Perspectives on the STEaPP Internship: Urban knowledge for resilience building

STEaPP intern Clementine Chazal reflects on 6 months working on research project Urban knowledge for socially urban resilient strategies in Cape Town:

I have been working with Enora Robin and Dr Rocio Carrero from STEaPP’s City Leadership Laboratory. The project looks at the production of knowledge in the aftermath of an urban crisis and whether or not this knowledge can be integrated and translated into resilient strategies at the local level. We chose Cape Town as our first case study looking at social unrest, violence towards foreign nationals and breakouts of xenophobia – these issues were identified as the main resilience challenges for the City of Cape Town by the 100resilientCities programme (Rockfeller Foundation).

Following a preliminary research period, our team travelled to Cape Town to undertake a week of fieldwork and conduct interviews with key informants. We met with a diverse range of professionals who enthusiastically/insightfully shared knowledge on urban violence and migration in Cape Town. It was a fantastic opportunity to embrace and understand the complexity of the South African context.

We aim to share the database we created on actors involved and existing knowledge on urban violence in Cape Town, as well as writing a policy brief, an academic paper and to present the findings of this project at the International Conference on African Urban Planning in Lisbon in September. The first findings of this project revealed the need to create bridges between the existing initiatives on data collection from academic institutions, civil society and public authorities; as well as the need to create a structure that can act as a potential catalyst for knowledge sharing between those different actors, and thus improve the building of holistic and integrated policy interventions. Issues of urban migration and subsequent arising tensions are not specific to Cape Town but are issues that many cities are facing today, as it was highlighted in the Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaptation (Bonn, 4-6 May 2017). Therefore, I believe that this project should be pursued in a comparative analysis with other cities of the Global South.

I gained a lot of skills from this project: I got to work on every aspect of the research, from preliminary research to mapping of actors and social network analysis, organising fieldwork to conducting, transcribing and analysing the interviews. It is inspiring to work in a dynamic environment like the City Leadership Laboratory and more generally UCL STEaPP. I am now participating in a collaborative project between Nature Sustainability and UCL STEaPP and I hope that I to be involved in further projects within the Lab.

I wish to continue working on (and in) Cape Town and more broadly on sub-Saharan African cities. This project fed my interests for the concepts of urban resilience and migration. I would love to continue work on those topics exploring issues of climate migration and the building of innovative sustainable strategies for African Cities.

Photographs by Clementine Chazal: chazal.clementine@gmail.com

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STEaPP Research Internships 2018

To find out about details of our internship programme for 2018, visit the internship webpages.