23.10.2018
Alice Hertzog, Doctoral researcher, Transdisciplinarity lab & Chair of Sociology, ETH Zürich
As people move and
cities grow the urban spaces we inhabit are becoming increasingly
diverse. We easily recognize the value of this urban diversity in the
cities we prize – in their offer of culinary delights, nightlife and
vibrant cultural scenes. When newcomers show up they bring novel ways of
belonging in the city, of co-habiting together, as communities rub
shoulders, and sometimes rub up against each other. As social scientists
we are interested in the forms of sociality, urbanity and politics that
increased diversity produce. And whilst we have a good idea of how
multiculturalism plays out in the great cosmopolitan cities in the
North, there's much to learn about urban settings in the Global South
where future urban growth and mobility will take place.
The Academy of African Urban Diversity (AAUD)
is training a new generation of scholars to tackle head-on some of
these key questions and advance knowledge about mobility and urban
diversity. The African continent is rapidly urbanizing. If this point is
agreed upon by a wide variety of actors—from media, to governments, UN
agencies, development banks as well as scholars—there is far less
consensus about what this process will mean for Africans. As regional
and global crossroads, African cities refract broader geo-economic and
political trends, often in innovative, anticipatory and unexpected ways.
This September I was lucky enough
to join the second cohort of AAUD at the Max Planck institute in Berlin.
This gave me the opportunity to engage with other emerging scholars
from across the social sciences attempting to provide answers to urgent
questions related to Africa's growing and diversifying cities. These
scholars, working all over the continent, are contributing to debates,
theories and a growing understanding of how diversity is shaping urban
futures. Drawing on their work, we plunged into the impact of diversity
in case studies including local market economies in Ouagadougou,
informal street traders in Accra, urban social movements in Harare,
Somali refugees in Nairobi and a post-colonial neighborhood in Cape
Town.
The AAUD is headed by Dr. Loren Landau – co-editor of Forging African Communities, Mobility Integration and Belonging, and director of the African Centre Migration and Society – and Dr. Léonie Newhouse
a senior research fellow with the African Urban Diversity cluster at
the Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic
Diversity. The key idea behind the AAUD is to bring together a new
generation of scholars from Africa, the US and Europe to refine their
research focus, promote professional development, and build
trans-national scholarly communities. It's a boot camp for migration,
mobility and urban scholars seeking to increase the strength of their
theoretical claims, define clearer research goals, and build the
endurance needed to write a PhD!
The
goal of this academy is to produce a new generation of academics who
will collaborate, partner, and together populate the field of urban
diversity studies in the African context. Another clear ambition was to
incite researchers to produce results that speak to wider audiences,
beyond the strict empirical focus of their work. What wider lessons can
be learnt about the political, social and economic processes surrounding
Africa's urbanization? And how can insights from our specific cases be
transferred and shed light on other contexts?
The
academy set our scholarly ambitions at new heights. Sadly research
about African cities, especially by African scholars, encounters many
barriers before being considered within global debates about our urban
futures. So the earlier we can build solid alliances between scholars,
the more likely we are going to be able to bring the topic of African
diversity to the table!
The Academy is in its second year now,
and judging by the first cohort, it is living up to its promise to
foster brave new research. We will meet again in a year – to check our
progress, share results and continue to build this exciting new
community.
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