The project that's remapping migration in urban Africa

The project that's remapping migration in urban Africa

3 March 2026 - Wits University

And with it, a glimpse into the world's future cities.

The population of African cities is expected to double to 1.4 billion people by 2050, with much of this growth being driven by those ​​arriving from elsewhere. Yet the way planners and policy-makers talk about these spaces - using words like failure, ungoverned, and problematic - is unfit for this era of global political, economic and environmental instability.

The Atlas of Uncertainty asks: What if African cities aren't behind the curve, but ahead of it?

Launching at the Origins Centre at Wits University on 18 April, the Atlas of Uncertainty is a collaborative, interdisciplinary knowledge project - part book, part interactive website, part travelling exhibition - that challenges how we understand and interpret migration and African cities.

Built on surveys from gateway neighbourhoods in Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, it braids hard data with essay, poetry, soundscape, artwork, and new forms of cartography to convey what statistics alone cannot - a deliberate movement from the "census to the senses".

The Atlas contributors argue that uncertainty is not a problem to be solved but a productive condition to be understood; that knowledge about African cities and migration must be generated differently, from the ground up and across disciplines, if it is to reflect these spaces as they actually are; that migrants are not a burden on cities but their makers; and that Africa may offer the clearest map of where the world is headed.

Out of words

After decades of research, urban sociologist Caroline Wanjiku Kihato and political scientist Loren B Landau found that the tools of their disciplines were unable to capture what they were seeing. The language of margins and centres, inclusion and exclusion, formal and informal, didn't fit the complexity of how people actually lived.

"We needed a new vocabulary," says Landau, Research Professor at Wits University's African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford and co-founder of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab. "And we needed new maps."

The Atlas of Uncertainty not only tracks where people are and from where they have come, but where they dream of being and what their futures might hold. "We often map movements of people, supply chains, agricultural goods," says Landau. "But we weren't capturing the circulations of moralities, of ideas, of imagination. If you've come from a place, but you're living in a city, and you're dreaming of Minnesota - how can we capture that?"

What lies beneath

In Johannesburg's Somali community, clan legal infrastructure from Somalia resolves local conflicts through WhatsApp, a system of governance invisible to any official map, yet functioning and real. Witchcraft accusations determine who can stay in one Nairobi neighbourhood, invisible forces as powerful as any landlord or law. In Accra, development schemes carry the repackaged logic of colonial planning, an attempt at scripting who and what goes where.

Among the artworks, a central figure is surrounded by fish; a meditation on family in motion, on relationships not destroyed but constantly reconfigured as people move. "The fish are in a fluid space that itself is moving," says Landau, reflecting how we move together in shifting waters, like a school of fish, until someone goes off on their own.

A papier-mâché canoe built in Nairobi from the street posters of prophets, healers, and miracle-workers that plaster the city's walls captures something harder to name. Nobody travels to Nairobi by boat. But the vessel suggests that migration is not always a rational calculation - it is also speculative, mysterious, spectral. People move toward something they cannot fully see, drawn by forces that don't appear on the map.

"We're trying to see what lies beneath the map," says Kihato, a Research Associate at ACMS and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development (ODID). "We've got to think about the city as all of these things, as part of an ecosystem of both the visible and the invisible."

The Atlas is also a reimagining of how knowledge is generated, who generates it, where it comes from, and to what end?

"How many times have we returned to neighbourhoods in Joburg or Nairobi or Accra where we intervened, and it doesn't seem that anything has changed?" asks Kihato. "We have not eliminated the fundamental issues around inequality, lack of employment. These solutions have not worked, even with the certitude that comes with their implementation. What this project is asking us to do is take a pause and think, if the knowledge we have on hand has not helped us build these spaces the way policy intends, what could we be missing?"

Citymaking in uncertainty

The Atlas also flips the script that depicts African migrants as streaming into Europe or North America. Most migrants, the data show, are moving to other African cities - 80% of African migrants stay on the continent. The vast majority of movers remain in their own countries, largely uncounted. But their journeys are rarely linear or final. Nairobi, Accra, and Johannesburg are not endpoints but gateways where people arrive, reconfigure their lives, and reshape their spaces.

This reframing carries implications well beyond the continent. With instability becoming a defining condition globally, Africa's long experience of navigating uncertainty looks less like a local handicap and more like hard-won knowledge.

"What Africa has on its side is that we have never been certain about anything, except uncertainty," says Kihato. "It's not just about resilience. It's a way of being. Because we have had very little to rely on, there's always been this looking at life otherwise - to make things work, and knit things up in order to survive. And that skill is what we have to offer the world."

About the Atlas of Uncertainty

The Atlas of Uncertainty is a project of the Oxford/Wits Mobility Governance Lab and Wits University's African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), the continent's leading scholarly institution for research and teaching on human mobility. The book, Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming African Cityscapes (Actar/Wits Press), will be released in January 2027. The opening exhibition runs at the Origins Centre, Wits University, Johannesburg, from 18 April to 3 July 2026. Exhibitions in Accra, Nairobi, and Amsterdam are planned for 2027.