International Workshop: "Liquid Urbanisms in Africa: Thinking Climate Adaptation with and through Water"

International Workshop in Critical Urbanism, University of Basel, 12-13 June 2025

Faced with rising sea levels, cities across the globe are being remade to confront the threat of water. The climate crisis meets water and urban life head on, manifesting in an array of contact zones that both threaten and give hope to the people who live with them.

Using water as a way of seeing through, with and about climate-related urban issues, this workshop invites a critical examination of the urban/water interface in African coastal cities, particularly in the context of climate change. African coastal cities are at the cutting edge of water-borne climate change, as they are forecast to attract the highest urban growth and commercial investment, but 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, co-organized by the PRECURBICA project (Precarious Urbanism in Coastal Cities in Africa) and the Swiss Society for African Studies, aims to bring together urban planning and critical social theory by exploring the diverse ways African urban communities are adapting their lives and environments to these challenges. Through a focus on various real-world examples based on in-depth qualitative empirical research, including but not limited to the practices of street-level bureaucrats, fishing communities, home-builders, residents’ associations and city planners, the workshop seeks to uncover new modes for living in and with the “urban sea”.

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, to develop a perspective of critical hope on sustainable urban development in the face of global climate challenges.

Registration Fees:

• Free for student members of SGAS/SSAS
• 30 CHF for employed SGAS/SSAS members and non-member students
• 60 CHF for employed non-members

(Fees cover coffee breaks and lunches.)

Organised with support of the Swiss Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities SAGW/ASSH

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