About the project
Why crisis?
We are living in an era of global crisis. Cities around the world are impacted by financial, climate, health and political disruption. Top-down responses such as curfews are often flawed, repressive or lacking sensitivity. This can particularly affect communities in cities with high levels of inequality and exclusion.
Focus
Our research team includes experts from urban studies, communication studies, political science, and geography, with extensive experience using participatory and audiovisual methods in Latin American and African cities. Together we aim to:
- Explore how urban crises are represented by people in four South African and Colombian cities, and by media and other organisations outside these cities. .
- Understand the relationship between how crises are represented, and how effective crisis response is, according to local people.
- Compare representations of and responses to crises across fourdiverse cities in South Africa and Colombia: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Cali and Buenaventura.
Action
We have partnered with local organisations in these four cities, including social and environmental justice advocates, youth movements, human rights organisations, local development actors, and others striving to improve quality of life for communities.
Representatives from local organisations participated along with project team members in storytelling facilitation training.
In each city, we have worked together to design and run storytelling workshops, with a total of 45 participants, to understand how communities experience and respond to crisis.
We have also carried out interviews with representatives from state institutions and civil society organisations involved in crisis response, to understand their perspective.
Finally, we also undertook actor mapping and analysed media and policy representations of crisis, to offer context in each city.