What
story-telling
With
Urban Birth Collective & ITM Belgium
Format
visuals for two academic papers
Year
2025-2026
Context
Paper 1
My role was to build a visual narrative for an academic paper – Richness of Urban Health Realities Lost in Measurement Monocultures (in press) authored by researchers from ITM Belgium, analysing the existing landscape of maternal health services in cities and peri-urban areas of Africa.
The paper discusses knowledge production in the health ecosystem; that global health’s preference is for standardised, internationally comparable metrics or ‘measurement monocultures’, which is not a neutral choice. It is influenced by funder/donor requirements, citation incentives, and the institutional power of northern research consortia who circulate the same approaches across very different contexts, creating a ‘foreign gaze’ that systematically fails to produce city-specific insights.
Visual narrative
I found this metaphor of the monoculture powerful and interesting to draw out. Just as agricultural monocultures replace diverse ecosystems with a single optimised crop, measurement monocultures replace diverse knowledge systems with a standardised analytical output, one that is also, like its agricultural counterpart, super vulnerable to shock. The Trump administration’s 2025 suspension of the Demographic and Health Surveys programme illustrates this fragility very well.
The visual for this paper traces the tensions of navigating a dense built environment through the bodies of pregnant women and how this is completely missed out on by the clinical abstraction of a journal article. Here, the paper held at arm’s length focusses on that distance of not seeing what actually is. A hand holds up a very sanitised paper while behind it, women and cities live differently. The idea is not to argue against research; but to ask what gets missed out in its production.
Context
Paper 2
From the paper authored by the Urban Birth Collective team – The Landscape of Urban Childbirth Services (manuscript), what is clear is that in Conakry, 74 out of 94 facilities report providing childbirth care, but just 21 of them account for 80% of all deliveries, and only 3 perform 80% of all caesarean sections. In Kampala, 243 out of 1,042 facilities report providing childbirth care, but 14 account for 80% of deliveries, and 7 for 80% of caesarean sections. These numbers, drawn from routine health facility data, reveal provisioning, access and the invisible geography of maternal care that national or regional averages often overlook. The context is also important because childbirth facilities or any public services for that matter are inversely related due to the colonial geography.
Visual narrative
The visual I created for this paper communicates the scale and concentration of childbirth care across both cities simultaneously. I used extrusions and isometric grids to show (at a glance), what proportion of facilities provide the bulk of the services, making the disproportion legible without showing the technical tabulation. Above the statistics, cityscapes of Conakry and Kampala set the context for the data: a coastal city on a peninsula, a landlocked city on seven hills.