Atlas of Uncertainty | Transformations Community

A collaboration of social scientists, architects, and artists from Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, the Atlas of Uncertainty — a book, interactive website, and travelling exhibition — navigates how people’s mobility shapes urban futures in uncertain times.

Could You Briefly Explain The Driving Force/Motivation Behind Your Work?

The driving force behind Atlas of Uncertainty is a desire to understand African cities beyond the tired languages of crisis, failure, and lack that so often shape how they are seen. We are interested in how mobility and urban life are actually lived in places like Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg: through movement, improvisation, relation, memory, and everyday negotiation under conditions of uncertainty. Grounded in data from gateway neighbourhoods, the project brings together essays, art, cartography, sound, and visual practice because we believe no single form of knowledge can fully hold the complexity of these urban worlds. At its heart, the Atlas asks what becomes visible when we move from the census to the senses — and what African cities might teach us about living and thinking in uncertain times.

Where/How Has Your Work Engaged With Systems Or Transformative Change-Making?

Atlas of Uncertainty engages transformative change-making by working on the systems through which African cities are understood and governed. Too often, urban policy and public discourse approach migration, informality, and uncertainty through narrow categories that flatten lived complexity and limit what kinds of responses become possible. The Atlas intervenes in that by bringing different forms of knowledge into relation — quantitative data, essays, cartography, sound, and visual practice — to widen how cities are read and what can be seen, heard, and valued. In that sense, the project is not only about representation; it is about shifting the terms on which urban life is interpreted, and therefore what kinds of action, solidarity, and imagination become possible. African cities are not simply sites of deficit or delay. They are showing how people make life, negotiate uncertainty, and build urban worlds under conditions that are becoming increasingly global. By working across research, art, and public engagement, we hope to create spaces where more relational, grounded, and open-ended approaches to urban transformation can emerge.

How Can The Transformations Community Support Your Work?

We would love support in building what we are beginning to think of as an Atlas 2.0: a wider community of researchers, practitioners, artists, curators, and change-makers willing to collaborate in genuinely transdisciplinary ways. One of the things Atlas of Uncertainty has taught us is that no single method, discipline, or institutional lens is enough to grasp the complexity of urban life in uncertain times. We are interested in taking these conversations, practices, and ways of working into other cities and contexts, and in building a network of people open to multiple forms of knowledge — analytical, artistic, spatial, sonic, lived, and embodied — as part of expanding how we respond to the challenges cities face. The Atlas is not a policy blueprint. It is an invitation to bring more voices into the room, to widen our collective repertoire, and to imagine what more just, inclusive, and sustainable urban futures might become possible. If this resonates, please email us at info@atlasofuncertainty.com, follow our work on social media, and help us build a community around these questions and possibilities.