Postdoctoral Fellowship in Urban Studies

The University of Basel, Switzerland, invites applications for one postdoctoral research position in Urban Studies, as part of the following research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation: PRECURBICA: Precarious Urbanisms in Coastal Africa.
With accelerating urbanization, strategies to address the climate crisis in cities are urgently needed. Yet African cities, scripted as the 'most vulnerable' to climate risk, remain largely invisible in current debates about urbanism and climate change. As long as conversations about urban adaptation are based on a generic 'global city', the proposed solutions will be capital-intensive and premised on the promise of rapid, smart technological advances. Yet such techno-utopias are out of reach for a majority of the world's growing urban population.
To bridge this gap, PRECURBICA reverses the perspective and centres African actors on the same analytical plane as the 'global' urban planners and policymakers that typically dominate these debates. Rather than seeing urban 'precariousness' as an endemic condition that mires African societies in a position of dependency, the project takes it as an invitation to uncover strategies of living and making the city in the face of looming crisis, and learn from these. Cities are spaces of aspiration and possibility. Because of Africa's history in the world, however, African coastal cities also stand at the sharp edge of global change: in addition to seaborne environmental threats, the tensions between the competing imperatives of growth-based development and climate change mitigation are thrown into stark relief.
The project will ethnographically investigate the impact of climate risk on social and infrastructural processes in four African coastal cities: Pointe-Noire, the Republic of Congo; Cotonou, Benin; Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Beira, Mozambique (the latter is PI's own case study). The project is attached to the Urban Studies division of the University of Basel, in collaboration with the Centre for African Studies Basel.
Research findings will not only be relevant to the fields of urban studies, social anthropology, and critical development studies, but will also help build up new partnerships with research institutions in the cities under study, and yield insights for planners, policymakers, and architects currently engaged with urban adaptation to climate threats in Africa and beyond.