Lab
IPS (International Planning Studies)
Institution: TU Dortmund University
About the lab
The International Planning Studies (IPS) research group deals with urban change, planning, and governance, as well as mobilities, infrastructure, and housing from a global perspective. Focusing on people’s lived experiences, we flip the perspective and emphasize the everyday practices of urban production and living.
Our teaching and research engage in co-creative and reflexive knowledge production ranging from critical and postcolonial perspectives to applied approaches. We offer courses in B.Sc. Spatial Planning, M.Sc. Spatial Planning and the international master program M.Sc. SPRING at the Department of Spatial Planning, Technical University Dortmund (Germany). IPS also offers to supervise PhD projects and organizes courses and exchange events for doctoral students.
Our teaching and research engage in co-creative and reflexive knowledge production ranging from critical and postcolonial perspectives to applied approaches. We offer courses in B.Sc. Spatial Planning, M.Sc. Spatial Planning and the international master program M.Sc. SPRING at the Department of Spatial Planning, Technical University Dortmund (Germany). IPS also offers to supervise PhD projects and organizes courses and exchange events for doctoral students.
Featured research (13)
At first glance, there is hardly anything more boring and mundane in the urban landscape of Nairobi than the plastic jerry can, or mtungi in Swahili (pl.: mitungi). An inconspicuous thing that is constantly used, re-used, and re-purposed but remains somewhat invisible in its ubiquity. Its most common and important function however is to contain, store, and hold water. Yet, given Nairobi's erratic and heterogeneous waterscape, mitungi do not just hold water for vendors and households. Rather, they hold the entire city together. Based on a longstanding connection to Nairobi as well as empirical research in 2021–2023, I present mitungi as more than just boring things or receptacles, but rather as incredibly multiple devices for engagements with African/southern urbanisms. Ultimately, my reflections argue for a joyful and unapologetic fascination with the supposedly mundane as an approach to engaging with contemporary cities, spaces, and infrastructures.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the initial focus on handwashing measures have highlighted the importance of water access as an essential service in protecting public health. Although handwashing was ultimately deemed less relevant in curbing transmissions of the airborne SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) virus, the pandemic presented a dilemma for water providers and residents in water-deprived urban areas as they had to adhere to new hygiene standards and requirements with limited water access. As such, a deeper understanding of pandemic urban waterscapes-infrastructure, governance systems, technologies, and everyday practices-is necessary for ongoing debates on (post)pandemic or zoonotic cities. We therefore focus on changes in urban (water) governance and government water projects in Nairobi since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. We show that Covid-19 has contributed to changes in Nairobi's waterscape, though only in conjunction with recent changes in the city's overall governance structure. Whether these waterscape changes will lead to greater equity in water access or have a long-lasting impact in alleviating water deprivation in sections of the city is more than questionable.
While researchers have observed a global rise in displacement, many countries in the Global South have set up large-scale housing programmes, aiming to ensure access for all to ‘affordable’ and ‘adequate’ housing. For residents of Casablanca’s shantytowns, this has created a paradoxical situation—enhanced displacement threats and hopes to be soon moving into a higher-quality home. The situation challenges common conceptualisations of displacement seeing it as a merely negative, forced moving. Therefore, this paper opens up the debate on how to account for heterogeneous or even contradictory experiences of displacement. Through the example of shantytown resettlement in Casablanca, it calls for more people-centred empirical research that explicitly acknowledges internal neighbourhood diversity and difference. Promising approaches may focus on displaceability, the analysis of people’s residential trajectories, and heterogeneity within post-displacement perspectives.
The delivery of houses for homeownership to low-income urban dwellers has been a cornerstone of post-apartheid policies fighting both land and socioeconomic inequalities in South Africa. In this context, policy stakeholders and scholars have been puzzled by housing beneficiaries who leave their state houses, either selling or letting them. On the one hand, this might signal upward mobility where “leavers” successfully integrate into the housing market, climbing the next rung of the “property ladder”. On the other, it could indicate that “leavers” cannot afford to stay in their state houses and are consequently displaced to worse living conditions. However, due to methodological challenges, research on the experiences and perspectives of “leavers” is scarce. Based on narrative interviews with “leavers”, this article questions the progress/failure dichotomy. Instead, it argues that “leaving” could be construed as people-led reconfigurations of pro-poor housing policy – representing alternative, individually adapted but partly constrained pathways towards inclusion, 25 years after the end of apartheid.
Against the 'normative concept of the networked city', urban studies and infrastructure research have seen a shift towards investigations beyond the network that engage with the post-networked city, heterogeneous infrastructures, and other situations 'on, off, below and beyond' the grid, especially in southern cities. Expanding on debates around southern urbanisms and their socio-technical infrastructures, we explore a ubiquitous yet rarely discussed element of contemporary urban infra-structures: storage. In Nairobi, a city shaped by infrastructural heterogeneity and uncertainty, households of all backgrounds and sizes store water and electricity within various constellations of actors, practices and artefacts. We show how domestic storage, its artefacts and practices cumulate in a storage city that is not opposed to a networked or post-networked city but rather entangled with it. We present domestic storage as crucial infrastructure to the socio-technical functioning of Nairobi, discuss diverse storage artefacts and practices, and highlight how a focus on storage can contribute to re-imaginings of infrastructural articulations beyond networks and flows.