Akuto Akpedze Konou successfully defends her PhD!

Our heartfelt congratulations go out to Akuto Akpedze Konou! She publicly defended her thesis on 5 September at EPFL. After submitting and defending the manuscript before an expert jury earlier this year, the public defense marks the endpoint of years of dedicated and extraordinary research.

Within the framework of the Sinergia project, Akuto Konou explored urban agriculture practices and their relationship with health, as well as the place of the architect and urban planner within this complexity in African cities. Akuto Konou’s work took her to Tanzania and Togo on various occasions, where she conducted extensive fieldwork, which included surveying agricultural sites and conducting interviews with farmers. Moreover, she exchanged and collaborated with local researchers, institutions, and communities, not least during the stakeholder meeting in Greater Lomé, which Akuto helped to organise.

Supervised by Jérôme Chénal, Akuto Konou channelled her findings into a thesis entitled “Urban Agricultural Spaces and Health: Exploring Spatial Planning and Design Paradigms for Enhanced Urban Agriculture in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Greater Lomé, Togo”. At the same time, she worked tirelessly to disseminate her work, sharing it across disciplinary and academic boundaries via diverse outlets ranging from articles in specialised journals to dissemination meetings, YouTube clips and music.

Akuto Konou broke new ground by highlighting urban agriculture’s limitations in providing complete food security while demonstrating that proper urban planning can mitigate adverse health effects. Indeed, Akuto’s empirically grounded and methodologically innovative thesis underscores that urban agriculture enhances the psychological well-being of farmers despite these challenges, particularly by promoting the emancipation of women involved in urban agriculture. More broadly, Akuto Konou’s thesis helps to define urban agriculture’s concrete place in urban health, especially concerning food security and women’s empowerment, and the proactive planning criteria that can catalyse its integration to build more sustainable cities. Additionally, Akuto’s results provide the basis for public policy addressing urban health issues and opening new avenues for future research on health, agriculture and urban planning. We congratulate Akuto Konou on this outstanding achievement and wish her all the best for the future!