Urban crisis in South African and Colombian cities: Understanding experiences, improving responses

Published: 29 July 2025

Updated: 08 September 2025

Authors: Melanie Lombard, Fiona Anciano, Charlotte Lemanski and Carlos Tobar Tovar

Our British Academy project, funded from Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research 2023, has investigated local communities’ perspectives on urban crisis, in order to consider how to improve responses, in four cities in South Africa and Colombia: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Cali and Buenaventura. Through storytelling workshops with communities and interviews with local state and civil society representatives, we looked at how crisis representations and responses differ across cities in the same national context, as well as comparing cities internationally. We found diverse crisis narratives in the four different cities, relating to how residents understood and experienced crisis through formulating collective stories of causes and consequences of events (Stanley 2014). Communities emphasised economic inequality and lack of opportunities (Cali), displacement and violence (Buenaventura), the effects of gang violence (Cape Town), and social mobilisation in response to lack of services (Johannesburg) – although these narratives often also overlapped in key elements, particularly inequality and violence.

What is particularly notable in our emerging findings is how this nexus of inequality and violence, historically determined in specific contexts, shapes local urban crises and the possibility of effective response to these, by both communities and local state agencies. Narratives are often determined by powerful interests, leading to a prevailing understanding of crisis as sectoral and constituted by disruption to service delivery, and therefore episodic or time-bound; however, critical narratives from community and civil society highlight the longer historical trajectory of multi-layered systemic, ongoing situations of violence and inequality from which everyday crises emerge. Nevertheless, what is also notable in our communities’ stories is a sense of situated hope – hope is lost or found in our stories where there is the sense of possibility – to find a way forward by staying put in a place or travelling to a different one, to get a job or find ways to make an income, to mobilise within a specific neighbourhood or city setting. 

Through a multidisciplinary approach involving collaboration with researchers from the University of Sheffield and University of Cambridge in the UK, University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and Pontificia Universidad Cali in Colombia, the project aimed to investigate local communities’ perspectives on urban crisis, in order to consider how to improve responses, in the four case study cities in South Africa and Colombia. Residents in such cities face a growing number of overlapping crises, including financial, climate, health, and political disruptions. However, the impact of these crises is unevenly felt, often reflecting and deepening existing social and economic inequalities. Crisis response by state agencies suggests ‘urgent and corrective action’ (Weaver 2017) , but measures such as curfews and militarisation may intensify urban inequality, especially for marginalised communities. Moreover, communities’ experiences of everyday problems such as violence, poverty and displacement may worsen or override the effects of natural disasters, epidemics and other periodic crises. In fact, crisis response undertaken by communities and community-based organisations themselves is often most responsive to local needs, although frequently unrecognised, and constrained by limited resources and time. 

The project built on previous collaborative projects including Pandemic Social Infrastructures 2022-2023, and Lockdown Diaries 2020-2021, Improbable Dialogues 2018-2022. Working with local community-based organisations, we used storytelling as the main method to capture local communities’ experiences and understandings of urban crisis in the four cities, running a series of workshops which led to the production of 19 collective stories produced by 45 community participants as storybooks, podcasts and videos. Additionally, a total of 41 interviews were undertaken with representatives from local and national government, and civil society organisations, exploring understandings of and responses to crisis in each of the four cities. Analysis of media and policy perspectives on urban crisis in the four cities was also undertaken to provide context. 

Further analysis and findings will be of interest to participating community-based organisations, and state and civil society representatives, in the four cities. They will help to improve understandings of communities’ perspectives and experiences of urban crisis, in order to improve local crisis response, at both neighbourhood and city level. 

For further information, including details of the project team and partners, and stories of crisis, please see the project website.