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Conference: The Just City in Africa

Writer's picture: Urban TimeUrban Time

The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), the Observatory on Latin America (OLA) of The New School, and UN Habitat will hold a conference on “The Just City in Africa” at The New School in April 2022. The objective of the Conference is to take stock of existing inequalities and obstacles to social justice in urban Africa and to identify a set of actionable policies and proposals which African governments at the national and urban level might undertake in this direction. It will be followed by a smaller workshop in Washington, D.C. with representatives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to discuss their support of specific kinds of urban policies in Africa. The latter include privatization of public services, support of big infrastructure solutions, and policies affecting wages of public service workers, specifically in the public transport sector.


This initiative is based on the FES work program on “The Just City” which has been underway for several years in several African countries including Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The work also builds on prior urban policy work by the Global Urban Futures Project of The New School which includes the invention of the Habitat Commitment Index which assessed the degree of fulfillment of the commitments by 169 countries at the 1996 Habitat II Conference.

Five preparatory papers will be prepared for this event, including three by recent New School PhD recipients: Beryl Odongo Oranga on macro-economic policies, poverty, and inequality, David Lopez Garcia on public transport, and Maria Carrizosa on informality; and one by Belen Fodde on food security under conditions of COVID-19.

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