Naleli and her family live in Mossel Bay. Residents like her, who reside in informal settlements are changing what they eat and how they cook due to unstable and expensive electricity. Unreliable access to water, transport and energy impact diets and general wellbeing, with marginalised communities, such as Naleli’s, bearing the brunt. The Living Off-Grid Food and Infrastructure Collaboration (LOGIC) project explores the social and material systems that drive food and infrastructure access across five African and Asian cities.
The LOGIC project focusses on how the most marginalised urban residents in five Southern cities (Tamale, Ghana; Mossel Bay, South Africa; Harare, Zimbabwe; Bangalore, India and Colombo, Sri Lanka) are meeting their basic needs and accessing infrastructure, particularly when they are living ‘off-grid’. Partner cities were selected because, while planning and infrastructure design and provision is improving for some in parts of these cities, such provision is not expanding fast enough to keep up with urban growth and provision is not evenly distributed for all. LOGIC focusses on five main types of infrastructure – water, sanitation, energy, transport and communications.
In South Africa, the LOGIC project was led by Gareth Haysom and Mercy Brown-Luthango and located in Growing Hope informal settlement in Mossel Bay. The research culminated in a community feedback session on 16 October 2024, giving the project leads and participants an opportunity to discuss the research outcomes and share their experiences. Animated videos that tell the interconnectedness of food security and infrastructure in the five cities were produced as project outputs.
Reflecting on the feedback session, Brown-Luthango said: “The day reconfirmed the value of using food as a lens to understand how different urban systems come together in space. It was also fascinating to again uncover new connections and to have our participants help us see the connections between hunger, substance abuse, violence. This further reaffirmed the importance of a holistic approach to understanding urban development challenges and the value of our Masters in Sustainable Urban Practice and the need for systems integrators who are able to ask new questions, differently in order to understand these wicked challenges confronting our cities and towns.”
Visit the project website for more stories on food and infrastructure justice.
