Near the entrance of the District Six Homecoming center, anyone who intended to cross the threshold was asked two questions: How hopeful or dismal do we believe our future will be, and how much agency do we feel we as individuals have to drive change? For six years, RISE Africa has boasted a diverse, passionate audience invested in the pursuit of homegrown solutions for sustainable African cities. This year, as we gathered for the first time under the same roof after years of virtually dreaming, meeting, and sharing, the anticipation to embrace and be embraced by familiar strangers was palpable. Poised at the edge of being immersed in four days of questioning the gap between our present realities and the futures we demand, the vast majority of participants clustered themselves in a position of hope for what might come.
Realising Unbound Possibilities through policy, research creativity and practice, aimed to experiment with inspiring novel ideas for positive transformation by enabling an environment for provocative gathering. The festival stood on the shoulders of half a decade dedicated to exchanging a wealth of knowledge based resources and queries about the current and future state of our urban environments. It offered a space to air out the lingering question- so what comes after dreaming?
The responses were charged by the excitement of colliding, juxtaposing thought leaders, atypical approaches to convening and an honest openness to challenge the very room we stood in. Amidst the novelty of the space, one answer stood out, people are hungry for what Reil Miller described in the opening plenary as “good compost”, ideas that are not lashed by the ambitions for a legacy, or attempts to feed an obsession with preservation that leaves us without room for evolution. Attendees had a deep desire for ideas that allow us to have flexible, open futures that is built with care and joy for everyone that inhabits our cities.
There were repeated concerns and views around securing ourselves to rigid, fixed plans that lack a foundation of meaningful community participation or are too theoretical, missing pragmatic routes to implementation. Jane Battersby, urban geographer and urban food systems expert, pressed that integrating community participation in all decision making as a necessity when reminding the room that “if you are not invited to the table, you are probably on the menu”. Rose Molokoane reiterated the urgency for this and incorporating all voices from the beginning of plans when discussing the transformation of cities today, and not just in the distant future, “You are talking about 2050. I am talking about now. People are making plans but are not including us in the plans”. During his presentation Edgar Pieterse, Founding Director of the African Centre for Cities asked the audience to “embody a profound scepticism of everything that feels firm and solid in our projections of what our cities should be. By stepping into the decay and grief of the fallout of not achieving or reaching that goal, and dancing in those cracks to reimagine a new understanding of our cities, and city making, in a strictly African way.”
This festival showed us that we are on the precipice of an era of navigating our relationship with flaws that emerge in plans that we set, and follow the paths they expose us to. As eloquently put by Bayo Akomolafe, philosopher, and Executive Director and Chief Curator, of Emergence Network, “Cracks invite us to play, to grieve and to experiment in a regenerative, empowering context.”
Paul Currie, chair of RISE Africa and Director of the Urban Systems unit at ICLEI Africa opened with an invitation that the act of being fully present in our gathering can be a gift to ourselves and each other, and he put forward a request for trust and play in the process, and to for us all to become brave enough to tinker. This tinkering space is fueled by driving action through intersecting sectors, and slowly, we are uncovering the potential of disrupting silos and embracing the wealth of possibility by anchoring our discussions with collaboration as a consistent baseline across the board. This grounding theme opened the door to honest discussions about our failures, challenges and hopes, diving deep into what makes us vulnerable – and forging new alliances because of our shared hope filled imaginaries, desperate feelings of struggles. Working across silos has forced us to find shared languages to communicate the urgency of transformation in the times we live in. “We underestimate the ways in which language influences the way we view and interact with the world. It has the power to both connect and disconnect us” – Bongiwe Simka, ICLEI Africa Professional Officer: Urban Nature & Nature-based Solutions. Breaking down technical and literal language barriers allows us to better hold each other fiercely accountable to the commitments that will shape our cities, because urbanization is happening now, not in some distant future, and we need to plan and plan adequately.
“Grief is an expert composter, it will break you down; and it is the best teacher: in the breakdown, in the cracks, what do we see? What is growing?” – Malika Ndlovu, RISE Africa Poetry curator
We are learning to walk and work with grief, a point that cannot be ignored because at different phases in the work of realising unbound possibilities, we will encounter grief. Often when we have grown tired from the weight of our grief it is that weariness that stirs us into action because as Deborah Johnson said in the opening plenary “It is too much of a mouthful to say that my greatest fear is having Africa be that bitter taste in my mouth that crawls into my chest and fills it with worry”
I am excited because we have only just began to wrestle with the discomfort of our potential. I believe we stand more to gain if we continue to risk experimenting with gathering, challenging our notions of the future and making good compost, all in the process of shifting the way we build urban narratives.
During the culmination of the third and final plenary, South African poet Siphokazi Jonas shared the following:
“Change demands courage
Warns the city dweller
Ask the buchu, protea, and geraniums
Scattering seeds before the charred air
Brandblom daises sprouting out of soot
A new cycle begins
Out of phantom bodies
When we commit to the act of
More, more, more,
An audacious flame paging through concrete and steel
Prying stories open to seed new growth
The city surrenders to seasons of fire and is quenched.”
– Siphokazi Jonas, 2025 Urban Action Festival poet
At the moment there are no answers for what will emerge when we explore ideas that mingle with the spaces in-between plans and actions but my hope is that we embody the spirit of the fynbos when confronted with the regenerative power of fire and say more, more, more.
