Healthy Cities Series Part II: Reimagining African Cities
Studies indicate that African cities have doubled from around 3,300 to 7,600 since 1990. These cities are the youngest and fastest-growing in the world, and as a result, there is a significant migration of people from rural to urban areas, which has put a strain on resources in these cities.
In order to create thriving cities in Africa, we must first answer some crucial questions, including: What principles are necessary to create thriving, long-lasting, adaptable, and inclusive African cities? How can policies contribute to proper governance and allocation of resources? How can the continent jointly effectively address and overcome pre-existing barriers? The second Healthy Cities Series seminar, Reimagining African Cities: Design, Participation and Diplomacy, will delve deeper into these questions on October 2nd at 5 pm EAT. Register here for the session.
CGC | Nairobi, in partnership with the Global Columbia Collaboratory, curated the Healthy Cities Series, composed of 3 seminars exploring solutions for equitably growing and transforming African cities. The first seminar, Rethinking Food Systems in Africa, discussed the importance of promoting natural, local foods and sustainability. The final seminar, Providing Safe and Affordable Cooking Energy in African Cities, aims to explore solutions for African urban households to obtain secure and affordable cooking energy.
Panelists
Noah Chasin is Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture in the Urban Design program at Columbia GSAPP. He received his Ph.D. in Architectural and Urban History from the CUNY Graduate Center and is a historian/critic/theorist with a specific emphasis on the relationship between urban design/planning and human rights. His teaching, research, and writing center on issues of human rights in zones of urban conflict, questioning the ways in which citizenship and access are adjudicated in urban social networks.
Chasin has taught at Bard College, Cornell, Barnard, RISD, and the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School. His critical writing has appeared in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, ArtForum, and Journal of Architectural Education, among many others. He was formerly architecture critic for Time Out New York, and was featured in the urban design documentary Urbanized, directed by Gary Hustwit.
In addition to his role in the M.S. AUD faculty, he is affiliated faculty at Columbia´s Institute for the Study of Human Rights.
Lorenzo Kihlgren Grandi is the founding director of the City Diplomacy Lab. He is a lecturer in City Diplomacy at Columbia Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE | Paris), Sciences Po – PSIA, and École Polytechnique.
He regularly advises international organizations, national governments, city networks, and municipalities on how to fully unfold the added value of city diplomacy.
Author of City Diplomacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), he holds a dual PhD in Political Theory from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS, Rome).
Emanuele Giorgi is a professor at EAAD, he develops teaching and research activities on the issues of communities and sustainable territorial development. He has a PhD in Civil Engineering and Architecture obtained at the University of Pavia (Italy).
In 2020 he published with Springer the book "The Co-Housing Phenomenon. Environmental Allience in Time of Changes" which has already been purchased by more than 200 libraries from various prestigious universities such as MIT, Stanford, Princeton and the British Library.
He presented his research papers at more than 30 international conferences and published several articles in indexed journals.