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New Professor of Urban Studies
The President’s Board has appointed Professor Nancy Odendaal as Full Professor of Urban Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She will take up her position, which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, at the beginning of August 2024.
26 March 2024
Nancy Odendaal studied Sociology at the University of South Africa and Town and Regional Planning at the University of Natal, South Africa. She received her PhD from the University of Witwatersrand in 2010 with a thesis on smart technologies and urban transformation in South African cities.
From 2011 she was a Senior Lecturer, and from 2017 Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She has been Full Professor of this institution since 2021 and Director of the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, since 2022.
Her research focuses on how mobility, digitalization, and new technologies influence livelihoods and urban change in contemporary cities. Other topics of her research include aspects of urban planning and urban geography in cities of the Global South and the impact of colonial infrastructures on contemporary urban conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Joint professorship
The five-year professorship in Urban Studies (without tenure track) is part of the cooperation between the University of Basel and UCT. The professorship, which is funded by the University of Basel, is institutionally integrated into UCT and based at its African Center for Cities.
Every year, Basel students in the Critical Urbanisms Master’s program spend a semester at UCT, where they participate in the academic program “Urbanisms from the South.” In addition, the position is involved in teaching in Basel and supervises Master’s and PhD students at the University of Basel.
