate precarity. The colonial outlook informs what and how we teach, where we publish, and how we organise workshops.
We need to courageously refuse to continue as accomplices in trapping ourselves in the very systems we are trying to overcome. We need to be intentional about challenging these systems by engaging with context, providing evidence and offering alternative narratives. We must make sure that the ‘best’ Lusaka, Kisumu, Lagos, and Cape Town are the best as defined by context, not by externally-derived indicators or targets.
We have learned that there is a politics to the statement: Thinking globally, acting locally. Acting locally shifts responsibility onto the already vulnerable, without targeting the systems of power that have forced universalised understandings of what and how change should happen. Through local case studies and evidence, we need to move towards a more global understanding of the role of difference and place in how we address global challenges.
As the USF, we are learning to understand the profound significance of case study research, which is locally grounded, to both generate much-needed data to understand systems, but also as a way of pushing back against conceptual and theoretical frames that do not serve African and other Global Southern contexts.
Who has the knowledge? We were told yesterday – that the women and youth know – they will give the policy makers and researchers the data that is needed. The knowledge is there; our changing methods (transdisciplinary and knowledge co-production) are providing real opportunities for engagement and influence. Surfacing knowledge and experiences is important, but are we making visible the full spectrum of influences that shape who has access to the ‘good life’? Who is listening to local voices?
Governments and academics are listening to different extents, but action is dependent on other actors. For government – public sector investors, for academics, funders, and journals – the political economy that shapes action in these spaces needs to hear and to shift. The USF is part of the knowledge political economy. It has a role to play in shaping academic knowledge practices, and this workshop has been a powerful contributor to understanding the role of African scholarship in shifting urban outcomes. We will certainly take these learnings forward into our deliberations to shape how we make decisions about support and resource allocations. Certainly, we are affirmed that our investments across our funding programmes are contributing to transformative change.
A final key message from our deliberations across this workshop is the need for institutional and systems change. Transformative change requires work in three spheres: the realm of the material, the political (including systems and structures), and the individual level (including values and world views). Coming together, as we have over the past 2 days, has built leadership and skills, but there is huge room for manoeuvre in increasing support to allow individuals to take new learnings back to their home institutions. This could be from the state, community structures, universities, or funding bodies. We must shift these systems to become more enabling for engaging with alternate conceptualisations and ways of shaping urban presents and futures.
This work, by individuals, within their institutional settings, is another part of the activism we spoke about yesterday. Activism comes in many forms. In academia, for example, there are other forms of scholar activism that can result in change by serving as Trustees, on committees, or as editorial board members and consistently advocating for different ways of doing and knowing. These are the multiple sites of work and labour that are needed for real change to happen. So, a key message then is for us all to play a role in giving form to what UN-Habitat referred to as institutions of illusion, mirages that are not delivering to their mandates. We are all part of institutions where we can nudge and shift systems and structures. This does not have to be revolutionary or large-scale, but consistently holding a line and bringing others along with you goes a long way to giving form to change.
This entire workshop in Lusaka has shown that – from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor to the mayor’s office to the grassroots – the questions that shape Just Urban Futures (and pasts and presents) matter deeply and profoundly. They give us headaches, as Alexander Chileshe from UN-Habitat told us. To ensure that what we have spoken about does not simply become wishful thinking, the challenge is to make hope a discipline; we need to nurture hope. Let’s all take a moment to make a silent pledge here today of the role each of us and our institutions will play in contributing to Hopeful and Just Urban Futures.
Check the Photobook of the event!