ACC produces rigorous applied urban research typified by a grounded criticality and a commitment to propositional thinking and experimentation.
ACC is a knowledge partner to public sector actors to help ensure formulation and
implementation of policies that will produce contextual, inclusive and sustainable forms of urbanism in the global South, and especially in Africa.
A Special Issue of the Third World Quarterly, guest edited by Laura Nkula-Wenz (ACC Lecturer and Researcher) and Tania Messell is now LIVE. Please join us for a virtual launch of this edition, which investigates the growing trend since the 1960s of using ‘design’ and ‘design thinking’ to solve urgent global problems. The articles look at historical and current examples of this phenomenon, such as: - The design of refugee shelters. - Biometric technologies used to register refugees. - New sanitation systems in South Africa, like waterless toilets. - Storytelling products used to combat disease in Kenya. - State-led programmes to ‘improve’ traditional crafts in Chile The Special Issue argues that while design promises to help, its role is complicated and needs to be criticised. Ultimately, the Special Issue concludes that design is never neutral. It argues that for design to be truly helpful, it must become more self-aware, context-sensitive, and decolonial. The webinar will feature a moderated conversation with some of the contributing authors about the "promising directions for future research on the entanglements of design, humanitarian aid, and development in times of overlapping emergencies”. 🗓 Monday, 22 June 2026 ⏰ 15h00 - 16h00 📌 Register on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/jC_mk3-lQA2C4dDKLnkpxg
Survey designers play a key role in producing social realities by defining categories and shaping how people are classified through the process of “making up people” and assigning them to specif-ic categories. In urban contexts, surveys are especially important tools for generating knowledge about diverse populations to help inform urban policy, planning, and service delivery. In this sense, sex, gender, and sexuality are not simply variables to be measured, but social constructs that are actively produced through how survey questions are designed, asked, and interpreted, which in turn may inform urban governance. Sthembiso Pollen Mkhize, a visiting scholar at the African Centre for Cities, will present a brown bag seminar on his ongoing PhD research, sharing emerging insights from the first phase of his data collection. This phase involved interviewing survey designers, including principal investigators and fieldworkers, to understand their roles in specific surveys. His talk explores how decisions are made about asking questions on sex, gender, and sexuality, and the challenges of implementing these questions across diverse urban and rural contexts. Sthembiso Pollen Mkhize is a PhD Student in Human Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. He is also a Research Associate (formerly a Junior Researcher) at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, where he leads the ‘Queering Social Survey Research’ project. His recent work includes a forthcoming Occasional Paper titled ‘Balancing inclusivity and practicality: Should South African censuses and social surveys include measures beyond the gender binary?’ He has also published in journals including Progress in Human Geography and Social Science & Medicine.
What does it mean for a city to be “smart”? Burcu Baykurt will present her latest book Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google piloted a citywide gigabit network and city officials launched several smart city projects in the 2010s. Through cases including public-housing residents’ quiet refusal of “free” gigabit internet, the city’s turn to predictive analytics that largely confirmed the obvious, and public–private strategies for managing failure without naming it, the book reframes test-bed urbanism as a mode of local governance that works through civic aspiration, deliberate ignorance, and municipal politics. It argues that urban disparities are not an unintended consequence of the smart city; they are the foundation upon which it is built. Burcu Baykurt is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores how digital infrastructures reshape and perpetuate urban inequalities. She is the coeditor of Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order.
