opportunities ( fursa ) and carve out space ( nafasi ) 2 for future actions. However, their stories shared a strong emphasis on anticipating future scenarios and the ways these could be controlled, which Yahya in the vignette above described as ‘insurance strategies’, Smart as ‘practised luck’ and the boda boda driver as ‘clever hustling’. The interpretation of ‘insurance’ as a means of negotiating risky futures is important, neither corresponding directly with the Swahili word for formal insurance, bima , which connotes
African cities and collaborative futures: Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the nature of African cities – the interactions of residents with infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability, seen through local narratives and theories. This groundbreaking collection, drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, offers a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. Each of the chapters, using case studies from Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we ‘see like a city’ in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision-makers and international practitioners can work together to achieve better outcomes.
6 New pasts, presents and futures: time and space in family migrant networks between Kosovo and western Europe Carolin Leutloff-Grandits For many families in Kosovo, migration is an integral part of life. This is true even if they do not themselves migrate but, rather, seem ‘stuck’ in a village such as the one in south Kosovo where I conducted fieldwork between 2011 and 2013.1 In fact, in this village, and throughout almost all of Kosovo, there is what one might term a ‘culture’ of migration. Every person has close family members who are living or have lived
London and those residing in the marginalised slums of one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas, Complexo da Maré. It shows how gender-based violence (GBV) is diverse across multiple spaces of the city in both contexts and how it fundamentally undermines women’s wellbeing. Yet, while GBV emerges as a major barrier to ensuring equitable and healthy feminised urban futures, such futures are paradoxical. Although the roots of gendered violence lie in patriarchal power relations, it is exacerbated by other forms of indirect structural violence that relate to the challenges
will be concentrated in the towns and cities of sub-Saharan Africa. This offers vast potential but at the same time such development futures are intertwined with disaster risks (Fraser et al., 2017 ). This chapter has shown that risk management in the four case study cities are characterised by considerable gaps and blockages, yet there are also several significant emerging innovative initiatives for overcoming these barriers. These issues have been explored through the application of the conceptual framework presented in Figure 3.1 . This research is an important
The author reviews the 2021 production of James Baldwin’s play, The Amen Corner, as directed by Whitney White at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. After situating the experience of engaging with Baldwin’s art through a constructivist approach to art-based education and learning design, the piece turns to considering the impact of various interpretive materials and the director’s artistic vision in the production. White’s decision to include an epigraph in the production leaves a notable impact, particularly in conversation with Baldwin’s essays, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” and “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”
put forward a proposal to end, or at least soften, the rule of silence that is generally imposed within the sector. Weissman argues secrecy is often as much of an impediment to resolving current cases as it is to preventing and managing futures ones. Strub questions the definition of risk-management policy from the point of view of the NGO security advisor responsible. She highlights the tensions she experienced in her role, in particular the lack of institutional support from the very institution that
, D. , Hunt , A. and Gray Meral , A. ( 2021 ), Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Face of COVID-19 and Displacement: Restoring Resilient Futures, Humanitarian Policy Group Commissioned Report ( London : ODI ), www.citigroup.com/citi/foundation/data/Womens-economic-empowerment-in-the-face-of-COVID-19.pdf
Bank and UNHCR, 2020 ). The cases of two research participants, Iman and Abbas, illustrate how finance, digital or otherwise, could not ensure self-reliance when their paths to realistic livelihoods were blocked by absence of foundational rights, costly bureaucratic processes and uncertain futures in the country. Iman, a 40-year-old Syrian, felt socially integrated into a small town in Northern Jordan, where they arrived in 2013, but she did not feel
correct remuneration [and] providing acceptable conditions of service ’ (2016: 63, emphasis added). Irrespective of these aims, many UNRWA employees – including the Palestinian teachers, guards and sanitation workers I have been speaking with across Lebanon – do not believe that UNRWA is committed to ‘protecting’ them at a time when their jobs and futures are at risk. Indeed, potential redundancies in Lebanon’s educational vocational centres had already been officially announced in March 2018 (Cordone, cited in AFP, 2018 ), and my interviewees