Everyday urban practices in Africa Disrupting global norms - Universities linking local realities and global policies

The event will launch the book "Everyday urban practices in Africa: Disrupting global norms”, edited by Nadine Appelhans, Carmel Rawhani, Marie Huchzermeyer, Basirat Oyalowo and Mfaniseni Sihlongonyane. The book is the result of a collaboration between Wits University, the Technische Universität Berlin and the University of Lagos.
The book examines international norms that inform urban development strategies in African cities against the backdrop of everyday lived experiences and practices in the continent's rapidly growing, densely populated urban spaces and regions. Adopting international policy frameworks has created a new universal agenda for developing cities. However, these frameworks have also imposed global paradigms and discourses that are often at odds with local urbanisms.
Halfway through the 15-year journey towards achieving the SDGs, there is a need for reflection and deliberation on a post-2030 agenda, and this book takes a step towards this objective. Its contributors identify powerful assumptions, norms and positionalities that obscure efforts to achieve sustainable development in African cities, as well as along the North-South divide. Through disruption, the authors critically reinterpret the meanings of policy and the practice of local urbanism, ultimately challenging the logic of universalising concepts that underpin implementation in the current international policy system and asserting the need for contextualised urban policies.
Drawing on "Everyday urban practices in Africa: Disrupting global norms” this event will reflect on the role of universities and international academic cooperation in designing and enabling and sustainable transformation processes by providing in-depth understanding of current challenges cities face, initiating change, and critically and constructively reflecting on global urban policies, their localisation and their impact on diverse and complex everyday realities. The panel will also explore how research with communities and advocacy can create productive linkages between civil society, academia and policy, bridging different scales and rationalities and translating different concerns. It will also reflect on the potential of international cooperation among higher education institutions to produce policy-relevant knowledge on urbanisation processes, rooted in different academic cultures and practices, as well as regional experiences and expertise.
The panel at this event will bring together the editors and authors of the book from University of Lagos, TU Berlin and University of the Witwatersrand, who are engaged in the DAAD/BMZ funded graduate school Wits-TUB-UNILAG Urban Lab and the African Research Universities Alliance’s (ARUA) Centre of Excellence for Urbanisation and Habitable Cities, hosted by the University of Lagos.