{"id":44455,"date":"2020-11-01T01:51:11","date_gmt":"2020-11-01T05:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?page_id=44455"},"modified":"2025-05-16T06:38:22","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T10:38:22","slug":"hidden-flows-rise-africa","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/hidden-flows-rise-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Flows \u2014 photographers uncover the invisible flows in African cities"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to our exhibition! It\u2019s been a year in the making, and will keep evolving. We\u2019d love to hear your thoughts: riseafrica@iclei.org<\/a>.
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The hidden flows exhibition emerged out of a need to enrich current conversations about resources, infrastructure and services in African cities. There is ongoing research, through the lens of urban metabolism<\/em><\/a>, to measure and track how resources flow through our cities, in order to support decision making and policy generation. Traditional urban metabolism research approaches rely on extensive quantitative data. Gathering these data accurately is difficult in most cities and even more so in African contexts because of the way resources move \u2013 not through typically piped and cabled network infrastructures – but in ways which are reliant on decentralized systems and on private [informal] individuals and organizations. 
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A central challenge exists: If data are required to make decisions, but no data are available to describe how private individuals enrich our urban economies, these people and these systems are effectively rendered invisible. The Hidden Flows photography exhibition seeks to bring to light the people, resources and infrastructures which support our lives, yet go unseen \u2013 either because they are literally buried, covered or hidden, or because we take them for granted despite them being right in front of us. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The images and stories shared here portray the diverse ways in which we resource our cities, the unique cultures that emerge because of this, and the value that private actors contribute to our societies. The dialogues<\/a> which accompany this exhibition seek to invite more perspectives into the conversation on urban resources, to connect quantitative and qualitative understanding of our cities, champion the value of creative expression in meaning making, and reflect on internal and external portrayals of African cities. It is organized into three sections: Instagram voices<\/em> shares crowd-sourced images from across cities in the continent; (in)visible stories <\/em>offers a deep-dive stories of resource flows in five African cities and; what now <\/em>shares next steps for the exhibition through policy dialogue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Instagram Voices<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Photographers and urban citizens from across the continent shared images to respond to themes of food, water, energy, waste and mobility, under the banner of #hiddenflows<\/a>. We received 646 images from many African cities, sharing diverse and recurring themes including: <\/p>\n\n\n\n