Co-Producing Sustainable African Urban Futures

This project focuses on the growing challenges affecting urban and peri-urban areas in Africa. It is aimed at scoping research and enabling knowledge exchange to support social equity, well-being and environmental sustainability in cities across the region. The project will explore ways in which the state and communities can jointly engage in urban management by leveraging traditionally unrecognized local skills and knowledge. The approach questions urban production processes that create social injustice and inequality, going beyond conventional participation and participatory design by actively engaging various sectors dedicated to establishing equitable partnerships. Effective co-production processes provide affected communities with decision-making power, as well as technical assistance to develop long-term urban management resources and skills.

The project, therefore, seeks to identify, explore and learn from community-led strategies that create livelihoods and infrastructure and manage environmental risks without exacerbating environmental harm and degradation. We will explore existing academic knowledge and datasets (e.g. urban and peri-urban quality of life surveys, climate data, environmental GIS layers and maps) and identify gaps to support context-specific urban interventions, leading to the development of a range of scoping studies. The project will enable engagement across an interdisciplinary academic team involving the Gauteng City-Region Observatory and the Global Change Institute (Wits), Architecture and Urban Studies (linking the Edinburgh/Heriot-Watt Strategic Alliance), and Centre of African Studies, School of Political and Social Science and Geosciences (Edinburgh). Beyond providing a platform to engage academics and the organisation of online/hybrid workshops, the project will create a shared database, and the findings will be promoted at a final hybrid event.