Cities & Infrastructure
The Cities & Infrastructure Programme funds interdisciplinary research projects that address the challenge of creating and maintaining sustainable and resilient cities, with the aim of informing relevant policies and interventions in developing countries. The programme is run by the British Academy on behalf of all the National Academies, as part of the Global Challenges Research Fund.
Current projects
Programme part of
International
We foster international collaboration in the humanities and social sciences, and promote the sharing of international perspectives on global challenges.
More about the programme
The Cities and Infrastructure programme funds seventeen projects that aim to produce policy-relevant evidence and interventions geared towards improving people’s lives in fragile, conflict-affected states or in developing countries. We issued an open call for applications (on behalf of all UK national academies), inviting proposals from UK-based researchers across all disciplines. Applicants were asked to develop interdisciplinary, problem-focused projects addressing the challenge of creating and maintaining sustainable and resilient cities in developing countries, while recognising the need to interweave mitigation and adaptation.
Projects were required to demonstrate an innovative approach, yielding new conceptual understanding on one or more of the following four sub-themes:
a) Planning: In the context of the large, dispersed and unplanned cities of the global south, planning for resilience becomes a matter of collaborative initiative involving a host of actors and sentient infrastructures. This requires mobilising plural and interdisciplinary knowledges, both for understanding and for acting in intelligent ways.
b) People: Human vulnerability and resilience go hand in hand. The poor are deprived in plural ways, but also forced to become resilient subjects, making use of the city and their know-how in imaginative ways.
c) Infrastructure: Cities are held together by infrastructures, which also instantiate and regulate social life in quite strong ways. In the global south the infrastructures are broken, incomplete, badly regulated, underfunded and often reliant on vernacular improvisations. Technical solutions alone will go only so far, and are expensive.
d) Habitat: The urban habitat is central to resilience, in the form of lived experience, the consequences of emissions and heating, the formation of symbolic and public culture, the consequences of urban architecture and design. This is an obvious terrain for interdisciplinary work on jointly making sense of how habitats can be managed as a silent form of 'atmospheric' regulation.
The Cities and Infrastructure programme is led by Caroline Knowles, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research and publications explore the ways in which particular strands of globalisation, in the movements of objects and people, compose and connect cities.
Programme highlights
Improving seismic safety in Kathmandu’s World Heritage Sites
Promoting self recovery after the Nepal earthquake
Don’t Dance on the Road: Advice on Navigating Kampala’s Transport Infrastructure
Everyday Climate Change in Ghana
Formalising Informal Cities: Contested Space in Nairobi
Still Thinking: Refugees’ Health and Healthcare in Nairobi
Health in an Informal Ugandan Settlement
Big Cities – Small Changes: Thinking Creatively through Urban Infrastructure audio recordings
Possibilities and small changes
Please contact GCRF@thebritishacademy.ac.uk or call 020 7969 5220 for further information.
Related funding opportunities
Global Professorships
This new programme is supported under the UK Government’s National Productivity Investment Fund. It aims to demonstrate and further enhance the UK’s commitment to international research partnerships and collaboration as well as strengthen the UK’s research capacity and capability in the humanities and the social sciences.
The Humanities and Social Sciences Tackling the UK's International Challenges
The British Academy is inviting proposals from UK-based researchers in the humanities and social sciences to develop interdisciplinary projects which bear on our understanding of the UK’s international challenges and opportunities (past, present and future). Proposals will relate to the themes of Conflict, Stability & Security; Europe’s Futures; Justice, Rights & Equality; and Urban Futures.
Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects
The British Academy is inviting proposals from UK-based researchers across all disciplines within the social sciences and humanities to develop international interdisciplinary research projects with development impact, in collaboration with colleagues from the natural, engineering and/or medical sciences.