MAPS at the SGAS-VAD 2026 Conference “African Perspectives on Global Transformations”

Laura Colini and Domenico Patassini, respectively researcher and senior consultant of the MAPS research unit at the Iuav University of Venice – SSIIM UNESCO Chair, are participating in the international conference “African Perspectives on Global Transformations”, held at the University of Basel from 26 to 28 August 2026.

Jointly organised by the Swiss Society for African Studies (SGAS/SSEA) and the Association for African Studies in Germany (VAD), the conference brings together scholars from Africa, Europe and beyond to discuss the contribution of African perspectives to understanding contemporary global transformations. With more than 80 panels, workshops and roundtables and over 500 paper presentations, the programme addresses a broad range of issues, including urbanisation, mobility, climate justice, natural resources, decolonisation and epistemic justice.

Within the conference, Domenico Patassini is co-convening the panel “Mapping African Approaches to Urban Planning: A Critical Overall Effort”, devoted to emerging African planning cultures, urban practices and approaches to higher education. The panel explores contemporary processes of “urbanity in the making”, questioning dominant planning frameworks and highlighting the potential of African perspectives to generate contextually grounded approaches to current and future urban challenges.

Within this panel, Laura Colini, together with Claire Simonneau (Université Gustave Eiffel), presents the paper “Beyond Model Transfer: African Perspectives on Community Led Housing.” The contribution critically examines emerging community-led, collective and non-speculative housing approaches in African contexts, focusing on the relations between community organisation, land and housing finance, plural legal frameworks and collective tenure. The paper stems from the ongoing research carried out by the Iuav-SSIIM team within MAPS in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements and home to a significant population of urban refugees and other migrants. Developed through fieldwork and collaboration with MAPS local researchers and local community-based actors, the research investigates housing conditions and access to land and housing for vulnerable populations, including international migrants, while exploring the potential of community-led approaches to address exclusion from conventional housing markets and governance mechanisms.

In this perspective, African experiences are approached not simply as local adaptations of housing models developed elsewhere, but as potentially generative practices capable of challenging established assumptions about land, collective tenure and housing provision. The ongoing work in Mathare therefore provides MAPS with a particularly relevant field from which to examine the intersection between migration and forced displacement, housing informality, community agency and the right to the city.

Participation in SGAS-VAD 2026 provides an important opportunity to bring this ongoing MAPS field research into the international African Studies debate, while increasing the visibility of the project among scholars working in and on Africa across different disciplines. It also offers a valuable setting for strengthening existing networks, establishing new research connections and identifying potential synergies around some of the key issues addressed by MAPS, including migration, forced displacement, climate change, urbanisation and housing among others.

HERE BELOW:

1. the accepted abstract 
Beyond Model Transfer: African Perspectives on Community Led Housing
Dr. Laura Colini | University Iuav of Venice | Italy (Presenting)
Dr. Claire Simonneau | Université Gustave Eiffel
African housing research has largely foregrounded state-led delivery, market mechanisms, and informal settlement upgrading while the recent Community-Led Housing (CLH) research in Africa, unevenly theorized and little implemented, highlights the promise for an alternative institutional logic that integrates permanent affordability with collective agency and community control. By reviewing the extant literature on multisite case studies in Africa, this paper critically reviews the emerging literature on community-led, collective, and non-speculative housing approaches in Africa to advance three main perspectives: it looks at the socio-legal and planning process sustaining CLH not as a stabilised institutional form but rather shaped through negotiation across plural legal orders and shifting relations with public authorities. It draws attention to the way community organisation in dense urban areas is treated separately from community-led finance in the international literature on African housing. It questions the non-speculative mechanisms brought to the fore by the circulation of Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in areas where land and real estate markets are a means of savings, and a significant source of added value that acts as a safety net for livelihoods.
By identifying potential analytical gaps especially regarding institutional integration, socio-legal negotiation, and the politics of collective tenure, this paper positions African perspectives on CLH and planning not as derivative adaptations of established housing models but as proactive and contextually grounded approaches. It suggests that CLH in Africa should be understood as a process that reframes land governance, social justice, and planning practice, ultimately considering African experiences as theoretically generative.

2. the PRESENTATION

forthcoming

* The MAPS Project—coordinated by the UNESCO Chair in Migrations, Population, and Development at Sapienza University of Rome— promotes evidence-based policy solutions on migration and displacement and involves a multidisciplinary consortium from Europe and Africa. Partner institutions include six Italian universities hosting UNESCO Chairs (Sapienza, Udine, University Iuav of Venice, Brescia, Ferrara, and Reggio Calabria), the University of Barcelona (Spain), the University of Dodoma (Tanzania), the University of Kabale (Uganda), and AMREF International University (Kenya). Advisory institutions contributing to the MAPS initiative include the IOM Regional Data Hub for West and Central Africa, the Catholic University of Rwanda, and the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa).