Many of the capacities that sustain urban life are not located within a single institution. Rather, they are distributed across relationships between communities, the State, civil society organisations, the market, informal groups and other urban actors, involving power struggles but also care and solidarity. This raises a fundamental question: how do we understand a city if we stop viewing it primarily as physical territory and begin to see it as a network of relationships?

The Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC) Human Settlements Hub, in collaboration with the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, cordially invites you to a webinar to present and discuss research approaches that advance knowledge and innovation applicable to dynamic urbanisation processes unfolding in the Global South.

Professor Igor Ahedo of the University of the Basque Country and Dr Camilo Umaña, Scientific Director of the IISL, will introduce relational approaches to knowledge creation. Dr Suraya Scheba of UCT will contextualise the discussion with insights from the UGood/National Research Foundation collaborative project on the emerging concept of Relational wellbeing. And young researchers will ground these ideas in practice by explaining how they used sociograms to ‘cook’ knowledge together in a community-kitchen initiative at Fundación Casa B in Bogotá, Colombia.

For more information on the presenters, please click here.

Date: 28 October 2026

Time: 15:00–17:00

Registration: Click here to register via Zoom

For more information please contact: Diana Sanchez Betancourt at dsanchez@hsrc.ac.za