Join us for a panel discussion delving deeper into the research, ideas and knowledge behind Tales of a Nomadic City. A VR exhibition about Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania—one of the fastest growing cities in the world—having grown from 500 inhabitants to more than a million in less than fifty years.

Christian Vium, one of the exhibition’s two curators, will host a panel discussion exploring how cities can grow without formal planning, and the dilemmas and opportunities it brings. As well as questions of nomadic culture and its contemporary developments, the life of young people in the metropolis of Africa, and the possible mutual learnings between Mauritania and a European context.

On the evening you can look forward to meeting:

• Christian Vium: Is an associate professor of anthropology at Aarhus University and works, among other things, with multimodal anthropology and urbanization in Africa. He has conducted research in Nouakchott, Mauritania for two decades. He is the principal investigator of the project “Revisioning the African City” (Independent Research Fund Denmark, 2024–2028), which brings together empirical material and anthropological research from three rapidly growing African cities: Nouakchott (Mauritania), Nairobi (Kenya), and Cape Town (South Africa).
• Morten Nielsen: Is a social anthropologist working in Mozambique, Scotland, USA and Denmark on socially sustainable urban development. Since 2004 he has been working in Mozambique doing ethnographic research on house-building and urban planning in Maputo and on the socio-economic effects of Chinese infrastructure projects in various parts of the country.

Stay tuned as we announce more panelists soon.

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