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New Professor for Urban Studies
The President's Boards has appointed Prof. Dr. Nancy Odendaal as 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.
Nancy Odendaal studied sociology at the University of South Africa and urban and regional planning at the University of Natal in South Africa. in 2010, she obtained a doctorate at the University of Witwatersrand with a thesis on smart technologies and urban transformation in South African cities.
From 2011 she was Senior Lecturer and from 2017 Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She has been a full professor at this facility since 2021 and has been its director since 2022.
Her research focuses on the question of how mobility, digitalization and new technologies influence living conditions and urban change in modern cities. Other subjects of her research include aspects of urban planning and urban geography in cities of the global South as well as the effects of colonial infrastructures on today's urban conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Joint professorships
The five-year professorship in Urban Studies (without tenure track) is part of the cooperation between the University of Basel and UCT. The professorship is funded by the University of Basel and is institutionally integrated into UCT; the position is based at UCT's African Centre for Cities.
Every year, Basel students on the master's degree programs in Critical Urbanisms spend a semester at UCT, where they take part in the academic program "Urbanisms from the South". In addition, the professorship for Urban Studies is involved in teaching in Basel and supervises Master's students and PhD students at the University of Basel.