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❶ The Team
❷ Contributors
❸ Partners
❹ How To Get Involved?
African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of Witwatersrand and Mobility Governance Lab at the University of Oxford present
Atlas of Uncertainty
Transforming African Cityscapes
Human mobility is the defining feature of an era marked by political instability, economic precarity, and environmental insecurity. These movements are reshaping urban landscapes and Africa’s cities stand at the forefront of this transformation. They are now among the world’s largest and most diverse urban centres, serving as focal points for a youthful, rapidly growing population. Yet, this is occurring without the traditional pathways of industrialization, job creation, and service provision. Urban life now blurs the line between lottery and life-making. It is a life of uncertainty. The complexities of material marginalization and mobile place-making demand novel ways of understanding community, politics, and the city itself. It requires novel forms of analysis that avoid oversimplified narratives and instead embrace the ambiguities characterising African urban life.
The Atlas of Uncertainty unsettles the racialised tropes of danger, desperation, and deprivation informing the manic mapping of contemporary migration and urbanisation in Africa. Where such classic cartography typically projects scientific certainty, the Atlas elevates emotion, ambiguity, and contributors’ positionality. Rather than definitive knowledge, it offers reflections to elicit the senses. It aims to unsettle and inform, to generate — not foreclose. Drawing on surveys, qualitative research, and artistic engagements in gateway neighbourhoods across Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, the Atlas builds on decades of interdisciplinary research. First realised as a pilot installation at the 2023 architectural Biennale in Venice, our goal is to cultivate a human understanding of time, travel, and urban politics. In doing so, we aim to understand urban life in an era of uncertainty.
For more on our research team click here.
What is the Atlas of Uncertainty?
The Atlas of Uncertainty is a publication, an exhibit, and a digital platform. It integrates written essays, visual art, sound, and critical cartography. Created dialogically, it offers layered and nuanced understandings of transforming urban spaces and the moral and material economies that bind them. It is at once a tool of knowledge communication and a reflection on what we believe and how we know it.
For more information on the research and how to get involved please contact us using any of the channels below;
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