CRG African Urban Dynamics

The rapid pace of urbanization across the African continent places Africa at the center of global urban development in the coming decades. African cities now garner increased attention from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. The enhanced focus on urban Africa – as place(s), practice(s), and concept(s) – encompasses a range of (inter)disciplinary themes no longer constrained to specific geographic boundaries. The study of African cities, and urban processes more broadly, is now not only put in comparative conversation with other locales around the world, but has a growing role in driving debates, old and new, across scholarly, policy, and practitioner fields.

Established in 2020, the African Urban Dynamics CRG thus arrives at an exciting moment in urban scholarship, as Africanist scholars play a leading role in the study of cities.

The main aims of the CRG are:

• To coalesce researchers working on African cities under a unified thematic umbrella.
• To put scholars embedded in divergent fields in dialogue with one another.
• To encourage innovation in the development of new projects across disciplines and to function as a network that will guide scholarship on urban Africa for years to come.
• To highlight the ways that innovative research can inform dynamic new rethinking of teaching practice, embedding cutting-edge research in the classroom in support of creative pedagogies, and expanding opportunities for students at all levels at institutions within and outside of the AEGIS network.