RISE Africa photography competition 2020: Hidden Flows

The RISE Africa Annual Photography and Multimedia Showcase encourages imaginative and novel thinking to collectively envision the futures of African cities. It aims to promote citizen photography and grassroots storytelling, as well as curated photo-journalism, as a way to excite and encourage citizens and decision makers about their homes. The resulting multimedia entries will be used to elicit ideas from city officials, urbanists, decision-makers, private sector and civil society who will explore and engage with the exhibition through a number of workshops. These annual photography showcases intend to produce realistic, novel and positive demonstrations of Africa which are curated from within. 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, 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 – not through typically piped and cabled network infrastructures – but in ways which are reliant on decentralized systems and on private [informal] individuals and organizations.