Babette Safougne

ACC Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Babette.Safougne@uct.ac.za

Projects

• African Mayoral Leadership Initiative (AMALI)

Bio

Babette Safougne is a postdoctoral researcher in the AMALI Urban Governance Research Lab, as part of the African Mayoral Leadership Initiative (AMALI). In this role, her work involves collating and synthesising city-level data to produce city profiles and research-based thematic insights to inform the implementation of transformative urban visions and development interventions in African cities.

She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Dschang- Cameroon. Her work critically explores the intersections of urban health, informality, urban sustainability, environmental risk and urban governance, focusing on how these dimensions manifest in vulnerable and marginalised urban settings. Through an interdisciplinary and spatially grounded approach, she explores how structural inequalities, governance gaps and environmental hazards interact to shape everyday urban life – and how communities are affected and respond.

Babette’s doctoral research investigated how vulnerable households in flood-prone, informal settlements build resilience in order to cope with urban flooding. Although resilience is often portrayed as a positive concept that supports sustainable communities, health and well-being, her findings revealed a more complex reality. In the context of rapid urbanisation and weak governance, which is common across many African cities such as Douala, resilience as manifested in informal settlements often involves adapting to poor living conditions rather than overcoming them. Instead of reducing vulnerability, this form of resilience tends to perpetuate it, contributing to the persistence of fragile urban systems and the reproduction of the bad city.