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At the crossroads of political science, anthropology, and urban studies, the project “Unruly Spaces: Public Space, Society and Politics in Urban Africa” examines the uses, imaginaries, and forms of regulation of urban spaces in Abidjan and Kinshasa, with a view to rethinking the boundaries between public and private spaces.

The conference, entitled “Unruly Spaces: Rethinking the Public, the Political, and the Urban from Africa,” will take place on Tuesday, December 16, 2025, starting at 9:00 a.m., and Wednesday, December 17, 2025, starting at 9:30 a.m., in Room S1-2 at the University Medical Center (UNIGE), Rue Michel-Servet 1, 1206 Geneva.

This event will mark the culmination of this work and will bring together the entire research team for the first time around the following program:

• Opening & Presentation of the project
• Thematic panels:
  - Governing the city: control mechanisms and hybrid forms of governance between public, private, and informal actors.
  - Spaces, power, and repression: repressed or tolerated uses of urban space, between police, violence, popular economies, and daily negotiations of social order.
  - Gender, (in)visibility, and subaltern urbanity: queer experiences, relationships to the body, violence, and (in)visibility in postcolonial public space.
  - Sociability, popular practices, and political appropriation: informal places of debate, street practices, “parliaments,” grins, and agoras as alternative forms of public creation.
• Inaugural lecture “Rethinking political violence through African urban spaces: militant experiences from the DRC” by Fred Bauma, executive director of Ebuteli, researcher and activist based in Kinshasa.
• Photo exhibition: “Espèces d'Espaces: Chroniques croisées d'un monde urbain fragmenté” (Species of Spaces: Crossed Chronicles of a Fragmented Urban World), presenting a selection of photographs produced between September 2023 and June 2025.

Further information can be found on the website of the University of Geneva.