We are an independent, nonprofit publication reporting on the world’s biggest challenges through the lens of local, solution-driven action in cities.

 

Our focus is on solution-driven urban activism to ignite networks of action in cities worldwide.

 

A letter from the founder:
Why I started The Urban Activist

I never harbored a desire to write, yet at some point I felt the urgency. After almost 15 years working in the corporate finance world, I understood one thing: companies operate based on business strategies that affect a global citizenry, and yet do not act in the public’s best interest. And I was not (and am still not) convinced that even governments can fully compensate for that hard truth and solve the world’s most pressing issues. It is us – each of us – who must act. We all have agency, which bears gifts only if we use it.

Cities have always been magnets for immensely talented people whose humanity outshines even their ambitions. Many fascinating individuals in the most unexpected places have been waging battles on countless issues that affect us all. They have engaged in struggles as diverse as human rights and the environment.

Often, these people do not fall into the profile of the advocate or the protester; rather, they come up with concrete solutions to the challenges on their doorstep–and they fight for them. These are the people the public needs to know about.

While there is extensive reporting on CEOs’ strategies, businesses’ solutions, governments’ decisions and politics, there is little reporting on these important actors in our midst.

I founded The Urban Activist to fill this void.

We are a media project taking a fresh approach to journalism. While it’s up to mainstream journalists to inform the general public and hold those in power to account, our journalism project centers its reporting on the world’s biggest challenges through the lens of local action and the power of city people to create social change – and exercise influence globally.

Reporting on local movements, grassroots groups, activists and advocates, narrows the disconnect amongst researchers, decision-makers, policy-makers, government officials, and the local citizens they ostensibly serve, among others. When diverse voices are excluded, it limits the discussion and reinforces the mainstream views. And this is true everywhere. I believe that a story out of New York can inspire action in Nairobi. What is effective in Buenos Aires could also work in Berlin.

I am also aware that Rome was not built in a day, and it takes time to build this new kind of journalism that leads to solution-driven action beyond the media stories it produces. I am honored that some of our articles have contributed to many positive changes: activists’ work being supported by nonprofit organizations, harmful city decisions being reversed, and activists and organizations uniting to exercise more power with their causes, to name a few.

As a publisher, I do my best to avoid any power imbalance between the journalist and the storyteller being interviewed. We want to do justice to any story we print, always with journalistic independence.

Also, shifting the narrative of what Western cities are and can be, is an important part of our publication. We report on the boldness and innovation of people in far flung places, who are facing multifarious issues and taking them head on, in often remarkable ways.

As the world gets increasingly urbanized, I believe using journalism to encourage public engagement is crucial. It puts much of the power to make change in the hands of the people; it strengthens democracies.

OUR IMPACT

ABOUT-US-The-Urban-Activist

We democratize local solutions, activists’ tactics, and social and environmental innovation.

American architect, writer, and philosopher Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Established in 2019, we have published over 250 impactful media stories to energize new approaches to pressing urban issues.

We bridge the gap between people with solutions in hand and policymakers, city officials, and decision-makers.

ABOUT-US-CAIRO

In November 2024, The Urban Activist held an event at the WORLD URBAN FORUM by the UN-HABITAT in Cairo. We gave the podium to local grassroots activists from Cairo, Nairobi, and Ghana, who are remarkably taking on the problem of mounting waste while transforming their communities into green, resilient and thriving societies. 

 

EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE POLICY

We operate as a nonprofit retaining full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic interests of our organisation. To keep our publication free of ads, and to avoid charging you for our content, this growing platform relies on grants and partnerships with non-profit organisations for our funding. But we will cede no right of review, influence or unauthorised distribution of editorial content.

Funding has been made possible by The Puffin Foundation, Ltd.

Logo The Puffin Foundation


Susana Fernández Molina is Founder and Editor at The Urban Activist. You can learn more about me in my Linkedin profile. I am always looking for those who write on the side, or investigate on the side, and deeply admire the mission of our journalistic work. Pitch me anytime at askusanything@theurbanactivist.com.

Contributors

Alex Smith

Alex Smith

Alex Smith is a writer and Associate Teaching Professor in the English department at Seattle University. Her writing explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in urban spaces.

See more...

Alex Smith

Alex Smith is a writer and Associate Teaching Professor in the English department at Seattle University. She has a PhD in Twentieth Century Multi-ethnic Literatures of the U.S. from the University of Washington. Her writing explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in urban spaces and her research has been published in Praxis and MELUS. 

Chisara Asomugha

Chisara Asomugha

.CHISARAOKWU. is an Igbo American transdisciplinary poet, artist, and retired physician creating multimedia poetry. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Cave Canem, and The Poetry Foundation.

See more...

Chisara Asomugha

.CHISARAOKWU. is an Igbo American transdisciplinary poet, artist, and retired physician creating multimedia poetry. Her chapbook “This Wake Holding, Mmiri” received the 2023 Evaristo Poetry Prize’s Honorable Mention from the Africa Poetry Book Fund. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Cave Canem, and The Poetry Foundation. A retired physician, she is working on her debut poetry collection.

Hannah Fenster

Hannah Fenster

Hannah Fenster is a writer and dancer in Baltimore, MD, where she is the Events Manager at The Ivy Bookshop. Her writing appears in Lumina, The Shallow Ends, Entropy, and elsewhere.

See more...

Hannah Fenster

Hannah Fenster is a writer and dancer in Baltimore, MD, where she is the Events Manager at The Ivy Bookshop. Her writing appears in Lumina, The Shallow Ends, Entropy, and elsewhere. She is a former educator at Goucher College and likes making things with other people, most recently with the Baltimore immersive theatre collective Submersive Productions.

Jennifer Hope Davy

Jennifer Hope Davy

Jennifer Hope Davy is an artist, editor and writer based in Berlin. Davy received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her PhD from the European Graduate School|EGS.

See more...

Jennifer Hope Davy

Jennifer Hope Davy is an artist, editor and writer based in Berlin. She is currently working on a novel based in Oklahoma, playing with Franz Kafka’s Nature Theatre of Oklahoma (Amerika) and the modern history of Oklahoma as a reflective microcosm for contemporary “America,” which she began as a Tulsa Artist Fellow (2017-2019). Davy received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her PhD from the European Graduate School|EGS. Working across disciplines, her practice centers on the politics and potentiality of perception and interruption, mediating between cognition and visibility. Recently she had the privilege to assist editing After 1921: Notes from Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and Beyond edited by Crystal Z Campbell and her book, Staging Aporia: putting together impossible things, critical encounters with art and theory, was just published by Passagen Verlag.

Johannes Novy

Johannes Novy is an urban planner and works as Senior Lecturer and Course Director of the MA Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Westminster in London. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from Columbia University, New York, and researches and teaches on a range of issues including urban development and urban tourism and their interaction as well as urban conflicts and protests.

Laura Scherling, Ed.D.

Laura Scherling Ed.D. is designer, researcher, and educator. She is a director and lecturer at Columbia University and the co-editor of Ethics in Design and Communication and the new open access book Digital Transformation in Design. Scherling is also the co-founder of the design and sustainability organization GreenspaceNYC and their annual lab Civic Art Lab.

Maha Sano

Maha Sano

Maha Sano is Producer and Entrepreneur in Cultural and Creative industries in Marroco. She is also the founder of Marocopedia, a digital platform that presents shorts documentary about Moroccan cultural heritage.

See more...

Maha Sano

Maha Sano is Producer and Entrepreneur in Cultural and Creative industries with over fifteen years experience in delivering Moroccan theatre, street art and photography projects. She is the author of the play “Dialy” who challenges the taboo of female sexuality. She is also the founder of Association Badira CCD for preserving and digitizing moroccan cultural heritage, and co-founder of Marocopedia, a digital platform that presents shorts documentary about Moroccan cultural heritage. Maha is quadrilingual (Arabic, Japanese, French and English) and is committed to the cultural development of Morocco and inclusive access to education and information.

Simone Egger

Simone Egger is a cultural anthropologist from Munich, Germany. She is a professor for European anthropology at the University of Saarbrücken, Germany. Transformations in urban societies are main topics of her research that is often located at the interface of art and science.

Toby Godfray

Toby Godfray

Toby Godfray, Master’s in MSc Sustainable Cities at the King’s College London, is a mobility consultant within the Cities department at Buro Happold, a Trustee for public arts charity Urban Eye, and newly a city director for the FEM.DES. London chapter.

See more...

Toby Godfray

Toby Godfray, Master’s in MSc Sustainable Cities at the King’s College London, is a mobility consultant within the Cities department at Buro Happold, a Trustee for public arts charity Urban Eye, and newly a city director for the FEM.DES. London chapter. His interest in the intersections of mobility, critical feminist design, public art, and spatial justice ultimately underlines his written work.

Valeria Schiller

Valeria Schiller

Valeria Schiller is a Ukrainian curator, art historian, author and art critic. In 2022, Schiller was a fellow at the educational department at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and in 2023 she was a scholarship holder at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin. Currently, she lives and works between Berlin and Buenos Aires.

See more...

Valeria Schiller

Valeria Schiller — born in Crimea, Ukraine, 1994. Art historian, curator, author and editor of texts. In 2019, she was a Junior Curator at the PinchukArtCentre and a Curatorial Team Member at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre. From 2016 to 2018, she worked in the archive of PinchukArtCentre’s Research Platform in Kyiv. From 2019 to 2022, she was an art history lecturer at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts, and from 2020 to 2022, Schiller was an editor-in-chief of an online media about contemporary art Artslooker. In 2022, Schiller was a fellow at the educational department at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and in 2023 she was a scholarship holder at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin. Currently, she lives and works between Berlin and Buenos Aires.

Vivienne Marquart

Vivienne Marquart

Vivienne Marquart is a social and cultural anthropologist interested in urbanity, migration, and the various forms of memory and remembrance. She gained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

See more...

Vivienne Marquart

Vivienne Marquart is a social and cultural anthropologist interested in urbanity, migration, and the various forms of memory and remembrance. She gained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, doing research in Istanbul (Turkey) on the construction and contestation of cultural heritage, focusing especially on UNESCO World Heritage.

Yasmeen Abdallah

Yasmeen Abdallah

Yasmeen Abdallah is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, writer, and educator, and activist. Yasmeen also holds an MFA in Fine Arts with distinction from Pratt Institute. Her work has included roles as a visiting lecturer, grant recipient and resident at numerous institutions.

See more...

Yasmeen Abdallah

Yasmeen Abdallah is an interdisciplinary artist, working across intersections of sculpture, textiles, painting, collage and social engagement. Drawing from the personal and the political through elements of memory, trauma, resilience, and persistence, this work takes shape in various capacities from minimal gestures to maximal installations. Yasmeen uses a variety of materials and processes to illustrate the connections between our bodies, allegories, contemporary culture and colonialism. This work is inspired by histories, social movements, space, place and personhood. Yasmeen earned Bachelor’s degrees from University of Massachusetts in Anthropology (emphasis in Historical & Collaborative Archaeology, which included field schools with New England indigenous tribal communities); and another in Studio Art with honors, including a Minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Yasmeen also holds an MFA in Fine Arts with distinction from Pratt Institute. Her work as an artist, curator, writer, and educator has included roles as a visiting lecturer, grant recipient and resident at numerous institutions. Fusing together years of decolonial practice, grassroots organizing and creative reuse, Yasmeen has cultivated regenerative discussion, support for emerging artists, and fostered foundational thinking for place-making. Through this work, Yasmeen believes solid communities are sustained and can thrive through cultures of care, collectivity, and resourcefulness as they navigate shifting discourse, movements and landscapes.