The SMUS (Post)Doctoral Programme (2025-2029), promotes doctoral and post-doctoral research revolving around urban sustainability topics and their underlying wicked urban problems (WUP). Next to the ongoing goal of strengthening research competencies among the teaching and research staff at partner universities, SMUS encourages the incorporation of a transdisciplinary, spatial, and practice-led research lens. By developing methodological research skills relative to this threefold approach, new light can be shed on the paradoxical nature of WUP. This in turn provides the basis for: (a) a greater understanding of WUP across the three world regions allowing for better comparison; (b) deriving common patterns and practices to tackle WUP; and (c) understanding and rendering operative contextual knowledge.
This action also includes a science-policy collaborative research initiative between Technische Universität Berlin and APRI, the African Policy Research Institute (a Berlin-based, independent, and non-partisan African think tank). In 2025, post-doctoral researchers from African-based SMUS network partner universities will be hosted at these institutions to produce policy briefs related to Urban Africa.
Action 3 – Junior Researchers Experiences on Thematic Excursions
The 2025 SMUS–APRI Urban Africa Post-Doctoral Research Scholarship Programme was designed to strengthen postdoctoral researchers’ ability to communicate findings on urban “wicked problems” in African cities to policymakers and the public at large through a series of policy briefs.
The resulting APRI special series, “Wicked Urban Problems in African Cities: Rethinking Policy and Practice”, comprises four briefs by Dr Mildred M. Ambani Songoro, Dr Calvince Ouko Othoo, and Dr Emmanuel Amponsah, with guest contributors Mourice Wambua Kausya and Brunilde Verrier. Each brief tackles a distinct urban challenge: a failed transit system, a broken mapping workflow, corruption in water provision, and the persistence of illegal electricity connections. Read together, the briefs highlight a recurring urban policy dilemma in which behaviours treated as problematic are often rational responses to conditions of systemic exclusion.
The wicked urban problems highlighted in the policy briefs are systemic, politically contested and mutate as actors respond to attempted fixes, so that one-dimensional fixes generate new harms rather than resolving existing challenges. These recurring paradoxes, or “wicked problems,” as Rittel & Webber (1973) call them, form the theoretical basis of this series.