- Complexities began as something genuinely ambitious: a multi-platform experiment that wove together an exhibition, a series of events, a magazine issue, and a limited podcast—all orbiting around the question of urban complexity as seen from the Global South. It was a proper collaboration too, one that brought together Cityscapes Magazine, the African Centre for Cities, Datarama, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
- At its heart was a deceptively simple idea: what if you could actually make Cityscapes Magazine spatial and immersive? The Datarama would let visitors step inside stories, ideas, scenarios, and research drawn from cities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America—not as case studies filed away for academic consumption, but as genuine entry points into deeper questions about governance, inequality, climate stress, work, and knowledge. The real wager was that cities everywhere might learn something from contexts that too often get treated as peripheral.
- The project itself was exploratory by design, testing how emerging technologies could actually help us understand complex systems and talk about them publicly in more dynamic ways. It crossed geographies, disciplines, and media deliberately—expanding how (urban) knowledge gets produced, shared, and acted upon.
- Getting everyone on the same page was the real challenge. You had a tech team building hardware and software; two social science institutions thinking in terms of research outputs; and our own designers and curators trying to bridge both worlds without losing either. Things did move forward, but there was friction—real friction. Different rhythms, different vocabularies, different assumptions all had to be hammered out as we went.
- Then the pandemic arrived and shut everything down. Travel vanished. Timelines evaporated. The whole model we’d been working towards suddenly wasn’t going to happen. What seemed like a catastrophe, it turned out, was exactly what we needed.
- So we started over. We began with a new audio project—The City Show—which came out as six episodes in early 2021, with reporting from Cape Town, Mumbai, Tijuana, Beirut and beyond. Working in lockdown with a scattered network of contributors, we found that you could do genuinely ambitious work without needing a spectacle to pull it off.
- Stripped down to basics—no flashy technology, no complicated logistics—we started questioning the whole thing again from scratch. Those months of staring at screens taught us something unexpected: more technology for its own sake wasn’t actually the answer. That realisation sent us in a different direction entirely, towards something more tactile, more analog. The redesign that followed rewired how we think about the work we put out into the world.
- Complexities showed us the real value of staying genuinely open-ended whilst still knowing what you’re trying to achieve. Iteration, friction, course-correction—these aren’t diversions from the work. Sometimes they are the work. The process revealed things we couldn’t see, forced us to examine our own assumptions, and clarified what actually mattered.
- But the harder lessons stuck with us: openness without discipline is risky, ambition can drift if you’re not watching it, and collaboration can muddy who’s actually responsible for what. We also realised that technology can easily eclipse purpose if you let it.
- Experimentation needs guardrails—clear decision points, the discipline to know when you’re going nowhere, and the nerve to walk away from sunk costs when they’re no longer serving the goal.
- Complexities never became what we initially imagined it would be. Instead, it became the prototype for something else. The questions it raised and the pivots it forced us to make became the foundation for SHIFT—a tighter, more portable, deliberately analog system for collective learning.
Freddie Boswell
Dashen Moodley
