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The call for papers for the African Urbansims conference organised by the Wits-TUB-UniLag Urban Lab and hosted by Wits Unversity's School of Architecture and Planning is still open until April 21 2024. The conference will take place from October 23 to October 26 2024. To submit an astract, please upload your proposal under the respective session. You can find all the sessions open to presentation proposals here.

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Prof. Matthew Gandy: Learning from Lagos (reprise)

Prof. Matthew Gandy is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Professor of Geography at University College London and was founder and first director of the UCL Urban Laboratory from 2005-11.

Prof. Boris Schröder-Esselbach

Prof. Boris Schröder-Esselbach is a professor of Plant Ecology at TU Berlin. Previously he held a professorship for Landscape Ecology and Environmental Systems Analysis at TU Braunschweig, where he was also Dean of Environmental Sciences/Geoecology.

James Gondwe: Can Cattle Speak? Collecting data from cattle using multispecies methods

James Gondwe is a PhD student in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University and scholarship-holder under the Wits-TUB-Unilag Urban Lab. He is also a senior lecturer in the Department of Geosciences at Mzuzu University. His research focuses on more than human geographies in the context of animal geographies of cattle in Karonga Town, Malawi.

The call for papers for the African Urbansims conference organised by the Wits-TUB-UniLag Urban Lab and hosted by Wits Unversity's School of Architecture and Planning is now open! The conference will take place from October 23 to October 26 2024. You can find all the sessions open to presentation proposals here. The call is open until April 21 2024.

In spatial disciplines such as urban research, we often have to deal with a wide variety of data: Interviews, observations, documents, photos or video are just some of them. Data collection is usually tedious in itself, and little time is then often spent analyzing and describing it - but this becomes necessary in research articles at the latest. The webinar presents ways to analyze urban data with a special focus on qualitative content analysis and grounded theory approaches.

Ariane Sept is a professor for Participative Spatial Development and Community Work at Munich University of Applied Sciences since 2022. Before she has been working as a Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner, Germany. She studied Urban and Regional Planning and holds a PhD in Sociology. Her main fields of study regard current spatial transformations especially the interplay of rural and urban areas, social innovations, and urban sustainability. In her teaching and research activities she has a special focus on methodological issues, because, with her background in different disciplines, she repeatedly realizes that social sciences and spatial disciplines sometimes have completely different approaches to methods. Finding a common methodological language here is a major concern for her.

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The Wits-TUB-UniLag Urban Lab will host an international conference on "African Urbanisms" in Johannesburg next year. The conference will take place from October 23 to October 26 at Wits University's School of Architecture and Planning. The call for session proposals is open until January 21 2024. More information on the conference's theme can be found here.

In a new blog post James Gondwe, one of the project's PhD students based at Wits university, reflects on his engagement with animal geographies at this year's European Conference on African Studies. In his PhD project James explores the role of cattle in the making of urban spaces in Karonga Town, Malawi. You can find the full text here.