Deservingness by concrete: imaginaries of urban middle-classness in times of crisis

Jon Schubert is SNF Eccellenza Professor in Critical Urbanisms, University of Basel. His research focuses on the social life of infrastructures, the impact of extractive industries on African polities, authoritarian politics, and urban development in times of climate crisis, mainly through the lens of cities in Angola and Mozambique. His current SNF-funded project, PRECURBICA, centres African actors on the same analytical plane as the ‘global’ urban planners and policymakers that typically dominate debates about climate risk and urban adaptation, and seeks to uncover strategies of living and making the city in the face of looming climate crisis, and learn from these. He is the author of Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola (Cornell University Press 2017), a co-editor of the International Africa Institute’s book series ‘Politics and Development in Contemporary Africa’ and a member of the editorial collective at Allegra Lab.