Tag Archives: Shuaib Lwasa

Viewpoints: The informal as the “city” in urban Africa: Experience from Kampala

Shuaib Lwasa
Makerere University, Uganda

shutterstock_129730406 (1)Cities in developing countries have grappled with spatial planning, infrastructure, housing and, more recently, fragmented and “runaway” development. Spatial plans largely remain at a strategic level and less at the neighborhood scale, where there is a disjuncture between the envisioned urban layout and the actual development (Lwasa, 2013). The coupling of these multiple challenges has rendered planning a failure, resulting in a continued organic development of “informal” cities with diverse infrastructure and services that contrast with centralized systems used as the benchmark for measuring progress of a formal city. In this article, I postulate that the “informal city” is actually the city. Continue reading

Symposium: A Decade of Urbanization & Global Environmental Change

urbanization global environmental change symposiumThe Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project is proud to announce “A Decade of Urbanization and Global Environmental Change: A UGEC Symposium” on Thursday, February 18, 2016 at the Arizona State University Memorial Union in the Pima Auditorium.  The event starts at 10:00.  It is part of the Sustainability Solutions Festival.

Panelists will draw from their own research and practical expertise to offer insight into the needs and directions of future UGEC research and science-policy-practice linkages, particularly addressing the role of young scholars and students interested in urbanization and sustainability issues.

Click the image for more details, or click here to download the pdf version.

Moderator:

Christopher Boone, Arizona State University, USA

Panelists:

Shuaib Lwasa, Makerere University, Uganda
Patricia Romero-Lankao, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
Karen Seto, Yale University, USA
David Simon, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK & Mistra Urban Futures, Sweden

Ph.D. Research Opportunity in waste and/or sanitation in Ugandan cities

Dr. Mary Lawhon (Department of Geography, Florida State University) is seeking a Ph.D. student beginning in August 2016 to assist with an international research collaboration on waste and sanitation in African cities. The candidate is expected to spend 6-8 months conducting fieldwork in Uganda supported by a Swedish Research Council (VR) grant. The remainder of the candidate’s time in the program will be supported through the regular funding mechanisms at FSU, including teaching and research assistantships; the department also typically provides a final semester writing fellowship.  The candidate will have the opportunity to interact with an international team of experts based at Makerere University (Uganda), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), University of Cape Town (SA), and Durham University (UK), participate in relevant workshops, receive conference funding, and co-author scholarly publications.

More details about the research project and its theoretical framing can be found here: http://www.situatedecologies.net/archives/1500.

Information about FSU’s geography program and application process can be found here: http://geography.fsu.edu/programs/graduate/phd/.  Graduate applications to the department are due Feb 1, 2016.

To apply for this position, please send a CV and 1-2 page cover letter explaining your interests and experience to Dr. Lawhon by January 5, 2015.

For more information, please contact Mary Lawhon (mlawhon@fsu.edu)