New Article: Assessing the Quality of Urban Life in Three Neighbourhoods, Lilongwe, Malawi.

August 13, 2021

New Article: Assessing the Quality of Urban Life in Three Neighbourhoods, Lilongwe, Malawi.

New Article:
Assessing the Quality of Urban Life in Three Neighbourhoods, Lilongwe, Malawi
DOI: 10.1680/jurdp.21.00017 - ICE Urban Design and Planning
Laura MacLean and Ashraf Salama
https://doi.org/10.1680/jurdp.21.00017

Recent literature corroborates a lack of critical engagement with contemporary East-South African cities and a scarcity of focus on the quality of urban life in Africa at large. Geographically situated in Malawi's capital city, Lilongwe this study provides insights into the quality of urban life (QoUL) in three heterogenous neighbourhoods in the city from the perspective of the residents. The article examines key indicators which impact urban life. Data are gathered through neighbourhood profiling and a residential attitude survey. It focuses on the individual resident's subjective assessment of their quality of life, and their view of four domains of urban life: namely the physical, social, economic and well-being domains. Variances in demographic and socio-economic groups are discussed as well as the variances in QoUL found in three neighbourhoods. The results reveal that there is significant variance in the QoUL across the three neighbourhoods in Lilongwe. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse of QoUL by asserting that its underlying domains should not be viewed in isolation as they incessantly impact one another and that confronting urban challenges in this context should be considered at a neighbourhood scale.

Michael Crosbie interviews Ashraf Salama on possible outcomes in a post-coronavirus world.

How Might the COVID-19 Change Architecture and Urban Design? Ashraf M. Salama, a professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland, and the director of the Cluster for Research in Architecture and Urbanism of Cities in the Global South, has been following how these disciplines might be changing. He’s recently written a publicly peer-reviewed paper on some of his findings: “Coronavirus Questions That Will Not Go Away: Interrogating Urban and Socio-Spatial Implications of COVID-19 Measures.” I sat down with Salama to discuss some of the issues he raises, and what their implications might be for the built environment in the future (7 May 2020) (Feature image taken from CommonEdge by Andy Yueng, as part of his “Urban Density” drone series).