Africa is the only continent where the rural population is still the majority (around 56%), despite this, the run to the cities is faster and faster: the average urban growth rate in 2018 was 3.6%, the highest in the world. A considerable percentage: in 2020 the cities of the continent will host over 21 million …
Continue reading “Going small – the role of secondary cities in Africa”
Ever heard of Smart Cities? This term indicates strategies that, thanks to the opportunities offered by technology, make it possible to optimize interconnections, services and data exchange within cities, maximizing environmental sustainability and the quality of life in the urban environment. Necessary strategies given the weight that cities have on the planet’s environmental degradation. The …
During last rainy season, two big floods have hit the city of Freetown, inundating many urban neighbourhoods and making at least ten victims. Nothing new: the effects of decades of deforestation, lack of planning, indiscriminate consumption of land all add up to a complex geographical context: a city of almost two million inhabitants squeezed between …
Continue reading “Community, Participation, Resilience: flood control strategies in Freetown”
Competent, realistic, with a clear vision of the future, an informal and friendly style and an engaging smile. This is Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the new mayor of Freetown. Graduated at the London School of Economics, she is currently manager of IDEA, an investment and infrastructure company in the tourism sector in Sierra Leone. She is well known …
Continue reading “Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, a breath of fresh air in Freetown”
A popular joke in the 90’s, a time of great interventions and experimentations on urban poverty, said that there’s only one thing worst than a slum: a planned slum. Planning the unplannable is undoubtedly a bad idea, at least with methodologies used for static and controlled realities, that could inevitably never adapt to temporary and …
Continue reading “Planning the unplannable? Urban utopias and local realities”
We have recently told about innovative methods to fight against floods that have been implemented by the Freetown administration, but the problem is certainly not new. 12 years ago, during a survey in Kroo bay, I found myself in the middle of a huge flood that miraculously did not make any victim. That same night, …
Exactly during these days, ten years ago, I was going to the slum of Kroo bay for the first time, writing down my first, conflicting impressions on a notebook. Even if the diary pages always sound trivial and silly when read years later, I decided to keep them as they are: confused, full of mistakes …
Two years ago Marielle Franco was murdered, since then Brazil has changed dramatically and some ministers even affirm to hope to bomb the favelas. It’s a real declaration of war against the urban poor. We remember Marielle with this post, written a few hours after her assassination, but still so terribly current. Today more than …
Continue reading “To Marielle Franco and to those on the right side of the story”
In the vulnerability and risk exposure assessments within slums women usually emerges among the most fragile categories: poverty, insane environment, lack of main services and petty crime are usually widespread in most of the informal settlements, recreating a high-risk context. Several researches have shown that in many slums, the majority of family units are single-parent …
Continue reading “Women in slums, a revolution in small steps”
May discrimination and urban exclusion pass through words and language? How many terms, at first sight neutral, are discriminatory? Everyone has heard about favelas, a term born in Brazil and entered, like the French word bidonville, in the common language in every part of the world to indicate a shanty town. The origin of the …
Continue reading “Slums, bidonvilles or favelas? Words and urban exclusion”
