Nancy Odendaal trained as a spatial planner and, following a decade in practice, commenced her academic career in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. She is currently the University of Basel-University of Cape Town Professor of Urban Studies, a position she took in August 2024. Nancy is ostensibly based at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, but spends enough time in Basel to teach several courses on the MSG Critical Urbanisms and supervise postgraduate students. She is also responsible for the Southern Urbanisms track in Cape Town, together with Dr Laura Nkula-Wenz. Having trained in urban planning, Nancy is acutely aware and curious about the ways through which urban processes manifest in space and contribute to place-making. Her focus is on infrastructure, particularly digital infrastructure. Her monograph, Disrupted Urbanism: Situated Smart initiatives in African cities (published by Bristol University Press in 2023), explores how endogenous innovations with digital platforms contribute to city-making in Southern and East Africa. The edited volume with Allesandro Aurigi, from Plymouth University, entitled Shaping Smart for better Cities: Rethinking and shaping relationships between urban space and Digital technologies (published by Elsevier in 2021) explores how urban spaces are made and remade through spontaneous and orchestrated smart interventions. 

She has also collaborated with Professors Ola Söderström (University of Neuchâtel) and Ayona Datta (University College London) on an SNSF-funded project on ‘Provincialising Smart Cities’, which concluded in 2023. In 2019, she collaborated with Professor Simon Marving, then from the Urban Institute, at the University of Sheffield on a study of the humanitarian uses of drones in East Africa, funded by the British Academy. She is currently working to convene a workshop for early-career researchers in Cape Town, together with Professor Catalina Ortiz from the Bartlett, University College London, on southern urbanism. Nancy is committed to mentoring fledgling researchers and teaching staff in her role as Teaching and Learning Lead at the African Centre for Cities. 

In the past, she has also served on the International Advisory Board: Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (2017–2019), and has been a member of the Review Panel for Planning degrees at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) (5-year review) (2021). She remains very active in the international research space, with her commitment to Global South connections reflected in her membership of the International Advisory Board for CEFAVELA, Research centre on informal settlements, UFBAC (Federal University of ABC region, São Paulo, Brazil). She is currently on the following international research agency panels: Member of the Social and Economic Geography Panel, Portuguese Research Council; Member of the Interdisciplinary Research Review Panel, Swiss National Science Foundation; and Member of the Review Panel: FORMAS Panel on Robust and Resilient Infrastructure and Built Environment, Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development. She is a regular reviewer for the Irish Research Council and was formerly on the permanent panel of the SNSF’s Spirit programme. Nancy is on the editorial boards of the journals Urban Geography, the Journal of the American Planning Association, and Progress in Planning. 

Her current research investigates how online storytelling and engagement co-produce different imaginaries of urban places. This work also examines how such imaginaries may be counter-mapped and spatialised. Recent publications explore the codification of Google's infrastructure and its impact on urban places, the governmentality of digitisation processes, and a decolonised smart city. 

• Smart Urbanism
• Infrastructure futures
• Alternative conceptualises of urban space through relational analyses
• Critical mapping
• Case study methodologies 
• African urbanisms

• Southern Africa
• East Africa