Speaker: Noah Nathan
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)
Talk Description
The physical structures in which urban life occurs are an underappreciated determinant of how grassroots urban politics unfolds. In many rapidly growing cities, housing scarcity forces residents into multifamily buildings that create daily exposures to neighbors. We argue that these exposures affect political behavior by shaping residents’ access to political information and capacity for collective action. We focus on the informal, vernacular architecture of West Africa’s dominant urban housing form– the compound house. Compound house residents in urban Ghana participate more in politics than similar residents of other housing types. Lever aging an original survey, including novel measures of tenants’ spatial network centrality within their residential buildings, we suggest that key mechanisms for this relationship emerge from the effects of architectural design on visibility and social ties among co-tenants. Ultimately, built environments must be studied alongside demographic environments to best understand contextual effects on political behavior.
Speaker’s Bio
Noah Nathan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. His research focuses on electoral politics, political economy, and urban politics in Africa. He is the author of The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, UW-Madison.
The event is free and open to the public.