Liquid Urbanisms in Africa: Thinking Climate Adaption with and through Water

Faced with rising sea levels, cities across the globe are being remade in an array of contact zones of the climate emergency to confront the threat of water. Recent scholarship has started to question the terracentric, territorially bound notions of the city to ask what new, decolonial understandings about urban life in the Anthropocene could be gained by thinking with water. 

Using water as a way of seeing through, with and about climate-related urban issues, this international workshop offers a critical examination of the urban/water interface in African coastal cities. African coastal cities stand at the sharp edge of water-borne climate change. They are forecast to attract the highest urban growth and investment, but are also persistently scripted as the least well equipped to deal with climate-related disasters, making manifest the tension between the imperatives of economic growth and sustainable urban development. 
The workshop brings together architecture, urban planning and critical social theory to explore the diverse ways African urban communities are adapting their lives and environments to climate change induced transformations in coastal areas. Drawing on empirical contexts across the African continent, presenters will rethink conventional urban adaptation strategies by centering water as a method to reimagine sustainable futures. Key themes include the transformation of materials, vulnerability and infrastructure politics, and "amphibious" ways of reimagining urban living. 

These insights are crucial for reimagining urban futures in times of environmental change, especially for African contexts, where pessimistic or development-centric narratives of crisis dominate. Join leading academics and practitioners as they develop perspectives of critical hope on sustainable urban development in the face of global climate challenges.

Keynote speaker: Huda Tayob, RCA.

Participation fees:
60.- CHF Faculty and employed non-members
30.- CHF Student non-members, SGAS/SSEA/SSAS members
Free: student SGAS/SSEA/SSAS members

Registration: Please register your attendance until 15 May 2025 by clicking on the registration link here. 

To learn more about the event, please click here.

For further questions and information, please contact:
dany.tiwa@clutterunibas.ch 
Tel. +41 61 2076413

Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal