The University of Cape Coast (UCC), as part of a consortium of universities led by the University of Kassel and University of Gottingen, Germany, has won a new DFG-funded research project known as the FOR5903-Sustainable Rurbanity Resources, Society and Regulatory Systems.

Researchers from the School for Development Studies, UCC, in the persons of Dr. Kaderi Noagah Bukari, Prof. Akua Opoku Britwum and Dr. Sabina Appiah-Boateng will host the project on campus.

The Project, which will run for a period of four years, beginning October this year, will seek to address issues of Ruban systems that affect society, resource use and regulatory governance mechanisms. Institutions will be primarily hosted by the University of Kassel and the University of Göttingen, Germany.

UCC will host PhD students and collaborate with other participating institutions in Germany, Morocco and India to undertake research and fieldwork within three clusters that is Rurban land use and its social-ecological drivers, Rurban dwelling and its social- ecological outcomes and Abstraction and synthesis.

In view of the global relevance of urbanization processes, which involve important challenges as well as chances for reaching global sustainability goals, this Research Unit (RU) addresses a timely topic that is of significant academic and societal interest.

The applicants developed the highly original concept of urbanity which offers a new perspective for studying processes of urbanization in the Global South.

The applicants argued that the Rurbanity concept is better suited to study the reality of urbanizing regions than the conventional rural-urban dichotomy approach and associated gradient concepts.

Using the unifying concept on Rurbanity means that the proposed work will be examining an arguably different social-ecological system and assembly of social and ecological processes in a context in between ‘pure’ urban and ‘pure’ rural.

Source: Documentation and Information Section-UCC