Susana Neves Alves has joined LATTS for two years as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship research fellow and will be working with Sylvy Jaglin. Her project will explore the intersections between digital technologies and water infrastructure in Nampula and Nacala, Mozambique, and will seek to contribute to a broader understanding of urban infrastructure and secondary cities in Africa.
Her research interests focus on small and medium-sized cities as critical sites for understanding the manufacture and use of infrastructure in these urban spaces with very high demographic and spatial growth.
Before joining LATTS, she was an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, where she worked on similar topics. Previously, as a postdoctoral research associate at University College London, she studied how land markets influence urban transitions in four cities in East Africa—Hargeisa and Berbera in Somaliland and Kampala and Arua in Uganda. At the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, she also participated as a research associate in various projects exploring energy infrastructure in cities in the Global South.
Her doctoral thesis, defended in 2017 at University College London, is entitled " Creole Water Supply: states, neoliberalism and everyday practices in a secondary African city ." It examined the roles of the everyday practices of state and non-state actors in shaping water infrastructure in a small secondary city in Africa (Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau).