This text was published by Rike Sitas, Liza Rose Cirolia and Marcela Guerrero Casas, 20 April 2021, at the website of African Centre for Cities and the African Urban Research Initiative (AURI) The AURI workshop series concluded on 25 March with an interactive session about comparative and collaborative research. Moderated by Liza Cirolia and Rike Sitas, this workshop built on the two previous workshops on co-production and communication and focused on the value comparative studies offers to Urban Theory and practice across African cities. Liza introduced the session by reiterating the goal of...

Villa 20 is one of a number of informal settlements in Buenos Aires. As in many other cities around the world, authorities and inhabitants feared the spread of the corona virus in the informal settlements in the early days of the pandemic. Surprisingly, Villa 20 and some other villas stood out with a considerably slower spread and lower number of infected inhabitants. The Observatory on Latin America (1) carried out an analysis of three villas and specific neighbourhood characteristics as part of the Mistra Urban Futures comparative work on city responses to Covid-19 (2). The study was carried...

Kisumu city in Kenya is overwhelmed by growing waste generation and limited capacity to expand collection services. Most of the waste of the informal settlements is not collected, posing great health and environment hazards. Several attempts have been made to improve the waste situation. These initiatives have generally been unsuccessful in reaching sustainable solutions. To move forward, a co-production knowledge process on waste management was initiated by Kisumu Local Interaction Platform (KLIP) in 2010, with the overall objective to enhance the waste management value chain and maintain a...

Understanding and engaging with the different rationalities of participants in co-production of knowledge processes is essential, writes a Mistra Urban Futures team in a Trialog article.

Everyone was asked to ‘drop their titles’ as levelling the playing field is one of the first things one must do when engaging in a process of co-production of knowledge. Marcela Guerrero Casas writes about the second AURI workshop.