It revealed the intricate ways in which technology, politics and land administration interweave, shaping a contested governance landscape in Mogadishu. It also highlighted how the technopolitics of land administration in the city are a complex matrix of negotiation, conflict and compromise involving various stakeholders, including the state apparatus, broader society and international partners. It showed how this multifaceted interaction creates a chaotic yet logical landscape where the state and society engage in continuous dialogue, but the outcome often remains minimal progress towards improving livelihoods in the city.

The presentation also highlighted ACRC’s advocacy efforts aimed at fostering change through active engagement. An exercise designed to animate this aspect of ACRC’s work demonstrated the practical challenges and dilemmas scholars face in advocating for transformation within such complex urban environments. The discussion extended to the roles and responsibilities of individual researchers across different geographies and times, underscoring the diverse approaches and characters researchers can adopt in their work.

UTA-Do 2024 programme

The opening day of UTA-Do 2024 was graced by a welcoming address from Professor Kombe of Ardhi University, who has been instrumental in shaping urban debates in Tanzania and Africa, and leads ACRC’s team in Dar es Salaam.

This first day featured a keynote online lecture by Gautam Bhan from the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, focusing on Southern urbanism and its implications for understanding urban Africa through the lens of the global South. Huda Tayob led a methods and writing workshop, leveraging her experience and the creative use of diverse archives. The day concluded with discussions on spatial experiments in Dar es Salaam and the role of African historians in conceptualising post-colonial experiences, setting a tone of critical engagement and interdisciplinary dialogue.

The second day delved into the economic dimensions of urban Africa, exploring themes from financialisation and infrastructure to digital platforms and welfare. Stefan Ouma’s keynote addressed the study of capitalism in African cities, highlighting the vocabulary of accumulation. Sessions with Liza Cirolia and Andrea Pollio examined the governance of service delivery systems, while Sabatho Nyamsenda discussed financial capitalism and precarity in Tanzania.

Wangui Kimari presenting at UTA-Do 2024. Photo credit: Liza Cirolia

The closing day of UTA-Do 2024 celebrated creativity and the arts in urban research and practice. Huda Tayob revisited the Archive of Forgetfulness, exploring themes of mobility and infrastructure. An interactive session further delved into creative methodologies for urban studies. The event concluded at the Goethe Institute, showcasing films, performances, and music, encapsulating the rich and diverse approaches to understanding and shaping urban Africa.

Conclusion

UTA-Do 2024 served as a catalyst for ACRC’s land and connectivity researchers to critically reflect on our methodologies and advocacy strategies. Researchers play multifaceted roles, in not just understanding, but also shaping urban landscapes.

This has reinforced the significance of active engagement and advocacy in driving meaningful change, highlighting the need for scholars to navigate the delicate balance between rigorous research and practical, impactful interventions in urban development.

Header photo credit: Liza Cirolia. Wangui Kimari presenting at UTA-Do 2024 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

Reimagining: The essence of UTA-Do

Across the breadth and depth of the workshop sessions, unique in their format as well as content, arguably the most powerful of these was a visit to the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). The visit included presentations and an overview of the movement’s history, covering events from the Centre’s creation to the police executions of local residents in response to supposed criminal activity in the Mathare settlement, with many unemployed youth becoming subjects of extra judiciary killings by state authorities.

Starting by documenting these crimes, the MSJC’s activity grew to incorporate various forms of resistance, including the Mathare Green Movement, which consisted of planting trees for victims of police crimes in the settlement, as well as a MSJC Kids Club, where children are mentored and schooled through fun activities designed to build their confidence and creativity. Other initiatives include the Matigari book club and Until Everyone is Free, a podcast series that uses the life and work of Kenyan freedom fighter, Pio Gama Pinto, to reflect on present realities and politics in Nairobi.

Equally inspiring and tuned to a similar tone of resistance, the Sound of Nairobi workshop session offered an alternative perspective to experiencing the city through the arts. Sound of Nairobi is an open access online archive, collection and portal of sounds from the city. The platform offers users an opportunity to upload their own sounds and listen to others in the portal, inviting them to consider how everyday audible experiences often go unnoticed, despite forming the essence of our city experiences. The portal draws people closer towards sounds that are often unheard, including silence as well as sound, considering how the city is shaped through sound and how different aspects of city life produce difference audible experiences. Ultimately, Sound of Nairobi functions as a living repository of urban sound, uplifting everyday experiences and voices through the arts in an alternative and inspiring way.

Workshop participants were also treated to an evening pre-screening of Kamirithu, a film documentation and history of the Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Centre – an open-air theatre in Limuru that was established by workers and residents fromKamiruthu village. The Kamirithu theatre is best known as the site where Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s critical play, Ngaahika Ndenda (“I will marry when I want”), was written, directed and initially performed in 1977. The play was subsequently halted by the then government, the centre banned from holding gatherings and events, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o arrested and detained. Kamirithu is narrated by original cast members, and centres on the establishment of the centre, the production and subsequent banning of the play, and the ultimate destruction in 1982 of the facility by authorities at the time.

The cast members share reflections on their own lives, presenting multifaceted pathways through which they came to use drama and music to protest and highlight challenges in their village, relating to land, dispossession, industrial environmental pollution and oppressive work environments. Framed against the play, these life histories offer a rich and nuanced reflection, not just of Kamirithu and Limuru town, but of Kenya’s complex histories of land and dispossession that continue to date. In this way, Kamirithu provided UTA-Do participants a view of how history also provided forms of activism – through drama, music and creative arts – that could be connected to new social justice centres that were organising to contest similar issues.

Offering another alternative perspective on how to think of the city was a contribution by Carl Nightingale, associate professor of urban and world history at the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo. Situating cities within the discussion on the Anthropocene, Carl joined the workshop in a hybrid session to present his book, Earthopolis. Carl covered the history of urbanisation of the world through perspectives on planetary urbanisation and discussed his ideas around realms of action, habitat, impact and consequence.

As the UTA-Do workshop drew to a close, with a celebratory dinner and party held in Nairobi and hosted by Sound of Nairobi, many of us shared our enthusiasm over the event itself, the inspiration we gained from the interactive sessions, lectures and talks, as well as our excitement about the potential of future collaborations and engagements with attendees near and far.

In the midst of exploring the challenges of doing as well as undoing, reimagining and unlearning, most of us found that in order to claim new perspectives and ways of thinking, old frameworks and narratives must be dismantled. Looking forward, this event set a precedent for future workshops that will undoubtedly be equally thought-provoking and inspiring in addressing the essence of UTA-Do.

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

Remaking the city from the margins

In addition to workshops and contributions focused on the materiality of development trajectories in African cities, the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop also included presentations that unpacked experiences of marginalisation – shedding light on subjective ways of reimagining the city, many of which remain peripheral within the field of urban studies.

Echoing some of the central theoretical considerations raised by Jethron Ayumbah on the various forms of UTA-Do, Sabatho Nyamsenda, a political scientist and lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, presented research on local and community-driven approaches to resistance in Dar es Salaam. Sabatho presented his research on labour informality in Tanzania, relating this to economic theories and framing of informal workers as entrepreneurs. Echoing back to Hernando de Soto’s conceptualisations of dead capital, Sabatho presented how informal workers in the UWAMATA Bus Drivers Association, the women of Manzese, and BodaBoda taxi drivers throughout urban Tanzania challenged the insecure working conditions they experienced in the face of formalisation.

A shared discussion on queering the city was led by Keguro Macharia, an independent scholar from Nairobi, and Eddie Ombagi, postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. They extended the conversation around marginalised urban experiences. This complementary exchange covered historical and contemporary questions of queer urban subjectivities, and the intersections of gender and sexuality in the African city.

Referencing the city of Nairobi, Keguro proposed imagining the city through an abolitionist framework, where city dwellers are not policed but, rather, are allowed to enjoy and own the city as theirs. He provoked attendees to explore a thought process through which the city was viewed less as a space or mode of production, and more as a place continually in the process of becoming for all its residents. Similarly, in his description of Nairobi as a shot of whisky, Eddie underscored the value of temporality in the making and re-making of the city. Through this lens, time, change and continuous transformation become central elements in understanding queer urban lives in a context of social progress and movement towards inclusion and equality.

A hybrid lecture delivered jointly by Willie J. Wright, assistant professor at the University of Florida, and Adam Bledsoe, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, resonated with notions of reimagining the city from the margins, specifically through the lens of Black geographies. Introducing the origins of Black geography as a theoretical discourse emerging out of Black studies, Willie and Adam described race as a social and economic indicator located at the heart of how cities are experienced in the USA as sites of structural inequality. By challenging mainstream perspectives that dominate the discipline of geography, they highlighted the universality of Black geography to the experiences of black people everywhere. They also emphasised how a focus on Black experiences of education, housing and labour in the city exposes spatial dimensions of injustice otherwise unaccounted for. 

Revisiting the themes of defiance and transgression, a hybrid lecture from Gautam Bhan offered an elaborate understanding of the relationship between knowledge and activism. Gautam’s reflections on his experiences in Delhi resonated well with insights earlier shared by Jethron on the possibilities of collective action and antagonistic urban formations. Drawing attention to instances when the political becomes technical, Gautam reminded participants that in our roles as urban scholars, we should treat research as a political process.

Gautam led participants through the Indian Institute for Human Settlements’ experiences with what he termed the “demystification of the technical”, surmising the role of the scholar-activist as: bridging the political and the technical; engaging in the long durée of knowledge production which offers new language to the marginalised; producing research in alternative non-academic platforms; producing public archives; and challenging our own locations as scholar-activists. His counsel was for participants to be always conscious of the risk of depoliticising processes that are intrinsically political. This, he argued, can be done by always knowing when one is being used to shut the politics out and by a refusal to legitimise processes that seek to displace the political.

Adrian Wilson and Mario Schmidt put a spotlight on Nairobi as a place for scientific and political experiments, while noting the ethical problems that emerge from this. They observed the increased intrusion of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) into the cityscape to correspond with the turn towards evidence-based development aid. Identifying Nairobi as a key locus for these experiments, Adrian and Mario pointed out that Nairobians participate in RCTs and behavioural experiments which benefit mostly western scholars and local elites, while subjecting participants to substantial risks. They reminded participants of the heated debate that emerged following the publication of a paper by four economists, which was based on an RCT involving the disconnection of water services for inhabitants of Kayole in Nairobi over non-payment of water bills. According to Adrian and Mario, although many of these studies are presented as unproblematic, they often raise serious ethical questions and have damaging outcomes for the subjects.

Writing the African city

With plenty of opportunities to engage with fellow participants during the workshop, a number of sessions were designed specifically to bolster the budding skillsets of early career researchers in the room. Academic and non-academic participants were encouraged, through interactive and practical sessions, to reflect on how we could write the African city from diverse and multiple positionalities. In an interactive lecture, Amollo Ambole, a design researcher and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, shared her career path and journey as inspiration for participants to identify their own milestones and aspirations and to develop their own mission statements. Through this exercise, we were encouraged to understand our own journeys, strengths, accomplishments and trajectories as positionalities from which we could frame and shape our work, and direct our objectives and ambitions forward.

This self-reflective session was complemented by a working group activity led by Wangui Kimari on the diversity of methods used in studying the city. The session began by encouraging us to consider our positionality and the power dynamics that characterise our research context and relations. Using this, Wangui underlined how theory and positionality shape the ways in which data is collected, the particularities in the data that we concentrate on, and the importance of triangulating methods as a way of validating our research. Participants were then asked to identify unique methodological tools and approaches to research, and groups identified a range of tools, including group video analysis, sketch analysis and participant diaries. Attention was also given to the value of participatory action research and street phenomenology – or walking interviews – in underlining the relational nature of place in urban spaces, alongside other methods generally deemed conventional. This links back to the importance of collecting data in a non-extractive way – a key point raised by Jethron in his keynote lecture at the start of the workshop, who noted that “Africa needs to be treated as a source of knowledge, not as a source of data”.

Peter Ngau, associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Nairobi, also contributed to this discussion on research methodologies. Sharing his experiences of being an urban practitioner and activist, he also acknowledged the importance of publishing as part of an academic’s career trajectory. Similarly, Mary Lawhon, senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Edinburgh, gave a lecture on navigating the intricacies of writing journal articles and getting published. Mary shared experiences on the challenges and rewards of academic writing and offered valuable tips on framing, and claiming, specific theoretical discussions when designing academic papers. Workshop participants were also offered an opportunity to apply for a number of grants offered by the generous funders who made the UTA-Do Workshop possible (listed below). 

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

A different kind of space

The UTA-Do workshop offered space for a diverse range of urban thinkers and practitioners from Africa to meet, reflect and engage in dialogue and ideas from multiple positionalities and perspectives. There were at least 40 attendees from Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, the UK and the USA, of varying ages, personal and professional backgrounds, disciplines and careers. A key achievement for the workshop was in creating a space and a forum for these African urban theorists to meet, learn, exchange and draw from these personal frameworks to contribute and enrich the programme. As participants, we were gifted with an unprecedented opportunity to bring our ideas, work, energy and experiences into connection with fellow thinkers and doers from across the continent – in fun and stimulating engagements – to grow from this encounter, and to forge connections for future collaboration.

The UTA-Do programme was structured to blend formal and informal interactions to enable co-learning, dialogue, fun, exchange, and to stimulate as well as challenge theoretical and methodological processes – highlighting the importance of generating new ways of thinking about and doing research on the African city. The programme included exclusive keynote presentations, guest speaker lectures, interactive hybrid sessions, thought-provoking working group discussions, field visits, reflection sessions, lunch and dinner events around the city, and a closing night party with Sound of Nairobi DJs.

Undoing the African city

Beginning with a thought-provoking keynote presentation by Jethron Ayumbah Akallah, lecturer at the Department of History and Archaeology at Maseno University, the workshop situated the principles of UTA-Do within discussions on the right to the city, who owns the city and how the city is experienced and perceived. Describing the roots of the UTA-Do concept – set in city dwellers’ resistance to the challenges posed by everyday urban life – Jethron described the temporality of cityness in many African contexts, where home often resides outside of the city, in rural areas as places of origin and de facto belonging.

Jethron referenced the works of David Harvey and Jennifer Robinson, among others, raising questions around the ways that the phrase UTA-Do can manifest: when doing becomes undoing, or doing differently; as a form of protest or defiance; or as a surrender to unchanging conditions. With many challenges in the lives of marginalised urban groups relating to a lack of service provision, Jethron emphasised the need to acknowledge existing, informal provisions of water or transport as a form of UTA-Do – of making and re-making the city – despite being off the grid. Informality as a type of cityness, then, becomes essential to the UTA-Do mentality and its perseverance.

Building on these reflections and contemplations, Wangui Kimari – social justice activist, anthropologist and participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), and part of ACRC’s safety and security domain team in Nairobi – led the first interactive session of the workshop around conceptualisations of southern urbanism. This saw participants discussing the meaning behind southern urbanism in relation to the Eurocentric vision of urbanity – exploring the different ways of framing what the city is and how where we are situated theoretically shapes how we see African cities. A key takeaway was the need to “write from within UTA-Do contexts”, rather than writing about them.

A lecture led by Liza Rose Cirolia, senior researcher at the African Centre for Cities and part of ACRC’s land and connectivity domain, delved into the material fabric of the urban, exploring the fundamental importance of infrastructure in understanding the present, as well as the future, of the African city. Drawing on a variety of examples, and contextualising the narrative within the SDGs and Agenda 2063 framework of developmental objectives, Liza’s lecture took a deep dive into unravelling how “writing and narrating a moment from infrastructure” can contribute to challenging, from outside the box, ideas of a single, fixed network of thinking about African cities.

Building on this conversation, Zhengli Huang, postdoctorate researcher at Tongji University, Shanghai, further advanced the discussion on infrastructure as the development project of many African cities through the lens of large-scale Chinese interventions. Drawing on examples such as the Nairobi Expressway and the Addis Ababa light rail transit system, Zhengli’s lecture elaborated on the impact of Chinese infrastructural investment in Africa’s urban development, while also touching on how these initiatives contribute to increasing debts among many recipient nations.

The discussion around China’s role in the infrastructural development of Africa continued with presentations by Andrea Pollio, research fellow at the African Centre for Cities and Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Polytechnic of Turin, who also focused on the separate theme of the digital African city. Andrea presented his approach to viewing the city through a digital lens and shared some of the research challenges faced in researching a growing and increasingly digitalising African urbanity, including the visible–invisible nexus of data accessibility and reproduction.

Exploring the smart African city through the social implications of adopting ICT for basic service provision, Prince Guma, researcher in cities, infrastructures and technologies at the BIEA, shared his research into water infrastructures and technologies in Nairobi: a case study of Jisomee Mita (“read your meter”). This was a project designed to reconfigure water supply in the city by integrating low- to middle-income neighbourhoods in Nairobi, including Soweto-Kayole, into extended digitalised networks. Through his empirical findings, Prince highlighted how low-income communities mobilised in diverse ways to resist digitalised processes which had disempowering economic consequences. The research pointed to the nuances and complexities emerging from the rapid digitalisation of service provision in cities in Kenya and beyond.

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.