 Hello everyone and welcome. Welcome to this fireside chat with Professor Joe Biel. Today we'll be talking about Professor Biel's work and also about especially about the challenges facing African cities. I'm very pleased to be here today with Professor Biel. As many of you will certainly know she's a professor and distinguished research fellow at the London School of Economics and she's conducted research in Africa and in Asia on urban development and governance as well as in as well as on cities in situations of conflict and state fragility. She's executive director of the education of education and society for the British Council, formerly deputy vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town and among other positions she is on the wider UNU wider board and she is also a member of the advisory group of the African Cities Research Consortium. So the African Cities Research Consortium is a new research consortium led by the University of Manchester with nine, I believe it's nine core partners including UNU wider. It's a very exciting group. We're really excited to be a part of it and the aim of the consortium is to provide new insights to enable African cities to be productive, equitable, and inclusive. So we're really excited to talk with you about all of that today and just to introduce myself, my name is Rachel Gislequist. I'm a senior research fellow here at UNU wider. I'm a political scientist. I work on some related issues so I work on issues of state fragility and governance on African politics. I usually work more at the national or the state level and so I'm really interested to hear as time permits about some of the comparisons of work at the city versus the national level and what we can learn from each other. So the way this call will work, this chat will work, is we'll kick off the discussion and then we'll open up to you in the audience. I see there's a number of people here and as time permits I'm going to try to unmute you to post questions but please also feel free to post questions in the Q&A box and be ready to be unmuted so we can have a nice conversation together. But why don't we kick off and let me ask Joe, how did you become interested in work in this area, in work on African urban development? Well by default rather than design actually because my early work was on women's organization in the city of Durban when I was at the University of KwaZulu Natal and I had to leave South Africa under the apartheid period, arrived in the UK and discovered that what I did as local research fell in under the rubric of development studies and so it was at the Institute of Development Studies that I did my first work in the UK mainly on gender and mainly learning how what I was doing fitted within this broad interdisciplinary field of development studies and from there I went to the development planning unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL and of course in that context became deeply embedded in all issues urban and for a long time worked on gender issues in cities and in urban planning and women in cities and then from there I went to the London School of Economics where I was for nearly 20 years and broadened out in two ways, one my interest in gender became an interest in social relations and social dynamics more generally and my interest in cities narrowed if you like to looking at issues of urban poverty, urban services development and urban governance and it's really from those beginnings that I became an urbanist not the usual route of geography or urban planning. Oh that's really interesting I wonder yeah maybe it would be interesting to know you know thinking about the various projects you've been involved with what what are you know what is the most exciting one or one or two of the most exciting rewarding ones that you've been a part of? So it's oh it's a difficult question because I've been involved in many and all of them were exciting I think early projects such as the one I did in fact with Manchester and University of Birmingham on urban poverty and urban governance that was in the late 90s early 2000s that was a fascinating project because at that point development studies was not interested in the urban as the field was focused on rural development as a field to the extent urban issues or cities came into it was through a focus on industrialization policy and so there was a long battle really to get cities on the agenda and I think that project was one that played a part. You know first it was scholars challenging what the dominant thinking was which was very much framed by Michael Lipton's urban bias thesis and the notion that the poor were in rural areas that urban dwellers had access to decision makers and could mold policy to their own interests and scholars like Gareth Jones and Stuart Corbridge challenged that we challenged that by looking at the dynamics and dimensions of urban poverty not setting it up as an either or to rural poverty but rather setting it up as an area of investigation and its own right with its own characteristics its own problems and its own solutions. It was also at a time when the World Bank and UNDP had both put out urban policy papers that was in there in 1991 but you know during that whole decade and into the 2000s into this century progress was very slow I think it's different now we take an urban focus for granted because of the and we now have an urban SDG you know which was a great triumph and the result of a lot of lobbying and hard work on the part of urban policy makers and academics so I think that was very very much an exciting project I think the one I'm involved in now which is looking at interdisciplinary issues as a way of addressing cities is is also important so in the 2000s leading up to a publication by Oxford University Press in 2010 I was involved in a UNU wider project on multidisciplinary approaches to urbanization and that was yeah do you remember that one I do yeah that was a precursor to some of the work going on now looking at interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives but at that time Ravi Kamba and I were focused very much on multidisciplinary approaches within the social sciences and a lot of what we dealt with was how economists and the softer social sciences viewed and approach cities the differences between and how working together would lead to more efficacious solutions the work I'm involved in now is with a much broader group of disciplines including engineers and architects so looking um not just at the social sciences and the work um is on urban sanitation and waste management and um is it's very challenging because you know engineers are trained to think about the ways at which a bridge might collapse and social scientists are trained to think about the people crossing the bridge and sleeping under the bridge and and so coming together in a broader in the broader scope of interdisciplinarity has been very exciting how do you have you do you have any tips for facilitating these these interdisciplinary discussions and what what sort of um how has it worked or not worked the obvious one is is to to listen to listen um but also to be heard um and I I think I mean work that I've done with um Addis Ababa uh in an interdisciplinary sanitation project involved iterative engagement so you know often you're talking talking at cross purposes initially but you come back with some evidence you bring forward some perspectives and insights that provide the aha moment for people from another discipline and eventually you come to some compromise or some some common understanding and I think the best you can hope for is a common language and a common approach I'm not sure it's sustained always people do go back into their disciplinary boxes but um you know if we've taken 30 years to get urbanization firmly on the agenda I think we've got to wait quite a long time and be persistent over another couple of decades to get the interdisciplinary approach approach is really embedded so I could keep asking you questions but I I see there's already uh at least one question here in the Q&A box um Salam al-Rabadi are you here can you unmute yourself can you request to be uh to speak if not I can ask the question and then others in the audience there are a lot of people I see here who I know would have great questions please do um feel free to request to speak and then you can pose a question but we have one question here from uh Salam al-Rabadi um he says in terms of reading or analyzing the history and development of the global economy how can we read the reality of the world trade organization I wonder if you have have thoughts any thoughts about that or we can collect a few questions too and then come back it's a broad question yeah I mean if I bring that question to a city's focus I think what's very interesting is that world trade um happens around urban hubs um there is a net a global network of cities that are um around which trade is concentrated uh and of course when you think about how global organizations like the world trade organization the UN the World Bank they are invariably organized at a national level and cities are outside of global governance um and yet whether you're talking about trade whether you're talking about um rebuilding post-covid uh whether you're talking about um global governance you it's very difficult to think about it without cities being there as part of a sort of multi-level multi-dimensional governance uh process so so that would be my my take on that question um thank you um there's another question here from Kala Shridhar would you like to unmute yourself if you can well I can I'll pose the question then it seems that unmuting is not working so well uh so the question the comment is Dr. Biel very interesting discussion how would you distinguish the experience of African cities from those of Indian cities especially during the pandemic very interesting question um I mean if you if you look at uh the African cities research consortium which is focused on African cities when that was first conceived there was a lot of discussion around why why Africa um as Rachel will know um and in some ways you could argue that uh African cities represent cities um in in the global south in challenging conditions very well um in other ways of course there are specificities so what's common with Asia I would say they're fast growing um so Africa as a continent is the most rapidly urbanizing continent um cities of South Asia are already urbanized um so Africa is urbanizing off off a lower base if you like um I think um rural urban migration in African cities is often circular not always but often people keep routes to rural areas in various ways in a way that is not always open to urban dwellers in South Asian cities so those would be two immediate thoughts um of course the size and complexity of South Asian cities is often it often dwarfs what we're looking at in Africa um but if you look at um some of the large slums in cities like Mumbai and Nairobi, Kibira for example, a lot of the issues a lot of the problems a lot of the opportunities are the same you have populations of urban strivers who make it against the odds who are becoming entrepreneurs in the context of uh slum economies um and you know a lot of those lessons would be useful for other parts of the world to learn so we have another question here um from Agneta Nyabundi uh whoops yes uh kindly address the aspect of urban areas uh and its hinterlands in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic given the fluid nature of urban and rural divides in Africa another excellent question and one that um people have been addressing in this conference uh very um very extensively um I mean I think the first thing to say is um cities are at the heart of the COVID pandemic they are the theatres if you like of the crisis is not to say that the pandemic hasn't extended to rural areas but it's concentrated in cities that's uh the first thing to say the second is that the links between cities mean and migration between them uh mean that uh they are vectors so if you environment and urbanization recently published a very interesting article by Caroline Moser where she looks at um a small not very well known city in Ecuador Guayaquil and um the migration for work of people from Guayaquil to Spain when the pandemic hit Europe Italy first in Spain people moved back and there was a devastating impact on the city so we're not just talking about small areas but globally you're having that mobility uh impacting on cities I think um yesterday we heard in this this conference um on um the experience of research done by wego on the informal economy um and in that session it was made uh very clear that the informal um sector workers in the informal economy uh experienced a much worse impact recovered much more slowly and in my area of work which is on solid waste management which includes recycling and waste picking and rag picking even in that area the waste generated has been less during the pandemic the dump sites have been closed so access to existing waste has not been there and that's devastatingly and negatively impacted um on the poorest people in in an economy and then when you start thinking about um rebuilding cities post-covid you have to think again about the governance issues and Rachel you you're a political uh scientist you know how important um political inclusion is and I would argue that political inclusion needs to include being able to see like a city not doing things to cities but including cities in the post-covid reconstruction decision-making processes um colleagues at LSE are involved in um the EGI and the Emergency Governance Initiative which is a big project with the United Cities and Local Government Organization and Metropolis and they're looking at the urban governance dimensions of rapid and radical action in response to global emergencies and it was initially set up to look at things like climate change and cities and climate change but of course COVID has overtaken everything and they have been there to to look at um how in cities it's not it's a health issue yes but it's not only a health issue um issues of environmental sustainability very old uh long-standing dimensions like um urban services water sanitation waste management they are critical to recovery and prevention with regard to pandemics you know people are washing their hands but they're throwing their rubbish into drains that then block and lead to diseases like dengue which constitute a really toxic mix when it's combined with COVID in cities like Karachi where I'm working at the moment so um I would say that cities have to be at the heart of any thinking about how we prevent future academics pandemics and deal with current ones I wonder in building on that what what do you see as the as a member of the advisory group for the acrc what do you see as the the um the space for the consortium's work where would you where might you like to see it going and where how to see the consortium's work fitting into to those challenges well I think um one of the core challenges that um the african cities research consortium is tackling is inequalities um and um I think it was the the head of the the secretary general of the UN said urban inequalities are the crux of of how we deal with COVID dealing with urban inequalities and um acrc are looking not only at economic uh and social inequalities but also political inequalities and political exclusions and I think you know apropos of what I've been saying about urban governance that is at the heart of what needs to be done and I think that there isn't a research um project at the moment that is better poised to address some of those issues I think also um the fact that um acrc treats cities as systems and pandemics as part of complex emergencies I think that bodes well for um bringing to the fore in the interdisciplinary approaches that we need to address complex emergencies like pandemics and I think lastly the fact that um acrc is a consortium it's got all the strengths of Manchester but it's not just Manchester it's got partners all over Africa um the fact that it um is drawing on that strength of scholars and practitioners across the the continent uh puts it in a very good position where it goes next um I I think you know talking to the funders rather than the team is what is the next subcontinent you're going to take these lessons too and you know for me South Asia would be an obvious one um because there is you know like your earlier question uh uh intimated there are so many lessons to be learned uh and shared across the two subcontinents thank you so much this is um we're at the end of our time unfortunately there's some other great questions in the chat but I think that I've been under strict orders to end on time so that we can get to so that others can go to other sessions but I really would like to thank you Joe for for joining us today in this fireside chat and to the audience members and especially those who raised questions so thank you all for for joining us and thank you Rachel and everyone for really great questions I've enjoyed it