Urban planner Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah to speak

04/19/2022 

Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo and its Community for Global Health Equity, will offer a seminar on the “Water-Land-Health Nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa” at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 27.

Presented by SUNY Cortland’s Clark Center for Global Engagement, the talk continues the center's focus on Earth Day and addresses its year-long focus on water security, environmental justice and climate change.

The online event is free and open to the public. Select the talk title above to access the meeting link.

Trained in urban and regional planning and institutional economics, Boamah seeks to understand and reform the planning processes and institutional structures that impede and ‘weaponize’ planning interventions against historically marginalized communities. His work focuses on identifying the institutional drivers of land, water, food and housing inequities in sub-Saharan Africa and the U.S. and pursuing reform based on designing flexible and learning-based planning institutions.

Boamah’s research has been published in some of the world’s leading planning and cross-disciplinary journals, including Planning Theory, Applied Geography and Big Data and Society. He currently advises and works with the World Health Organization’s Urban Health Unit on the development of an implementation toolkit for communities and governments as part of the recently launched WHO Housing and Health Guidelines.

“The talks are all a part of a general goal of raising global awareness and alerting audiences to different ways to think about social justice,” said Professor of History Scott Moranda, the Clark Center’s acting director.

The series has explored how inequalities of gender, class and race shape access to clean drinking water and the protection of communities from climate-induced flooding and sea-level rise.

The talks also have been sponsored by the university’s International Studies Program with support from a Campus Artist and Lecture Series Grant.

For more information, contact Bekeh Ukelina or Moranda.

The H20 image above left is in the public domain by Pixabay.