Training Program
Over the last 2-3 years, the various neighborhood committees of Alshigeilab have proactively engaged with local and international organizations to facilitate a variety of training and projects for the betterment of their neighborhood. These have ranged from medical training for the youth and neighborhood resistance committee training for better organization to securing funding and aid for households and families impacted by the unprecedented floods of the last 2 years. This project aims to respond to and work with this momentum by introducing a training program that addresses a highlighted gap.
The training program aims to aid grassroots committees in identifying opportunities, problems, and solutions for their neighborhoods through:
(a) data collection,
(b) data analysis,
(c) turning data into knowledge through various techniques and
(d) developing informed correspondence with the local government and private sector (across multiple sectors).
These would address topics such as service provision, neighborhood development, risk mitigation, and government accountability. Furthermore, the project intentionally selects participants from three groups; Alshigeilab community members, young interdisciplinary urban researchers, and members from local organizations. This is done in order to bridge the gap between these various groups and to diversify the lens through which the site is explored and acted upon utilizing the various backgrounds and knowledge of each.
Entity Responsible: 26 Daraja
- Taking communities as the starting point place-making PM is an urban development method that utilizes local resources towards co-creating places for people imagined and implemented by the people themselves. Unlike top-down urban planning and design methodologies place-making is a bottom up approach that can be applied by almost anyone using simple tools and techniques and following the main principles set by the Project for Public Places. The under-development of Khartoum is mostly apparent with its seemingly neglected public spaces left to gather waste and rainwater that nests diseases during the summer. Street sidewalks are hardly fit for pedestrians as they lack basic safety measures such as zebra crossings and shading from the scorching sun, and are filled with potholes, overtaken by cars and sellers, or nonexistent all together. This course will introduce participants to placemaking as an art and development methodology that can help them better utilize these and other shared spaces while realizing their own potential becoming owners and implementers of their public space development. It will help them identify PM practices in their local context by sharing various local, regional and international examples and will walk them through the PM methodology step by step by applying it in a short term project of their choosing. The course will also support and guide participants towards the preparation of a long term vision and goals that will be presented during the conference at the end of the course.
Entity Responsible: ICoU, KULeuven
The Critical Mapping training component will be provided by experienced researchers from the OSA Research Group at KU-Leuven University (Belgium), who have a long experience in mobilizing critical mapping and participatory action research as methodologies to conduct research and action-based interventions in urban and rural areas around the world.
While the term “critical cartography” often refers to a body of theoretical literature, critical cartographers also call for practical applications of critical cartographic theory, such as counter-mapping, participatory mapping, and neogeography. Rekachewiz (2021) argues that ‘maps are political objects’ that allow for exposing economic, social and (geo)political processes that may not be visible to the naked eye. It allows for the visual depiction of alternate realities by intentionally focusing on certain information over others through framing, codifying, and distilling this selected information (Awan, 2017). Mapping within Sudanese urban environments is largely monopolized by state planning bodies, using maps to administer land use and urban spatial configurations. Ongoing global discussions on critical mapping, however, increasingly also seek to use mapping as a tool to understand everyday practices of city-making as inherently spatial and territorial endeavors. Advocating for grassroots action and leadership, social movements such as the Neighborhood Resistance Committees, have highlighted the importance of collective action that stem from the grievances of the everyday livelihoods of the people. The objective and outcome of this training is a series of drawings (various forms of maps) that intertwine the data collected during the fieldwork with each other and any additional desktop research (including that conducted during the first two weeks of training), in order to understand why the neighborhoods are the way they are and how particular issues have risen in these neighborhoods. This will require the participants to question external policies and internal politics that have played a role in this.
