🌆 Building strong foundations for urban reform

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Reflections from ACRC’s second consortium-wide meeting

Around 120 consortium members gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at the end of May 2023 for ACRC's second annual meeting. The energising and action-packed week began with preliminary team workshops and visits to neighbourhood projects before the main meeting commenced.

Sessions covered learnings from ACRC's foundation phase – bringing together the threads from domain, city of systems and political settlements studies, along with research uptake – as well as looking ahead to the implementation phase. Future-focused discussions centred around ACRC's ongoing decolonisation efforts, designing programmes for cities that are being taken forward and those that are not, the potential role of reform coalitions in our action research, and the selection process for priority complex problems.

Fostering resilient and inclusive urban development in Freetown

Kweku Koranteng recaps on the Freetown uptake workshop, which brought together more than 50 participants from the Sierra Leone government, civil society organisations, development partners, community members and private sector partners, to engage with ACRC city research.

Translating research into positive urban action for Accra

Rosebella Apollo summarises Accra's uptake workshop, which saw over 100 stakeholders – including researchers, local communities, urban reform coalitions, government ministers and FCDO representatives – convening to discuss research findings and possible pathways to reform.

AFRICAN CITIES PODCAST

Joseph Macarthy, executive director of the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), joins Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael for a conversation around coalition building for inclusive urban reform. He talks about collaborating with community residents as co-researchers and how City and Community Learning Platforms can provide a space for genuine dialogue among different actors in Freetown.

Listen via our website

Shuaib Lwasa talks to Ezana about building and sustaining reform coalitions, drawing on his experiences as founder of the Urban Action Lab (UAL) at Makerere University, Kampala. He discusses the importance of knowledge co-production, along with challenges around bringing together disadvantaged and advantaged groups – and how urban researchers should play a bridging role between communities and other actors.

Listen via our website

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Do you have any questions or suggestions for future e-news updates? Please contact African Cities digital communications officer, Hannah van Rooyen at hannah.vanrooyen@manchester.ac.uk.

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