Critical Urbanisms

Critical Urbanisms Kontaktinformationen, Karte und Wegbeschreibungen, Kontaktformulare, Öffnungszeiten, Dienstleistungen, Bewertungen, Fotos, Videos und Ankündigungen von Critical Urbanisms, Hochschule und Universität, Hebelstrasse 3, Basel.

From the Freiburg Rising Stars Academy, our PhD student Leah Lazer steps into our "People & Projects" spotlight. Leah is...
23/03/2026

From the Freiburg Rising Stars Academy, our PhD student Leah Lazer steps into our "People & Projects" spotlight. Leah is part of the 2025–26 cohort of early-career researchers worldwide hosted by a PI at Freiburg to collaboratively develop their projects and intensively exchange with a community of multidisciplinary scholars. She was hosted by the Africa Center for Transregional Research (ACT) and Prof. Tim Zajontz in the Department of Political Science. Building on a collaboration developed over the past six months, the visit enabled them to consolidate and advance a joint research agenda on the geopolitics of foreign investment in urban transportation infrastructure in the global South. This work will form part of her doctoral project "Geopolitics and Gridlock: Urban Mobility in the Age of Financialized Infrastructure" in Urban Studies at the University of Basel.

Image caption: Dr Abdou Rahim Lema (Concordia University, Montreal), Prof. Tim Zajontz (University of Freiburg; Africa Center for Transregional Research), and Leah Lazer (University of Basel) collaborated on research about Chinese infrastructure investment in Africa at the Freiburg Rising Stars Academy Conference Week. 18 March 2026.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DWO5SnzAtlB/

Ambre Alfredo’s PRECURBICA research focuses on Cotonou (Benin), where she examines everyday experiences of living with w...
16/03/2026

Ambre Alfredo’s PRECURBICA research focuses on Cotonou (Benin), where she examines everyday experiences of living with water in lakeside neighbourhoods. Amid Cotonou’s rapid urban transformation, these communities face demolition to make way for large-scale infrastructure projects. Her doctoral project explores how residents navigate the constant threats of eviction and how national urban visions often perpetuate historical spatial and social inequalities.

Images caption: “Houses on Stilt in Ladji, Cotonou.” April 2024. Ambre Alfredo

https://www.instagram.com/p/DV8h0HzAump/?img_index=1

Semhar Haile’s PRECURBICA research examines strategies of place-making and claims to recognition and personhood among wa...
12/03/2026

Semhar Haile’s PRECURBICA research examines strategies of place-making and claims to recognition and personhood among waterfront communities in coastal Freetown. Drawing chiefly on ethnographic research in two self-built coastal settlements, the research traces the material, embodied, political, and relational practices through which coastal residents actively make the city. Building on scholarship in urban studies, anthropology, and critical scholarship on the Anthropocene, her doctoral dissertation foregrounds alternative insights into how cities are lived, built, and imagined from their margins.

Image caption: “Self-building land - Freetown, Sierra Leone.” July 2024. Semhar Haile

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVx8QfbgmS1/

Dany Tiwa’s PRECURBICA research (2023-2026) documented the complex interplay of climate change, waste, and resilience in...
11/03/2026

Dany Tiwa’s PRECURBICA research (2023-2026) documented the complex interplay of climate change, waste, and resilience in Pointe-Noire, Congo. Facing rising sea levels, communities living in the city's marshes utilize global debris—specifically, second-hand tires imported from developed nations—to build essential infrastructure. This practice highlights a stark global inequity: the repurposing of the developed world's waste for survival in the global South. However, these materials inadvertently exacerbate the environmental threat by constraining natural water movement, creating a critical and unsustainable feedback loop.

Image caption: “Elevated walkway built by repurposing worn-out imported car tires in Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo.” 21 September 2023. Dany Tiwa.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVv_Sc8AjeS/

From the Precarious Urbanisms in Coastal Africa (PRECURBICA) Project led by Jon Schubert, Natalie Schöbitz’s postdoc res...
10/03/2026

From the Precarious Urbanisms in Coastal Africa (PRECURBICA) Project led by Jon Schubert, Natalie Schöbitz’s postdoc research in eThekwini and KwaDukuza (South Africa) explores how people live with water infrastructures that are formally present yet unreliable. Her work traces the storing, waiting, hoping, through which households manage uncertain supply, revealing how breakdown becomes part of ordinary urban life. Following the domestic circuits of buckets, tanks, pipes, and bills, her research connects municipal fragmentation and ageing systems to the intimate labour required to sustain life.

Image captions: “Smart water meters, KwaDukuza” and “Storing Grey Water during an extended water outage, KwaDukuza.” 19 Feb 2026 Natalie Schöbitz.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVsxyleAuOT/?img_index=1

Jon Schubert's research in Beira (Mozambique) takes the shine on our "People & Project" feature this week.Jon's work hig...
09/03/2026

Jon Schubert's research in Beira (Mozambique) takes the shine on our "People & Project" feature this week.
Jon's work highlights the disconnect between institutional best practices to "build back better" after the devastations of Tropical Cyclone Idai (2019) and the realities of living, rebuilding, and home-making in a postextractivist, and opposition-governed, city like Beira. Through the intersecting circuits of concrete, rebar, sugar cane and coal, his analysis seeks to trace the buried seams of extractivism that not only link Beira to its hinterland and to far-flung places across the globe, but also stretch across time, connecting the violence of the Companhia de Moçambique’s concessionary rule of the territory (1890-1942) to the seeming inescapability of today’s boom-and-bust cycles of coal and future LNG. Published work from this research contributes to critical debates on urban resilience and adaptation (IJURR 2025).

Image captions: “Roof iron sheets lifted off by the gales of hurricane Idai, still lying in a former living room for lack of funds to repair the roof”; “Makeshift repairs and living arrangements in a cyclone-damaged top-floor flat in Ponta Gêa, Beira”; and “Extending an old, colonial-era house with rebar and concrete, Ponta Gêa, Beira.” March-April 2023.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVqNU1zAnM8/?img_index=1

This week, our "People & Projects" highlight is on Kenny Cupers research, conducted during his leave and supported by a ...
03/03/2026

This week, our "People & Projects" highlight is on Kenny Cupers research, conducted during his leave and supported by a MIASA (Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa) through a senior fellowship. During this time, he is writing a history of the postcolony that traces how land, design, and performance practices reconfigure sovereignty. Research for this book project is rooted in the collaborative research and film project Kamiriithu Afterlives (kamiriithuafterlives.net), and archival research on villagization and settlement schemes in Kenya.

Image caption: “Documentary still from Kamiriithu Afterlives (feature-length film by Kenny Cupers, Majalla Alexandria, and Makau Kitata), showing Samuel Ochieng, Lauryn Awuor, and Ann Wanjiku in a reenactment of the 1977 play “I Will Marry When I want” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVasozbgtkb/

25/02/2026

School is closed, so we are out in the city for Basel Fasnacht 2026. Wishing our students and faculty a happy carnival and successful Spring semester!

This is a farewell post to the 2025 communication team constellation! From left to right: Ernest Sewordor, Jennifer Fels...
08/02/2026

This is a farewell post to the 2025 communication team constellation! From left to right: Ernest Sewordor, Jennifer Felsenberg, Amanda Haas Abd El Halim, with Kenny Cupers, head of the communications committee, missing from this pic. Amanda will leave us and will soon be replaced by a new student assistant.

Thank you for a great team effort in managing planning, gathering, designing, and publishing news from our faculty and students in Urban Studies.

We look forward to the start of the Spring Semester 2026 and to a new edition of our newsletter, which will be sent at the beginning of each semester. Please sign up for it through the link in bio.

Ambre Alfredo, Doreen Mende and Lea Nienhoff, have edited “Trouble Comradeship in the Arts: On Mozambican Artists’ Exper...
09/12/2025

Ambre Alfredo, Doreen Mende and Lea Nienhoff, have edited “Trouble Comradeship in the Arts: On Mozambican Artists’ Experiences in the GDR, their Works, and Political Imaginations“ with Spector Books (Leipzig). The anthology explores the cultural exchanges between the People’s Republic of Mozambique and the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s. Through conversations, photographs, personal letters, and official reports, the publication brings together the perspectives of Mozambican and East German actors involved in these exchanges, while situating them within the institutional frameworks that shaped the “comradeship.” Central to the Research Edition are the stories of painter Mankew V. Mahumana and theatre director David Abílio Mondlane – two Mozambican artists who lived and worked in East German cities such as Rostock, Schwerin, Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin. The book also features a contemporary Mozambican perspective from art historian and researcher Alda Costa, who reflects on the lasting influence of the journeys and collaborations pursued by Mozambican artists after independence. The publication is part of the SNF-funded project “Decolonizing Socialism: Entangled Internationalism”.

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112 pages
Published by Spector Books, 2025
ISBN978-3-95905-876-6

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About Us

In our rapidly changing and contested global environment, cities are becoming increasingly important: they house a majority of the world’s inhabitants and act as catalysts of social, political, economic, cultural, and ecological change. Urban Studies at the University of Basel offers a new platform for understanding these planetary transformations. Our aim is to expand the study of the urban by confronting today’s social struggles and global conflicts with the legacies of empire and with alternative practices of world-making. Our work starts from the premise that the world’s urban and environmental challenges call not only for new ways of doing but for new ways of thinking. Imagining alternative futures means rethinking the present—its historical making, its political unfolding, and the ways in which it is made sensible.

The University of Basel’s Master in Critical Urbanisms is an English-taught four-semester program that trains a new generation of graduates to think beyond divisions of urban versus rural and North versus South in order to address the complexity of urban lifeworlds in the twenty-first century. The program is founded by an internationally recognized faculty who work on and with cities and territories from a global perspective. The curriculum is structured around an interdisciplinary research studio where students work together combining humanities and social-scientific methods with visual and spatial analysis, and a semester of study and fieldwork in Cape Town, at the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town, or alternatively, field work in the Global South.

For more information, please visit our website: https://criticalurbanisms.philhist.unibas.ch