Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Gough, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester

Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, is celebrated as a city founded to resettle freed slaves in the 1790s. Over the following century, it became a truly cosmopolitan port city as people from across western Africa and the Americas made it their home.

But Freetown’s British colonial rulers struggled to acclimatise. Many were plagued by deadly fevers that earned West Africa its reputation in Europe as the “white man’s grave”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the intensifying racism of colonialism, coupled with the emergence of the new field of tropical medicine, led to the construction of Hill Station, an experimental, racially segregated settlement built in the mountains four miles south of Freetown.

This was more than simply a public health measure to protect the white colonists. It was an abandonment of Freetown – an exit strategy from a city that was seen by this colonial elite as diseased, overcrowded and dangerous. The writer and journalist Graham Greene was highly critical of these motives in his travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936):

England had planted this town [Freetown], the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service … They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could.

Now, more than a century later, a proposed masterplanned city in Sierra Leone called Sherbro Island City is raising questions about the nature of modern urban developments – questions that resonate with my research in Freetown’s public archives about the story of Hill Station.

The people behind Sherbro Island City, including English actor Idris Elba, are anything but colonial types. And in a country that is almost always portrayed as a place of violence and suffering – epitomised by its civil war in the 1990s and the devastating Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016 – the more optimistic headlines generated by Sherbro Island City are welcome. Its plans for an “afro-dynamic eco-city” promise long-term growth for Sierra Leone and the wider region.

But like Hill Station, this development – to be built on Sherbro Island, around 75 miles (120km) south of Freetown – has been planned for a small international elite. It is marketed as being clean and sanitary, with state-of-the-art “smart infrastructure” – in contrast to the perception of Freetown, like many other major African cities, as dirty, chaotic and perpetually malfunctioning.

Abuzz with anticipation

In 2019, I was in Freetown conducting research into the history of the city. On the day my fieldwork was wrapping up, Idris Elba landed for his first visit to his father’s homeland. Freetown had been buzzing with the news of his arrival. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Sierra Leone’s own superstar.

On his week-long trip, Elba was busy. Events and photo opportunities swirled around a ritualistic centre piece: the presentation of citizenship by the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Elba was understandably enamoured by Sierra Leone and the welcome he received. Speaking to a BBC correspondent, he proclaimed that “the son of the soil is coming back to fertilise the soil”.

In fact, his plans to “fertilise” Sierra Leone were already in motion before this trip. Elba had set up a company called Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) earlier in 2019 with his childhood friend, Siaka Stevens – grandson of Sierra Leone’s dictatorial post-colonial president, also called Siaka Stevens.

That same year, SAP signed a memorandum of understanding with President Bio to build Sherbro Island City, envisaged as a thriving hub of improved infrastructure, tourism, media, healthcare and eco technologies.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

The project has moved slowly over the past five years, but recently gathered some momentum. Lloyd’s of London and Octopus Energy have been announced as project partners. These corporate tie-ins, alongside Elba’s stardom, have given Sherbro Island City enough clout to garner global media attention.

Many journalists and commentators have praised Elba and Stevens for their capacity to “dream big”. Braima Koroma, director of research and training at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre in Freetown, told me that “local communities, government officials and potential investors seem to be excited about the vision of creating a modern, eco-friendly urban centre. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding the promises of job creation, improved infrastructure and increased foreign investment.”

On the other hand, Koroma told me the project’s “focus on luxury and exclusivity” has prompted “worry about the risk of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality” – suggesting the optimism generated by Sherbro Island City and desire for development in Sierra Leone may have obscured questions about the desirability of a hyper-modern city designed to attract a wealthy, globalised elite and provide returns for mobile foreign capital. The majority of Sierra Leoneans, who live on an average of just US$560 (£422) a year, will be economically locked out of this exclusive urban enclave.

A very different built environment

Much of my time in Sierra Leone was spent at the public archive building, which is located within the country’s most historic university, Fourah Bay College. One day, I was on the back of an okada (motorcycle taxi) on the steep mountain road up to the archive when I got a call from Alfred, one of the archivists, reminding me it was closed for a national holiday.

Taking advantage of a day away from dusty colonial-era documents, I redirected the driver up to the neighbourhood of Hill Station, as it is still called today, on the main road into the mountains overlooking Freetown.

At first glance, Hill Station appears an unremarkable neighbourhood of Freetown. Large compounds hide behind breeze block walls, and corrugated-iron houses hang on to the steep sides of the ridge on which Hill Station is perched.

However, a short walk off the main road reveals a very different built environment. Amid the red dirt roads and thriving palm and kapok trees, vast wooden bungalows are hoisted up on top of stilts. In varying states of decay and heavily modified with corrugated-iron extensions, these bungalows are still owned by the government and inhabited by civil servants and their families.

On my stroll through Hill Station, the neighbourhood was very quiet aside from several men finishing off the big job of painting one of the bungalows in pastel green. While only 12 of these colonial homes remain, at its peak Hill Station consisted of about 30 bungalows.

This mountain settlement, its first stage completed in 1904, was connected to Freetown’s city centre by a narrow-gauge railway that operated to suit the hours of the few government officials who lived in Hill Station and commuted into the city each day. After returning in the evening (the last train up was at 6:30pm), British colonial officials drank together and played billiards at the recreational club. At weekends they played tennis, watched by their wives and children.

The bungalows, club and railway were built at great expense – around £86,000, roughly equivalent to £9 million today – to provide a new way of life for this handful of white colonial officials, businessmen and their families who had previously resided in the city. This was a huge project that catered for a tiny white elite – by 1911, only 90 people out of Freetown’s total population of about 40,000 lived in Hill Station.

Investment on this scale was highly unusual in Britain’s African colonies, which were usually run on shoestring budgets. The colonial government rationalised it as a response to the discovery in the late 1890s that Anopheles mosquitoes were the vector of malaria.

But African people were identified as the “reservoir” of the disease and so, according to this logic, white people would be safe from disease if they spent the night – when mosquitoes were feeding – away from them. This understanding of disease prevention is characteristic of a period that saw a hardening of the racial hierarchy in British West Africa around monolithic categories of whiteness and blackness.

Escaping their ‘seedy civilisation’

To colonial officials and medical experts, the settlement of Hill Station was associated with whiteness, health and modernity. Its opposite was the city of Freetown, associated with blackness, dirt and disease. The hard binary of white-black and mountain-coast forged by the construction of Hill Station was new. But it was built on older ideas of disease transmission, race and landscape.

While I walked among the bungalows of Hill Station, a breeze blew across the ridge providing me with some relief from the hot and humid stillness that characterised Freetown’s city centre. More than a century ago, this breeze was highly prized by colonial medical officers as ventilation was thought to circulate “healthy” air.

The Hill Station bungalows were designed to harness the breeze. All four sides were lined with windows that could be opened to encourage the movement of air. But contrary to the aim of preventing the spread of malaria, the windows were not equipped with mosquito screens, as officials thought screens would prevent air flow.

Concrete foundations held iron stilts that raised the bungalows more than two metres from the ground. This functioned to distance occupants from the dangerous miasmas that were thought to emanate from the ground.

The idea that “bad air” was the cause of health problems remained central to the medical geography of empire even after the discovery of new tropical medicines. Freetown, perceived as insanitary and overpopulated, was understood as a hotbed of enervating miasmas that left white colonial officials vulnerable to contracting deadly fevers.

From the ridge, I looked down to the west over Lumley Beach, south towards the mountains of the Freetown peninsula, and east over the city centre. Freetown sprawled over the undulating terrain, pushing up tightly against the Atlantic coastline. From this same location, colonial officials would have surveyed the territory and perhaps felt secure in their place at the top of the colonial hierarchy.

In the 1890s, the governor of colonial Sierra Leone, Frederick Cardew, justified the construction of Hill Station because of the “exhilarating and bracing” sensory experience of walking along this ridgeline. He marvelled at a view that “could hardly be surpassed in any part of the world in range and beauty”.

Even after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, Hill Station has remained a site of state power. Adjacent to the old bungalows is the president’s official residence and the various high commissions of old imperial nations, all hidden behind high walls and barbed wire.

But earlier this year, several senior civil servants and their families were evicted from their Hill Station bungalows after the government of Sierra Leone granted Turkey and Saudi Arabia plots of land to build new embassies. Their bungalows are now slated for demolition.

The destruction of Freetown’s colonial-era built environment, including the once ubiquitous 19th-century Krio bode ose (board houses), has been a consistent feature of Freetown’s postcolonial period. Many locals, looking resolutely towards a better tomorrow, do not mourn the loss of the material aftermaths of colonialism. Yet the unchecked churn of urban development can also mean some important lessons from history are forgotten.

Sierra Leone’s ‘afro-dynamic ecocity’

The foundational idea of architects Foster + Partners for Sherbro Island City is to make it “afro-dynamic” – as encapsulated by its leaf motif, loosely inspired by the shape of Sherbro island. According to the marketing material, this leaf shows the way in which the city is both “connected to Africa” and “rooted in community”.

Having been a slave boat harbour in the 18th century, Sherbro island would go on to become an important colonial port. However, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was a remote and overlooked part of post-colonial Sierra Leone. The new architectural vision for Sherbro Island City doesn’t reference this history – but within the shiny publicity material, there are some echoes of Hill Station’s relationship with Freetown.

Back in October 1902, the Public Works Department erected signs in the vicinity of the proposed site, with one reading: “Warning. Any person found squatting, erecting huts, or planting on this and adjacent lands from this date will be PROSECUTED and EJECTED.”

While Sherbro Island City will also be built on land used by existing communities, SAP claims the new city will benefit the island’s population of around 40,000 people. But Bankolay Theodore Turay, a Sierra Leonean scholar based at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is sceptical. He explained to me that he is “not aware of any compensation process that has taken place for communities that will be dispossessed of their land, and those that will be relocated from the community”.

Sherbro Island City will exist on a separate legal footing from the rest of the nation as a special economic zone, and promises huge tax incentives to investors. It appears that it will be a private city, even if not in name, managed by business people and shaped by the interests of foreign capital.

The architects’ images conform to an aesthetic of globalised modernity. Where the bungalows of Hill Station were constructed from imported prefabricated materials that conformed to a pan-imperial style, CGI renderings of Sherbro Island City imagine a hyper-modern city of glass and steel that appears to have little to do with its locale.

Foster + Partners says it has “not engaged in any detailed designs at this stage, which will be shaped by input from several stakeholders including local communities”. It adds that all of the designs “are rooted in sustainability and a respect for the communities we design for”.

Turay told me that, regardless of SAP’s claims that the city will have minimal environmental impact, “construction work does not come without environmental issues, without changing the special dynamics of the community” in an area with an “ecological footprint that is very, very low”.

In an interview in 2023, SAP’s co-founder Stevens described how the idea for the new city first germinated while he was on holiday at a luxury beach resort in Dubai. He recalled thinking: “I wish I could make my country like this one day.”

It looks like Sherbro Island City will, like Hill Station, be a city for the elite. Fosters + Partners’ preview book describes five “character profiles” of potential residents of, and visitors to, the city. These are a tourist family from Europe, two renowned health professionals and young parents, a South African digital nomad living between Dubai and Singapore, a recent Harvard graduate, and a successful actor and DJ.

These profiles suggest the city will be for diverse people from all over the world, but with one condition: they must be well-off.

Africa’s masterplanned cities

Sherbro Island City is not the first masterplanned city for Africa in the 21st century. Over the past 20 years, similar plans for new cities have cropped up throughout the continent.

Perhaps the most notable is Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria. First announced in 2003, the Eko Atlantic project has radically altered the geography of Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos. Built on 6.5 million square miles of reclaimed land, it protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean from what was Bar Beach. Its first few skeletal tower blocks have changed the skyline of downtown Lagos.

Other projects on the continent have been less successful. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, conceived in 2009, is still a work-in-progress street grid 50 miles outside the capital, Nairobi. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Hope City project got no further than computer-generated images of glowing towers before being cancelled.

And then there is Senegal’s Akon City, the brainchild of Senegalese-American rapper Akon. Six years after it was announced with great fanfare, Akon City is little more than a half-built welcome centre. Some parallels to the Sherbro Island City project are evident: both are backed by global superstars, and both promise to transform the fortunes of small and often overlooked west African nations.

Turay said his first reaction to the Sherbro Island City plans was: “Is this is going to be another Akon city?” Such city-scale projects require vast amounts of capital and organisation, and many flounder facing this harsh reality.

However, not all of these projects are mirages. As South African professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson has described, cities in Africa have become the latest frontier for speculative real estate investment. This trend sped up hugely after the global financial crisis of 2007–08 as, since then, interest rates have generally been very low and capital has sought out riskier investments with potentially higher yields.

The rise of a foreign capital-led, speculative real estate market in African cities has been widely celebrated. Many urban residents across the continent see visions for modernity and new concrete structures as evidence of development, investment, and change for the better.

Comments on Eko Atlantic update videos, for example, show great pride in these ambitious plans from people who will probably never afford to live in the city’s luxury apartments. Similarly, in Sierra Leone, many people appear optimistic about the prospect of a hyper-modern city that promises development in the form of investment, jobs and infrastructure.

However, according to Braima Koroma: “There are also voices of caution. Community members and environmental activists have raised concerns about the potential displacement of residents and the environmental impact of large-scale construction.” He suggests these concerns “underline the importance of ensuring that the development is inclusive, and takes into account the needs and rights of local populations”.

Exit schemes

Beyond Sierra Leone, in countries where city-scale projects have progressed further, concerns about their potential for entrenching inequality have been communicated in different ways. The Nigerian photographer Christopher Obuh’s series of images of Eko Atlantic City, No City for Poor Man, asks viewers to reflect on the unevenness of this speculative urbanism by showing the process of construction that is usually obscured by slick videos, glossy CGI renderings and marketing speak.

In an article about Eko Atlantic, journalist Katie Jane Fernelius argued that this new city is less about developing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of a changing climate, urban overcrowding and a lack of investment, and more a place of elite moneymaking where capital can be made liquid and free-flowing. In her view, Eko Atlantic City is likely to further entrench the highly unequal status quo.

Inequality was vital to the colonial system. European empires depended on the construction of rigid hierarchies, most often around ideas of race. More recently, harsh inequalities have again become a defining feature of the world since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

The speculative urbanism of the 21st century recycles colonial logics in the form of protected compounds, private suburbs and gated communities. These spatial fixes to the challenge of living amid the masses are supported by other fixes to the “problem” of regulation, such as special economic zones, freeports and tax havens.

In his 2022 book Adventure Capitalism, Raymond Craib describes libertarian schemes to carve out spaces beyond the regulatory systems of the nation-state, from private islands to seasteads and space colonies. These extreme forms of exit have largely remained imaginary – yet these exit plans are significant in themselves, as they tell us how the wealthy envision the future.

In using his stardom to mobilise investment in Sierra Leone, I’m sure Idris Elba genuinely wants to uplift the homeland of his father. But it feels problematic that many of the most ambitious attempts at urban development in Africa, and across the world, appear to manifest largely through “exit schemes”.

The Conversation has contacted representatives for Idris Elba, Sherbro Alliance Partners and Eko Atlantic, offering them the opportunity to comment on issues raised in this article. By the time of publication, we had not received a response from any of these parties.

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Milo Gough has received funding from the AHRC through CHASE DTP.

– ref. From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what do these Sierra Leone developments tell us about urban elites? – https://theconversation.com/from-a-colonial-hill-town-to-idris-elbas-island-masterplan-what-do-these-sierra-leone-developments-tell-us-about-urban-elites-233714

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Gough, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester

Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, is celebrated as a city founded to resettle freed slaves in the 1790s. Over the following century, it became a truly cosmopolitan port city as people from across western Africa and the Americas made it their home.

But Freetown’s British colonial rulers struggled to acclimatise. Many were plagued by deadly fevers that earned West Africa its reputation in Europe as the “white man’s grave”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the intensifying racism of colonialism, coupled with the emergence of the new field of tropical medicine, led to the construction of Hill Station, an experimental, racially segregated settlement built in the mountains four miles south of Freetown.

This was more than simply a public health measure to protect the white colonists. It was an abandonment of Freetown – an exit strategy from a city that was seen by this colonial elite as diseased, overcrowded and dangerous. The writer and journalist Graham Greene was highly critical of these motives in his travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936):

England had planted this town [Freetown], the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service … They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could.

Now, more than a century later, a proposed masterplanned city in Sierra Leone called Sherbro Island City is raising questions about the nature of modern urban developments – questions that resonate with my research in Freetown’s public archives about the story of Hill Station.

The people behind Sherbro Island City, including English actor Idris Elba, are anything but colonial types. And in a country that is almost always portrayed as a place of violence and suffering – epitomised by its civil war in the 1990s and the devastating Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016 – the more optimistic headlines generated by Sherbro Island City are welcome. Its plans for an “afro-dynamic eco-city” promise long-term growth for Sierra Leone and the wider region.

But like Hill Station, this development – to be built on Sherbro Island, around 75 miles (120km) south of Freetown – has been planned for a small international elite. It is marketed as being clean and sanitary, with state-of-the-art “smart infrastructure” – in contrast to the perception of Freetown, like many other major African cities, as dirty, chaotic and perpetually malfunctioning.

Abuzz with anticipation

In 2019, I was in Freetown conducting research into the history of the city. On the day my fieldwork was wrapping up, Idris Elba landed for his first visit to his father’s homeland. Freetown had been buzzing with the news of his arrival. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Sierra Leone’s own superstar.

On his week-long trip, Elba was busy. Events and photo opportunities swirled around a ritualistic centre piece: the presentation of citizenship by the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Elba was understandably enamoured by Sierra Leone and the welcome he received. Speaking to a BBC correspondent, he proclaimed that “the son of the soil is coming back to fertilise the soil”.

In fact, his plans to “fertilise” Sierra Leone were already in motion before this trip. Elba had set up a company called Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) earlier in 2019 with his childhood friend, Siaka Stevens – grandson of Sierra Leone’s dictatorial post-colonial president, also called Siaka Stevens.

That same year, SAP signed a memorandum of understanding with President Bio to build Sherbro Island City, envisaged as a thriving hub of improved infrastructure, tourism, media, healthcare and eco technologies.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

The project has moved slowly over the past five years, but recently gathered some momentum. Lloyd’s of London and Octopus Energy have been announced as project partners. These corporate tie-ins, alongside Elba’s stardom, have given Sherbro Island City enough clout to garner global media attention.

Many journalists and commentators have praised Elba and Stevens for their capacity to “dream big”. Braima Koroma, director of research and training at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre in Freetown, told me that “local communities, government officials and potential investors seem to be excited about the vision of creating a modern, eco-friendly urban centre. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding the promises of job creation, improved infrastructure and increased foreign investment.”

On the other hand, Koroma told me the project’s “focus on luxury and exclusivity” has prompted “worry about the risk of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality” – suggesting the optimism generated by Sherbro Island City and desire for development in Sierra Leone may have obscured questions about the desirability of a hyper-modern city designed to attract a wealthy, globalised elite and provide returns for mobile foreign capital. The majority of Sierra Leoneans, who live on an average of just US$560 (£422) a year, will be economically locked out of this exclusive urban enclave.

A very different built environment

Much of my time in Sierra Leone was spent at the public archive building, which is located within the country’s most historic university, Fourah Bay College. One day, I was on the back of an okada (motorcycle taxi) on the steep mountain road up to the archive when I got a call from Alfred, one of the archivists, reminding me it was closed for a national holiday.

Taking advantage of a day away from dusty colonial-era documents, I redirected the driver up to the neighbourhood of Hill Station, as it is still called today, on the main road into the mountains overlooking Freetown.

At first glance, Hill Station appears an unremarkable neighbourhood of Freetown. Large compounds hide behind breeze block walls, and corrugated-iron houses hang on to the steep sides of the ridge on which Hill Station is perched.

However, a short walk off the main road reveals a very different built environment. Amid the red dirt roads and thriving palm and kapok trees, vast wooden bungalows are hoisted up on top of stilts. In varying states of decay and heavily modified with corrugated-iron extensions, these bungalows are still owned by the government and inhabited by civil servants and their families.

On my stroll through Hill Station, the neighbourhood was very quiet aside from several men finishing off the big job of painting one of the bungalows in pastel green. While only 12 of these colonial homes remain, at its peak Hill Station consisted of about 30 bungalows.

This mountain settlement, its first stage completed in 1904, was connected to Freetown’s city centre by a narrow-gauge railway that operated to suit the hours of the few government officials who lived in Hill Station and commuted into the city each day. After returning in the evening (the last train up was at 6:30pm), British colonial officials drank together and played billiards at the recreational club. At weekends they played tennis, watched by their wives and children.

The bungalows, club and railway were built at great expense – around £86,000, roughly equivalent to £9 million today – to provide a new way of life for this handful of white colonial officials, businessmen and their families who had previously resided in the city. This was a huge project that catered for a tiny white elite – by 1911, only 90 people out of Freetown’s total population of about 40,000 lived in Hill Station.

Investment on this scale was highly unusual in Britain’s African colonies, which were usually run on shoestring budgets. The colonial government rationalised it as a response to the discovery in the late 1890s that Anopheles mosquitoes were the vector of malaria.

But African people were identified as the “reservoir” of the disease and so, according to this logic, white people would be safe from disease if they spent the night – when mosquitoes were feeding – away from them. This understanding of disease prevention is characteristic of a period that saw a hardening of the racial hierarchy in British West Africa around monolithic categories of whiteness and blackness.

Escaping their ‘seedy civilisation’

To colonial officials and medical experts, the settlement of Hill Station was associated with whiteness, health and modernity. Its opposite was the city of Freetown, associated with blackness, dirt and disease. The hard binary of white-black and mountain-coast forged by the construction of Hill Station was new. But it was built on older ideas of disease transmission, race and landscape.

While I walked among the bungalows of Hill Station, a breeze blew across the ridge providing me with some relief from the hot and humid stillness that characterised Freetown’s city centre. More than a century ago, this breeze was highly prized by colonial medical officers as ventilation was thought to circulate “healthy” air.

The Hill Station bungalows were designed to harness the breeze. All four sides were lined with windows that could be opened to encourage the movement of air. But contrary to the aim of preventing the spread of malaria, the windows were not equipped with mosquito screens, as officials thought screens would prevent air flow.

Concrete foundations held iron stilts that raised the bungalows more than two metres from the ground. This functioned to distance occupants from the dangerous miasmas that were thought to emanate from the ground.

The idea that “bad air” was the cause of health problems remained central to the medical geography of empire even after the discovery of new tropical medicines. Freetown, perceived as insanitary and overpopulated, was understood as a hotbed of enervating miasmas that left white colonial officials vulnerable to contracting deadly fevers.

From the ridge, I looked down to the west over Lumley Beach, south towards the mountains of the Freetown peninsula, and east over the city centre. Freetown sprawled over the undulating terrain, pushing up tightly against the Atlantic coastline. From this same location, colonial officials would have surveyed the territory and perhaps felt secure in their place at the top of the colonial hierarchy.

In the 1890s, the governor of colonial Sierra Leone, Frederick Cardew, justified the construction of Hill Station because of the “exhilarating and bracing” sensory experience of walking along this ridgeline. He marvelled at a view that “could hardly be surpassed in any part of the world in range and beauty”.

Even after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, Hill Station has remained a site of state power. Adjacent to the old bungalows is the president’s official residence and the various high commissions of old imperial nations, all hidden behind high walls and barbed wire.

But earlier this year, several senior civil servants and their families were evicted from their Hill Station bungalows after the government of Sierra Leone granted Turkey and Saudi Arabia plots of land to build new embassies. Their bungalows are now slated for demolition.

The destruction of Freetown’s colonial-era built environment, including the once ubiquitous 19th-century Krio bode ose (board houses), has been a consistent feature of Freetown’s postcolonial period. Many locals, looking resolutely towards a better tomorrow, do not mourn the loss of the material aftermaths of colonialism. Yet the unchecked churn of urban development can also mean some important lessons from history are forgotten.

Sierra Leone’s ‘afro-dynamic ecocity’

The foundational idea of architects Foster + Partners for Sherbro Island City is to make it “afro-dynamic” – as encapsulated by its leaf motif, loosely inspired by the shape of Sherbro island. According to the marketing material, this leaf shows the way in which the city is both “connected to Africa” and “rooted in community”.

Having been a slave boat harbour in the 18th century, Sherbro island would go on to become an important colonial port. However, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was a remote and overlooked part of post-colonial Sierra Leone. The new architectural vision for Sherbro Island City doesn’t reference this history – but within the shiny publicity material, there are some echoes of Hill Station’s relationship with Freetown.

Back in October 1902, the Public Works Department erected signs in the vicinity of the proposed site, with one reading: “Warning. Any person found squatting, erecting huts, or planting on this and adjacent lands from this date will be PROSECUTED and EJECTED.”

While Sherbro Island City will also be built on land used by existing communities, SAP claims the new city will benefit the island’s population of around 40,000 people. But Bankolay Theodore Turay, a Sierra Leonean scholar based at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is sceptical. He explained to me that he is “not aware of any compensation process that has taken place for communities that will be dispossessed of their land, and those that will be relocated from the community”.

Sherbro Island City will exist on a separate legal footing from the rest of the nation as a special economic zone, and promises huge tax incentives to investors. It appears that it will be a private city, even if not in name, managed by business people and shaped by the interests of foreign capital.

The architects’ images conform to an aesthetic of globalised modernity. Where the bungalows of Hill Station were constructed from imported prefabricated materials that conformed to a pan-imperial style, CGI renderings of Sherbro Island City imagine a hyper-modern city of glass and steel that appears to have little to do with its locale.

Foster + Partners says it has “not engaged in any detailed designs at this stage, which will be shaped by input from several stakeholders including local communities”. It adds that all of the designs “are rooted in sustainability and a respect for the communities we design for”.

Turay told me that, regardless of SAP’s claims that the city will have minimal environmental impact, “construction work does not come without environmental issues, without changing the special dynamics of the community” in an area with an “ecological footprint that is very, very low”.

In an interview in 2023, SAP’s co-founder Stevens described how the idea for the new city first germinated while he was on holiday at a luxury beach resort in Dubai. He recalled thinking: “I wish I could make my country like this one day.”

It looks like Sherbro Island City will, like Hill Station, be a city for the elite. Fosters + Partners’ preview book describes five “character profiles” of potential residents of, and visitors to, the city. These are a tourist family from Europe, two renowned health professionals and young parents, a South African digital nomad living between Dubai and Singapore, a recent Harvard graduate, and a successful actor and DJ.

These profiles suggest the city will be for diverse people from all over the world, but with one condition: they must be well-off.

Africa’s masterplanned cities

Sherbro Island City is not the first masterplanned city for Africa in the 21st century. Over the past 20 years, similar plans for new cities have cropped up throughout the continent.

Perhaps the most notable is Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria. First announced in 2003, the Eko Atlantic project has radically altered the geography of Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos. Built on 6.5 million square miles of reclaimed land, it protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean from what was Bar Beach. Its first few skeletal tower blocks have changed the skyline of downtown Lagos.

Other projects on the continent have been less successful. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, conceived in 2009, is still a work-in-progress street grid 50 miles outside the capital, Nairobi. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Hope City project got no further than computer-generated images of glowing towers before being cancelled.

And then there is Senegal’s Akon City, the brainchild of Senegalese-American rapper Akon. Six years after it was announced with great fanfare, Akon City is little more than a half-built welcome centre. Some parallels to the Sherbro Island City project are evident: both are backed by global superstars, and both promise to transform the fortunes of small and often overlooked west African nations.

Turay said his first reaction to the Sherbro Island City plans was: “Is this is going to be another Akon city?” Such city-scale projects require vast amounts of capital and organisation, and many flounder facing this harsh reality.

However, not all of these projects are mirages. As South African professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson has described, cities in Africa have become the latest frontier for speculative real estate investment. This trend sped up hugely after the global financial crisis of 2007–08 as, since then, interest rates have generally been very low and capital has sought out riskier investments with potentially higher yields.

The rise of a foreign capital-led, speculative real estate market in African cities has been widely celebrated. Many urban residents across the continent see visions for modernity and new concrete structures as evidence of development, investment, and change for the better.

Comments on Eko Atlantic update videos, for example, show great pride in these ambitious plans from people who will probably never afford to live in the city’s luxury apartments. Similarly, in Sierra Leone, many people appear optimistic about the prospect of a hyper-modern city that promises development in the form of investment, jobs and infrastructure.

However, according to Braima Koroma: “There are also voices of caution. Community members and environmental activists have raised concerns about the potential displacement of residents and the environmental impact of large-scale construction.” He suggests these concerns “underline the importance of ensuring that the development is inclusive, and takes into account the needs and rights of local populations”.

Exit schemes

Beyond Sierra Leone, in countries where city-scale projects have progressed further, concerns about their potential for entrenching inequality have been communicated in different ways. The Nigerian photographer Christopher Obuh’s series of images of Eko Atlantic City, No City for Poor Man, asks viewers to reflect on the unevenness of this speculative urbanism by showing the process of construction that is usually obscured by slick videos, glossy CGI renderings and marketing speak.

In an article about Eko Atlantic, journalist Katie Jane Fernelius argued that this new city is less about developing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of a changing climate, urban overcrowding and a lack of investment, and more a place of elite moneymaking where capital can be made liquid and free-flowing. In her view, Eko Atlantic City is likely to further entrench the highly unequal status quo.

Inequality was vital to the colonial system. European empires depended on the construction of rigid hierarchies, most often around ideas of race. More recently, harsh inequalities have again become a defining feature of the world since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

The speculative urbanism of the 21st century recycles colonial logics in the form of protected compounds, private suburbs and gated communities. These spatial fixes to the challenge of living amid the masses are supported by other fixes to the “problem” of regulation, such as special economic zones, freeports and tax havens.

In his 2022 book Adventure Capitalism, Raymond Craib describes libertarian schemes to carve out spaces beyond the regulatory systems of the nation-state, from private islands to seasteads and space colonies. These extreme forms of exit have largely remained imaginary – yet these exit plans are significant in themselves, as they tell us how the wealthy envision the future.

In using his stardom to mobilise investment in Sierra Leone, I’m sure Idris Elba genuinely wants to uplift the homeland of his father. But it feels problematic that many of the most ambitious attempts at urban development in Africa, and across the world, appear to manifest largely through “exit schemes”.

The Conversation has contacted representatives for Idris Elba, Sherbro Alliance Partners and Eko Atlantic, offering them the opportunity to comment on issues raised in this article. By the time of publication, we had not received a response from any of these parties.

For you, more from our Insights series:

• I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and discovered classic propaganda techniques reimagined for the social media age

• The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
  

• How the world’s first open-source digital map of mass graves could help bring justice to victims in Ukraine and other war zones

• Novelist J.G. Ballard was experimenting with computer-generated poetry 50 years before ChatGPT was invented
  

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Milo Gough has received funding from the AHRC through CHASE DTP.

– ref. From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what do these Sierra Leone developments tell us about urban elitism? – https://theconversation.com/from-a-colonial-hill-town-to-idris-elbas-island-masterplan-what-do-these-sierra-leone-developments-tell-us-about-urban-elitism-233714

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Gough, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester

Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, is celebrated as a city founded to resettle freed slaves in the 1790s. Over the following century, it became a truly cosmopolitan port city as people from across western Africa and the Americas made it their home.

But Freetown’s British colonial rulers struggled to acclimatise. Many were plagued by deadly fevers that earned West Africa its reputation in Europe as the “white man’s grave”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the intensifying racism of colonialism, coupled with the emergence of the new field of tropical medicine, led to the construction of Hill Station, an experimental, racially segregated settlement built in the mountains four miles south of Freetown.

This was more than simply a public health measure to protect the white colonists. It was an abandonment of Freetown – an exit strategy from a city that was seen by this colonial elite as diseased, overcrowded and dangerous. The writer and journalist Graham Greene was highly critical of these motives in his travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936):

England had planted this town [Freetown], the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service … They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could.

Now, more than a century later, a proposed masterplanned city in Sierra Leone called Sherbro Island City is raising questions about the nature of modern urban developments – questions that resonate with my research in Freetown’s public archives about the story of Hill Station.

The people behind Sherbro Island City, including English actor Idris Elba, are anything but colonial types. And in a country that is almost always portrayed as a place of violence and suffering – epitomised by its civil war in the 1990s and the devastating Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016 – the more optimistic headlines generated by Sherbro Island City are welcome. Its plans for an “afro-dynamic eco-city” promise long-term growth for Sierra Leone and the wider region.

But like Hill Station, this development – to be built on Sherbro Island, around 75 miles (120km) south of Freetown – has been planned for a small international elite. It is marketed as being clean and sanitary, with state-of-the-art “smart infrastructure” – in contrast to the perception of Freetown, like many other major African cities, as dirty, chaotic and perpetually malfunctioning.

Abuzz with anticipation

In 2019, I was in Freetown conducting research into the history of the city. On the day my fieldwork was wrapping up, Idris Elba landed for his first visit to his father’s homeland. Freetown had been buzzing with the news of his arrival. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Sierra Leone’s own superstar.

On his week-long trip, Elba was busy. Events and photo opportunities swirled around a ritualistic centre piece: the presentation of citizenship by the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Elba was understandably enamoured by Sierra Leone and the welcome he received. Speaking to a BBC correspondent, he proclaimed that “the son of the soil is coming back to fertilise the soil”.

In fact, his plans to “fertilise” Sierra Leone were already in motion before this trip. Elba had set up a company called Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) earlier in 2019 with his childhood friend, Siaka Stevens – grandson of Sierra Leone’s dictatorial post-colonial president, also called Siaka Stevens.

That same year, SAP signed a memorandum of understanding with President Bio to build Sherbro Island City, envisaged as a thriving hub of improved infrastructure, tourism, media, healthcare and eco technologies.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

The project has moved slowly over the past five years, but recently gathered some momentum. Lloyd’s of London and Octopus Energy have been announced as project partners. These corporate tie-ins, alongside Elba’s stardom, have given Sherbro Island City enough clout to garner global media attention.

Many journalists and commentators have praised Elba and Stevens for their capacity to “dream big”. Braima Koroma, director of research and training at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre in Freetown, told me that “local communities, government officials and potential investors seem to be excited about the vision of creating a modern, eco-friendly urban centre. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding the promises of job creation, improved infrastructure and increased foreign investment.”

On the other hand, Koroma told me the project’s “focus on luxury and exclusivity” has prompted “worry about the risk of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality” – suggesting the optimism generated by Sherbro Island City and desire for development in Sierra Leone may have obscured questions about the desirability of a hyper-modern city designed to attract a wealthy, globalised elite and provide returns for mobile foreign capital. The majority of Sierra Leoneans, who live on an average of just US$560 (£422) a year, will be economically locked out of this exclusive urban enclave.

A very different built environment

Much of my time in Sierra Leone was spent at the public archive building, which is located within the country’s most historic university, Fourah Bay College. One day, I was on the back of an okada (motorcycle taxi) on the steep mountain road up to the archive when I got a call from Alfred, one of the archivists, reminding me it was closed for a national holiday.

Taking advantage of a day away from dusty colonial-era documents, I redirected the driver up to the neighbourhood of Hill Station, as it is still called today, on the main road into the mountains overlooking Freetown.

At first glance, Hill Station appears an unremarkable neighbourhood of Freetown. Large compounds hide behind breeze block walls, and corrugated-iron houses hang on to the steep sides of the ridge on which Hill Station is perched.

However, a short walk off the main road reveals a very different built environment. Amid the red dirt roads and thriving palm and kapok trees, vast wooden bungalows are hoisted up on top of stilts. In varying states of decay and heavily modified with corrugated-iron extensions, these bungalows are still owned by the government and inhabited by civil servants and their families.

On my stroll through Hill Station, the neighbourhood was very quiet aside from several men finishing off the big job of painting one of the bungalows in pastel green. While only 12 of these colonial homes remain, at its peak Hill Station consisted of about 30 bungalows.

This mountain settlement, its first stage completed in 1904, was connected to Freetown’s city centre by a narrow-gauge railway that operated to suit the hours of the few government officials who lived in Hill Station and commuted into the city each day. After returning in the evening (the last train up was at 6:30pm), British colonial officials drank together and played billiards at the recreational club. At weekends they played tennis, watched by their wives and children.

The bungalows, club and railway were built at great expense – around £86,000, roughly equivalent to £9 million today – to provide a new way of life for this handful of white colonial officials, businessmen and their families who had previously resided in the city. This was a huge project that catered for a tiny white elite – by 1911, only 90 people out of Freetown’s total population of about 40,000 lived in Hill Station.

Investment on this scale was highly unusual in Britain’s African colonies, which were usually run on shoestring budgets. The colonial government rationalised it as a response to the discovery in the late 1890s that Anopheles mosquitoes were the vector of malaria.

But African people were identified as the “reservoir” of the disease and so, according to this logic, white people would be safe from disease if they spent the night – when mosquitoes were feeding – away from them. This understanding of disease prevention is characteristic of a period that saw a hardening of the racial hierarchy in British West Africa around monolithic categories of whiteness and blackness.

Escaping their ‘seedy civilisation’

To colonial officials and medical experts, the settlement of Hill Station was associated with whiteness, health and modernity. Its opposite was the city of Freetown, associated with blackness, dirt and disease. The hard binary of white-black and mountain-coast forged by the construction of Hill Station was new. But it was built on older ideas of disease transmission, race and landscape.

While I walked among the bungalows of Hill Station, a breeze blew across the ridge providing me with some relief from the hot and humid stillness that characterised Freetown’s city centre. More than a century ago, this breeze was highly prized by colonial medical officers as ventilation was thought to circulate “healthy” air.

The Hill Station bungalows were designed to harness the breeze. All four sides were lined with windows that could be opened to encourage the movement of air. But contrary to the aim of preventing the spread of malaria, the windows were not equipped with mosquito screens, as officials thought screens would prevent air flow.

Concrete foundations held iron stilts that raised the bungalows more than two metres from the ground. This functioned to distance occupants from the dangerous miasmas that were thought to emanate from the ground.

The idea that “bad air” was the cause of health problems remained central to the medical geography of empire even after the discovery of new tropical medicines. Freetown, perceived as insanitary and overpopulated, was understood as a hotbed of enervating miasmas that left white colonial officials vulnerable to contracting deadly fevers.

From the ridge, I looked down to the west over Lumley Beach, south towards the mountains of the Freetown peninsula, and east over the city centre. Freetown sprawled over the undulating terrain, pushing up tightly against the Atlantic coastline. From this same location, colonial officials would have surveyed the territory and perhaps felt secure in their place at the top of the colonial hierarchy.

In the 1890s, the governor of colonial Sierra Leone, Frederick Cardew, justified the construction of Hill Station because of the “exhilarating and bracing” sensory experience of walking along this ridgeline. He marvelled at a view that “could hardly be surpassed in any part of the world in range and beauty”.

Even after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, Hill Station has remained a site of state power. Adjacent to the old bungalows is the president’s official residence and the various high commissions of old imperial nations, all hidden behind high walls and barbed wire.

But earlier this year, several senior civil servants and their families were evicted from their Hill Station bungalows after the government of Sierra Leone granted Turkey and Saudi Arabia plots of land to build new embassies. Their bungalows are now slated for demolition.

The destruction of Freetown’s colonial-era built environment, including the once ubiquitous 19th-century Krio bode ose (board houses), has been a consistent feature of Freetown’s postcolonial period. Many locals, looking resolutely towards a better tomorrow, do not mourn the loss of the material aftermaths of colonialism. Yet the unchecked churn of urban development can also mean some important lessons from history are forgotten.

Sierra Leone’s ‘afro-dynamic ecocity’

The foundational idea of architects Foster + Partners for Sherbro Island City is to make it “afro-dynamic” – as encapsulated by its leaf motif, loosely inspired by the shape of Sherbro island. According to the marketing material, this leaf shows the way in which the city is both “connected to Africa” and “rooted in community”.

Having been a slave boat harbour in the 18th century, Sherbro island would go on to become an important colonial port. However, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was a remote and overlooked part of post-colonial Sierra Leone. The new architectural vision for Sherbro Island City doesn’t reference this history – but within the shiny publicity material, there are some echoes of Hill Station’s relationship with Freetown.

Back in October 1902, the Public Works Department erected signs in the vicinity of the proposed site, with one reading: “Warning. Any person found squatting, erecting huts, or planting on this and adjacent lands from this date will be PROSECUTED and EJECTED.”

While Sherbro Island City will also be built on land used by existing communities, SAP claims the new city will benefit the island’s population of around 40,000 people. But Bankolay Theodore Turay, a Sierra Leonean scholar based at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is sceptical. He explained to me that he is “not aware of any compensation process that has taken place for communities that will be dispossessed of their land, and those that will be relocated from the community”.

Sherbro Island City will exist on a separate legal footing from the rest of the nation as a special economic zone, and promises huge tax incentives to investors. It appears that it will be a private city, even if not in name, managed by business people and shaped by the interests of foreign capital.

The architects’ images conform to an aesthetic of globalised modernity. Where the bungalows of Hill Station were constructed from imported prefabricated materials that conformed to a pan-imperial style, CGI renderings of Sherbro Island City imagine a hyper-modern city of glass and steel that appears to have little to do with its locale.

Foster + Partners says it has “not engaged in any detailed designs at this stage, which will be shaped by input from several stakeholders including local communities”. It adds that all of the designs “are rooted in sustainability and a respect for the communities we design for”.

Turay told me that, regardless of SAP’s claims that the city will have minimal environmental impact, “construction work does not come without environmental issues, without changing the special dynamics of the community” in an area with an “ecological footprint that is very, very low”.

In an interview in 2023, SAP’s co-founder Stevens described how the idea for the new city first germinated while he was on holiday at a luxury beach resort in Dubai. He recalled thinking: “I wish I could make my country like this one day.”

It looks like Sherbro Island City will, like Hill Station, be a city for the elite. Fosters + Partners’ preview book describes five “character profiles” of potential residents of, and visitors to, the city. These are a tourist family from Europe, two renowned health professionals and young parents, a South African digital nomad living between Dubai and Singapore, a recent Harvard graduate, and a successful actor and DJ.

These profiles suggest the city will be for diverse people from all over the world, but with one condition: they must be well-off.

Africa’s masterplanned cities

Sherbro Island City is not the first masterplanned city for Africa in the 21st century. Over the past 20 years, similar plans for new cities have cropped up throughout the continent.

Perhaps the most notable is Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria. First announced in 2003, the Eko Atlantic project has radically altered the geography of Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos. Built on 6.5 million square miles of reclaimed land, it protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean from what was Bar Beach. Its first few skeletal tower blocks have changed the skyline of downtown Lagos.

Other projects on the continent have been less successful. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, conceived in 2009, is still a work-in-progress street grid 50 miles outside the capital, Nairobi. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Hope City project got no further than computer-generated images of glowing towers before being cancelled.

And then there is Senegal’s Akon City, the brainchild of Senegalese-American rapper Akon. Six years after it was announced with great fanfare, Akon City is little more than a half-built welcome centre. Some parallels to the Sherbro Island City project are evident: both are backed by global superstars, and both promise to transform the fortunes of small and often overlooked west African nations.

Turay said his first reaction to the Sherbro Island City plans was: “Is this is going to be another Akon city?” Such city-scale projects require vast amounts of capital and organisation, and many flounder facing this harsh reality.

However, not all of these projects are mirages. As South African professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson has described, cities in Africa have become the latest frontier for speculative real estate investment. This trend sped up hugely after the global financial crisis of 2007–08 as, since then, interest rates have generally been very low and capital has sought out riskier investments with potentially higher yields.

The rise of a foreign capital-led, speculative real estate market in African cities has been widely celebrated. Many urban residents across the continent see visions for modernity and new concrete structures as evidence of development, investment, and change for the better.

Comments on Eko Atlantic update videos, for example, show great pride in these ambitious plans from people who will probably never afford to live in the city’s luxury apartments. Similarly, in Sierra Leone, many people appear optimistic about the prospect of a hyper-modern city that promises development in the form of investment, jobs and infrastructure.

However, according to Braima Koroma: “There are also voices of caution. Community members and environmental activists have raised concerns about the potential displacement of residents and the environmental impact of large-scale construction.” He suggests these concerns “underline the importance of ensuring that the development is inclusive, and takes into account the needs and rights of local populations”.

Exit schemes

Beyond Sierra Leone, in countries where city-scale projects have progressed further, concerns about their potential for entrenching inequality have been communicated in different ways. The Nigerian photographer Christopher Obuh’s series of images of Eko Atlantic City, No City for Poor Man, asks viewers to reflect on the unevenness of this speculative urbanism by showing the process of construction that is usually obscured by slick videos, glossy CGI renderings and marketing speak.

In an article about Eko Atlantic, journalist Katie Jane Fernelius argued that this new city is less about developing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of a changing climate, urban overcrowding and a lack of investment, and more a place of elite moneymaking where capital can be made liquid and free-flowing. In her view, Eko Atlantic City is likely to further entrench the highly unequal status quo.

Inequality was vital to the colonial system. European empires depended on the construction of rigid hierarchies, most often around ideas of race. More recently, harsh inequalities have again become a defining feature of the world since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

The speculative urbanism of the 21st century recycles colonial logics in the form of protected compounds, private suburbs and gated communities. These spatial fixes to the challenge of living amid the masses are supported by other fixes to the “problem” of regulation, such as special economic zones, freeports and tax havens.

In his 2022 book Adventure Capitalism, Raymond Craib describes libertarian schemes to carve out spaces beyond the regulatory systems of the nation-state, from private islands to seasteads and space colonies. These extreme forms of exit have largely remained imaginary – yet these exit plans are significant in themselves, as they tell us how the wealthy envision the future.

In using his stardom to mobilise investment in Sierra Leone, I’m sure Idris Elba genuinely wants to uplift the homeland of his father. But it feels problematic that many of the most ambitious attempts at urban development in Africa, and across the world, appear to manifest largely through “exit schemes”.

The Conversation has contacted representatives for Idris Elba, Sherbro Alliance Partners and Eko Atlantic, offering them the opportunity to comment on issues raised in this article. By the time of publication, we had not received a response from any of these parties.

For you, more from our Insights series:

• I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and discovered classic propaganda techniques reimagined for the social media age

• The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
  

• How the world’s first open-source digital map of mass graves could help bring justice to victims in Ukraine and other war zones

• Novelist J.G. Ballard was experimenting with computer-generated poetry 50 years before ChatGPT was invented
  

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Milo Gough has received funding from the AHRC through CHASE DTP.

– ref. From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what two Sierra Leone developments a century apart tell us about urban elitism – https://theconversation.com/from-a-colonial-hill-town-to-idris-elbas-island-masterplan-what-two-sierra-leone-developments-a-century-apart-tell-us-about-urban-elitism-233714

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Researcher, Historian, Australian Catholic University

In a world where information flows freely, it’s easy to forget that, for centuries, knowledge was much harder to come by. Imagine living in a time when the internet didn’t exist, books were scarce, libraries were few, and most people couldn’t even read.

This was the world of Isidore of Seville, a man dedicated to gathering and sharing knowledge to be passed down for generations.

Thanks to his work, he was named the patron saint of the internet in 1997 by Pope John Paul II, recognising his impact on knowledge and communication.

Importantly, understanding Isidore’s life and work also helps us navigate the murky online world of lies – and find information we can trust.

Isidore’s world and the ‘Dark Ages’

Isidore was a bishop and scholar who lived in Seville in what is now Spain during a time we often call the “Dark Ages”, roughly 500–1000 AD. After the fall of the Roman Empire, much of Europe was in chaos – as if the lights had been turned off.

Political instability, war and disease disrupted learning and culture. Many people were illiterate, and many classical works from ancient Greece and Rome risked being lost forever.

In this world of limited access to learning, Isidore stood out. He wanted to make knowledge more accessible, especially to Christians.

He saw preserving and sharing information as essential to keeping civilisation alive and thriving. To do this, he wrote his most famous work, Etymologiae, which became a go-to book for centuries.

What was Etymologiae?

Think of Etymologiae as one of the first encyclopedias. An encyclopedia is a book that collects information on many topics, often arranged alphabetically, making it easy to find answers.

Isidore’s work covered everything from language, science and geography to theology, the study of God. His goal was to make ancient knowledge easier to find and understand. He wanted to save the best ideas of the past and bring them into his present time.

In Etymologiae, he drew from well-known classical authors such as Aristotle, Cicero and Pliny, alongside Christian writers such as Augustine and Jerome. This book became essential for medieval students and scholars because it saved so much knowledge from being lost.

Later, Isidore’s work was widely used in schools across Europe and helped many people learn about topics they might otherwise never know about. It laid a foundation for preserving ancient ideas through the Middle Ages and beyond.

The power of language in Isidore’s work

For Isidore, words were powerful. He argued that understanding the origin, or etymology, of words gave people insight into the true meaning of things. This focus on language is why he called his book Etymologiae. He saw language as a bridge that connected people to knowledge.

But Isidore went beyond just defining words. He also explained concepts from nature, science and history, making sure people had a well-rounded understanding of the world.

In a time when superstitions and beliefs in supernatural forces often influenced people’s view of natural events, Isidore promoted a rational approach. He wanted people to know the facts about their world.

Isidore’s role in education and the church

Isidore wasn’t just a writer.

As a senior leader in the Christian Church, he played an important role in both religion and education. He set up “cathedral schools” for training future priests. These schools would later inspire the first European universities, where students could study a wide range of subjects.

For Isidore education was essential for everyone, not just the church’s leaders.

By promoting the seven “liberal arts” – subjects such as grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music – he helped create a model for what would eventually become medieval university education. His ideas about learning spread across Europe, inspiring others to value education as a path to both knowledge and faith.

The patron saint of the internet

So, how did Isidore, who lived 1,400 years ago, become the patron saint of the internet? His Etymologiae was, in many ways, the internet of his time – a collection of facts and explanations from various sources.

Just as the internet today connects us to all kinds of information, Isidore’s work aimed to make learning easier for people of his era.

In naming him the patron saint of the internet, the Catholic Church recognised Isidore’s efforts to collect, organise, and share knowledge. Like the internet, Etymologiae allowed ideas to flow across generations, even when people had limited access to books or formal education.

Isidore’s lasting legacy

Isidore’s influence didn’t end with his life. His ideas spread across Europe, especially during the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries – a time when scholars worked to revive learning and culture. Etymologiae became a popular text in monasteries and cathedral schools.

In later centuries, scholars relied on his work to understand classical literature, science and theology.

Today, Isidore’s dedication to knowledge serves as a reminder of the importance of preserving and sharing reliable information.

Just as Isidore saw his work as a way to preserve knowledge, we now live in an age of easy access to information. But not all of it is true.

He believed learning should guide us toward wise choices and serve a greater good.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Isidore of Seville: the patron saint of the internet who shaped knowledge for generations – https://theconversation.com/isidore-of-seville-the-patron-saint-of-the-internet-who-shaped-knowledge-for-generations-236792

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Swee-Hoon Chuah, Professor of Behavioural Economics, Tasmanian Behavioural Lab, University of Tasmania

Chances are that the end of the year has made you assess some of your 2024 New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps you, like us, bought a home spin bike or rowing machine in January. Most likely by March, you realised you’ve used it a lot less than you planned. And very probably by June, it has disappeared under a pile of clothes.

You are not alone. A recent Gallup survey shows seven out of ten adults plan to set goals for the next year. According to statista, the most common ones are health goals (exercise and diet) followed by saving money. This is why exercise equipment sales peak in January.

But research shows a quarter of us fail to stick to our New Year resolutions after just one week and more than half within six months. At the end of two years, only 20% succeed.

So why do we keep making resolutions – often accompanied by considerable expense – even though we keep breaking them, and what can we do to persevere? How can you redeem your spin bike? Recent insights from behavioural science hold some answers.

Why we try, and why we fail

You bought a spin bike because you are human.

Other animals do not exercise. Many of them are goal-oriented (they chase or flee), but only humans have the ability to pursue self-improvement to better achieve goals in the future. Exercise is an example of this.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow famously put self-actualisation – fulfilling your potential – at the top of the hierarchy of human needs. You want to be the fittest version of yourself you can be. It’s only natural.

The problem is that regular exercise involves willpower and discipline beyond most of us. Especially when faced with the choice between comfy couch and spin bike. Your ambition may be willing, but your flesh is weak. Exercise feels hard.

This is because our brains evolved in the Stone Age when it made survival sense to loaf about whenever the opportunity arose. With limited food, our ancestors needed to conserve energy for the next chase or flight.

This is true for other vices too, such as binge eating or gorging on sugary foods. But these things are often counterproductive in the modern world where we consume a lot more energy than we normally expend.

Self-regulation

But your bike is also a beacon of hope. Even though our psychology is often at odds with modernity, we have a trump card: the ability to self-regulate. At our best, we can override daily temptations and move towards longer-term goals.

Psychological research has identified two key ingredients to this (in addition to setting goals): monitoring your behaviour for any breaches, and correcting them whenever detected.

You’ve scored two out of three so far: you made the commitment to the bike and you noticed you failed to live up to it. Now it’s time to work on the correction.

Nudge yourself

Zen masters turn weakness into strength. You too can use the human psychological failings from our evolution to your advantage. This is known as self-nudging: changing your own choices to make your best decisions more likely.

An example is the “sunk cost fallacy”, our tendency to base decisions on irrecoverable past expenses.

Here is where the spin bike makes sense: having incurred the expense, you might have a greater motivation to go on your own new bike than to go to the gym. Membership can easily be cancelled, but the bike has been bought.

You could also go wholesale and use the very tools governmental Behavioural Insights Units use, on yourself. For example, policymakers use the EAST framework to make our desired behaviours easy, attractive, social and timely for us.

The spin bike at home is easy to use compared with changing into your fanciest lululemons, packing your gear, driving to the gym and parking your car.

It is also timely. You can use the home spin bike whenever it suits you without needing to queue for lockers, equipment and showers.

Why not make it attractive too? Many home exercisers use a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. In our house, the spin bike is permanently parked in front of the widescreen TV. Behavioural scientists call this temptation bundling.

You can also make your spin bike experience social. This is the Peloton phenomenon: instructors, leader boards and interactions with the exercise community.

Turn over a new leaf

So should you try again in 2025? Yes.

The new year is a natural opportunity for self-improvement due to the fresh start effect. Psychologist found events that mark the passage of time (birthdays, holidays, new years) allow people to mentally consign their failures to the past and start again with a clean slate. It’s an uncanny tactic and it works.

The lesson is that the end of the year provides a great opportunity to ring in much-needed changes. But that’s not enough. You also need some simple strategies to help you stick to them.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why your spin bike has become a clothes rack – and what you can do about it, according to behavioural science – https://theconversation.com/why-your-spin-bike-has-become-a-clothes-rack-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-according-to-behavioural-science-245154

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Fuller, Clinical Trials Director, Department of Endocrinology, RPA Hospital, University of Sydney

As we enter a new year armed with resolutions to improve our lives, there’s a good chance we’ll also be carrying something less helpful: extra kilos. At least half a kilogram, to be precise.

“Weight creep” doesn’t have to be inevitable. Here’s what’s behind this sneaky annual occurrence and some practical steps to prevent it.

Small gains add up

Adults tend to gain weight progressively as they age and typically gain an average of 0.5 to 1kg every year.

While this doesn’t seem like much each year, it amounts to 5kg over a decade. The slow-but-steady nature of weight creep is why many of us won’t notice the extra weight gained until we’re in our fifties.

Why do we gain weight?

Subtle, gradual lifestyle shifts as we progress through life and age-related biological changes cause us to gain weight. Our:

• activity levels decline. Longer work hours and family commitments can see us become more sedentary and have less time for exercise, which means we burn fewer calories

• diets worsen. With frenetic work and family schedules, we sometimes turn to pre-packaged and fast foods. These processed and discretionary foods are loaded with hidden sugars, salts and unhealthy fats. A better financial position later in life can also result in more dining out, which is associated with a higher total energy intake

• sleep decreases. Busy lives and screen use can mean we don’t get enough sleep. This disturbs our body’s energy balance, increasing our feelings of hunger, triggering cravings and decreasing our energy

• stress increases. Financial, relationship and work-related stress increases our body’s production of cortisol, triggering food cravings and promoting fat storage

• metabolism slows. Around the age of 40, our muscle mass naturally declines, and our body fat starts increasing. Muscle mass helps determine our metabolic rate, so when our muscle mass decreases, our bodies start to burn fewer calories at rest.

We also tend to gain a small amount of weight during festive periods – times filled with calorie-rich foods and drinks, when exercise and sleep are often overlooked. One study of Australian adults found participants gained 0.5 kilograms on average over the Christmas/New Year period and an average of 0.25 kilograms around Easter.

Why we need to prevent weight creep

It’s important to prevent weight creep for two key reasons:

1. Weight creep resets our body’s set point

Set-point theory suggests we each have a predetermined weight or set point. Our body works to keep our weight around this set point, adjusting our biological systems to regulate how much we eat, how we store fat and expend energy.

When we gain weight, our set point resets to the new, higher weight. Our body adapts to protect this new weight, making it challenging to lose the weight we’ve gained.

But it’s also possible to lower your set point if you lose weight gradually and with an interval weight loss approach. Specifically, losing weight in small manageable chunks you can sustain – periods of weight loss, followed by periods of weight maintenance, and so on, until you achieve your goal weight.

2. Weight creep can lead to obesity and health issues

Undetected and unmanaged weight creep can result in obesity which can increase our risk of heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and several types of cancers (including breast, colorectal, oesophageal, kidney, gallbladder, uterine, pancreatic and liver).

A large study examined the link between weight gain from early to middle adulthood and health outcomes later in life, following people for around 15 years. It found those who gained 2.5 to 10kg over this period had an increased incidence of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes, obesity-related cancer and death compared to participants who had maintained a stable weight.

Fortunately, there are steps we can take to build lasting habits that will make weight creep a thing of the past.

7 practical steps to prevent weight creep

1. Eat from big to small

Aim to consume most of your food earlier in the day and taper your meal sizes to ensure dinner is the smallest meal you eat.

A low-calorie or small breakfast leads to increased feelings of hunger, specifically appetite for sweets, across the course of the day.

We burn the calories from a meal 2.5 times more efficiently in the morning than in the evening.
So emphasising breakfast over dinner is also good for weight management.

2. Use chopsticks, a teaspoon or an oyster fork

Sit at the table for dinner and use different utensils to encourage eating more slowly.

This gives your brain time to recognise and adapt to signals from your stomach telling you you’re full.

3. Eat the full rainbow

Fill your plate with vegetables and fruits of different colours first to support eating a high-fibre, nutrient-dense diet that will keep you feeling full and satisfied.

Meals also need to be balanced and include a source of protein, wholegrain carbohydrates and healthy fat to meet our dietary needs – for example, eggs on wholegrain toast with avocado.

4. Reach for nature first

Retrain your brain to rely on nature’s treats – fresh vegetables, fruit, honey, nuts and seeds. In their natural state, these foods release the same pleasure response in the brain as ultra-processed and fast foods, helping you avoid unnecessary calories, sugar, salt and unhealthy fats.

5. Choose to move

Look for ways to incorporate incidental activity into your daily routine – such as taking the stairs instead of the lift – and boost your exercise by challenging yourself to try a new activity.

Just be sure to include variety, as doing the same activities every day often results in boredom and avoidance.

6. Prioritise sleep

Set yourself a goal of getting a minimum of seven hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, and help yourself achieve it by avoiding screens for an hour or two before bed.

7. Weigh yourself regularly

Getting into the habit of weighing yourself weekly is a guaranteed way to help avoid the kilos creeping up on us. Aim to weigh yourself on the same day, at the same time and in the same environment each week and use the best quality scales you can afford.

At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are studying the science of obesity and running clinical trials for weight loss. You can register here to express your interest.

A/Prof Nick Fuller works for the University of Sydney and RPA Hospital and has received external funding for projects relating to the treatment of overweight and obesity. He is the author and founder of the Interval Weight Loss program, and the author of Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids with Penguin Books.

– ref. Most adults will gain half a kilo this year – and every year. Here’s how to stop ‘weight creep’ – https://theconversation.com/most-adults-will-gain-half-a-kilo-this-year-and-every-year-heres-how-to-stop-weight-creep-244186

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

Parasite, zombie, leech – these words are often used to describe people in unkind ways. Many of us recoil when ticks, tapeworms, fleas, head lice or bed bugs are even mentioned. Coming across such unwelcome guests – in our hair, on our skin or in our beds – can be a real nightmare.

Some parasites cause horrific deformities and diseases, maiming and killing millions of people and wildlife. Others may help boost immunity or provide the basis of food chains.

Parasites are often demonised and misunderstood. But the more we study these oddities and wonders of evolution, the more we appreciate their vital roles in ecosystems and our complex relationships with them. They’re essential to life on Earth.

As an ecologist with a focus on wildlife and conservation, I wrote this article to share some of my fascination for parasites and the importance of their extraordinary lives.

What is a parasite?

Parasites rely on living organisms for food, to grow and to reproduce.

They can either live on the outside (ectoparasites) or inside (endoparasites) of their hosts. Far from being invited dinner guests, parasites typically turn up of their own accord and feed at the host’s expense, consuming part or all of them.

Parasites can live within their host (or hosts) for short or extended periods – in some cases many years – going largely unnoticed. For instance, one man lived with a tapeworm in his brain for more than four years until the headaches and strange smells become too much to bear. In other cases, parasites can kill their host.

Perhaps the most gruesome type of parasite, parasitoids, kill their hosts in order to reproduce. The disturbing chest-bursting scene from the 1979 movie Alien is a truly visceral sci-fi example of a parasitoid.

In real life, examples include spider wasps that first immobilise their spider prey, lay an egg on them, and bury them. Then when the egg hatches, the wasp larvae devour the incapacitated spider. That is, of course, if another animal such as a “bin chicken (Sacred Ibis)” or insect doesn’t intervene.

Parasites are typically much smaller than their hosts. Many are furnished with equipment for latching on and remaining attached, including hooks, suckers and “teeth”.

Endoparasites such as tapeworms are often flat, allowing them to live within the tight spaces inside other organisms. The flatworm Diplozoon paradoxum that lives in gills of some fish must conjoin with another to reach adulthood and reproduce. Once fused, they form a permanent, lifelong bond and mate with each other over many years.

As much as 40% of all animal species may be parasites, and this mode of life might have evolved more than 200 times in the animal kingdom. But parasitism is not solely confined to animals. Many plants, fungi, protists, bacteria and viruses are parasites too.

Parasite powers

The leech scene in the iconic 1986 movie Stand By Me comes back to me every time I walk through a damp forest. The idea of providing a blood meal for another species sparks fear in many people. But leeches may also come to our aid, either by helping to reduce pooling of blood or reestablishing blood flow to areas post-surgery. Their anaesthetic saliva also has anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant properties, which are advantageous for medical procedures.

As the blood of leeches contains DNA from their past meals, conservation scientists can use them to search for rare and cryptic wildlife.

One of the world’s most widespread parasites is Toxoplasma gondii. Some estimates suggest as many as one in three people are affected. This parasite’s main host is cats, large and small species. House cats are frequently infected, spreading this parasite through their faeces.

While many infected people appear to have no symptoms, serious effects can include organ damage, complications with pregnancy or abortion, erratic risk-taking behaviour, mental conditions, and more traffic accidents than unaffected people.

There are potential “benefits” too. Research suggests Toxoplasma infection, which can increase confidence and risk-taking, may even be linked with increased entrepreneurial and business-related activities. Indeed, this same study found that nations with higher rates of toxoplasmosis had a lower proportion of individuals concerned about failure related to new business ventures.

Toxoplasma gondii manipulates its host to increase transmission and continue its life cycle. Infected rodents may become unwitting participants in a game of cat-and-mouse-and-parasite in which they lose their fear of cats and instead become attracted to them.

Rather than manipulating host behaviour, as in the case of fungi that turn ants into zombies, some parasites cause body malformations. This makes hosts more likely to become prey for subsequent hosts and hence to continue the parasite’s life cycle. One of the most striking examples is a trematode (flatworms often known as flukes) that causes missing legs, extra legs or deformed legs in frogs and other amphibians. Extra legs, in some cases several, serve no function and simply impede movement, making it harder to escape predators.

Parasites are fundamental to ecosystems and require conservation

Parasites are a big part of life on Earth. A study on the Californian coast found the sheer mass of parasites exceeded that of top predators. In particular, the biomass of trematodes was greater than that of birds, fish, burrowing shrimps and polychaetes (marine worms).

Evidence suggests ecosystems rich in parasites are healthier than those with fewer parasites. But there is increasing concern for the survival of these species amid a growing extinction crisis. So a global plan for parasite conservation was proposed in 2020, with priorities including increased data collection and genetic analysis, making conservation assessments, and raising public awareness.

Sadly, parasites can inflict great pain, meat allergies, suffering, and a heavy death toll. Malaria, schistosomiasis (sometimes referred to as snail fever, bilharzia, and Katayama fever), and sleeping sickness are just a few examples.

But they also shape our world in profound ways, have crucial ecological roles, and paradoxically, may in some cases help keep us healthier. Though it may be confronting to admit, we need parasites as much as they need us.

Euan Ritchie is a councillor within the Biodiversity Council, a member of the Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Mammal Society, and President of the Australian Mammal Society.

– ref. Mind-bending, body-snatching, blood-sucking: parasites are bizarre yet vital for life on Earth – https://theconversation.com/mind-bending-body-snatching-blood-sucking-parasites-are-bizarre-yet-vital-for-life-on-earth-240547

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rod McNaughton, Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

Startups have always been at the forefront of innovation. But factors such as artificial intelligence (AI), sustainability and decentralisation are set to reshape industries in 2025.

Businesses are defined as startups when they are in the initial stages of development. They are characterised by the potential for rapid growth and external funding. And they are also sensitive to economic shifts and investment uncertainty.

For Australia and New Zealand, startups play an important role in overcoming geographic and market constraints. They can also help address both countries’ persistent productivity challenges.

Industry body Startup Genome estimates Sydney’s startup ecosystem was worth US$72 billion in 2024 with more than 3,000 startups. New Zealand’s ecosystem is valued at $9 billion across 2,400 startups.

Both Australia and New Zealand have weathered global challenges such as recent slowdowns in investment activity when startups struggled to secure funding.

But venture investments in both countries recovered well in 2024 compared to elsewhere. And the outlook for 2025 is cautiously optimistic.

Global trends in 2025

As global trends reshape industries, local startups could take the lead. Here are eight key trends set to define their path in 2025.

Generative AI: driving creativity and efficiency

Generative AI – a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce text, images and audio – helps firms to automate complex tasks, create personalised user experiences and lower costs.

The challenge will be to balance rapid innovation with ethical considerations around data privacy, bias and environmental impact.

Businesses that demonstrate transparency and accountability are more likely to stand out in an increasingly competitive field.

Sustainability: a competitive advantage

Sustainability has evolved from a compliance requirement to a strategic benefit.

Globally, carbon capture and green technology are attracting record investments. Sustainability drives some of the most innovative solutions in Australia and New Zealand, where climate resilience is a critical issue.

The rise of sustainable startups aligns with growing consumer expectations and government incentives.

Health tech: the personalisation revolution

Health tech is undergoing a profound shift, moving from reactive care to proactive, personalised solutions.

In 2025, personalisation will continue to influence healthcare. Startups using AI and data analytics to improve outcomes and accessibility are likely to see growth.

Remote work evolution

The shift to remote and hybrid work has reshaped business operations worldwide. This is particularly the case in the aftermath of the global pandemic.

Tools that enhance productivity and enable startups and big companies alike to build global teams will help businesses access talent across borders.

Decentralisation: blockchain beyond cryptocurrency

Blockchain technology is moving beyond its roots in cryptocurrency and is now integral to transparency, efficiency and data security.

Decentralised applications, which run on blockchain technology and rely on peer-to-peer networks, are changing how businesses do things in areas like finance, healthcare and entertainment.

Space tech: scaling the final frontier

Space technology is no longer the exclusive domain of government agencies. Startups such as New Zealand’s Rocket Lab are increasing access to space.

Australian company Fleet Space Technologies is deploying nanosatellites to improve connectivity in remote industries like mining and agriculture.

Diversity in funding and leadership

Globally, funding disparities remain a challenge for underrepresented groups in entrepreneurship, including women, Indigenous peoples and minority communities.

Startups led by these groups often receive a fraction of the funding allocated to their counterparts, limiting their ability to scale and compete.

Female-led startups, for example, attract less than 3% of venture capital. Indigenous and minority entrepreneurs frequently face unique barriers such as limited access to networks and culturally tailored support.

Programs designed to address these inequities can play an transformative role. These initiatives include those aimed at women founders, offering mentorship, funding and business development resources. Similar programs for cultural groups providing funding and culturally aligned advisory services are also important.

In 2025, systemic barriers will continue to attract attention, with increasing demands for startups to be more diverse and inclusive.

Alternative financing models

In the face of a continuing economic downturn, startups will likely continue to explore alternative financing models to fund growth without sacrificing significant equity.

Traditional venture capital often leaves gaps, especially for early-stage ventures or those in underserved sectors.

Bootstrapping, where founders self-fund and grow sustainably, continues to be a cornerstone for many entrepreneurs. However, crowdfunding platforms are evolving rapidly. Other options allow startups to engage directly with their communities and raise significant capital while building customer loyalty.

In 2025, new fintech developments and AI-driven platforms could streamline access to grants, loans and investment opportunities, making funding faster and more accessible.

These changes are set to expand the range of options for founders, reducing reliance on traditional venture capital and creating a more inclusive and dynamic funding ecosystem.

Startups as catalysts for change

Startups will continue to experience greater than usual uncertainty and must navigate the complexities of 2025, tackling global challenges with local ingenuity.

They will continue to reshape industries and address critical economic and environmental issues, harnessing generative AI, advancing green technologies and innovating financing models.

However, to succeed, startups must prioritise inclusivity and support innovative funding approaches to ensure broad-based participation in technology-driven growth.

Rod McNaughton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The multi-billion dollar startup sector is bouncing back – 8 big trends will shape 2025 – https://theconversation.com/the-multi-billion-dollar-startup-sector-is-bouncing-back-8-big-trends-will-shape-2025-245653

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Francisco Perales, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

Australian women are better educated than men but still face poorer job prospects and lower incomes.

We see this in Australia’s stubbornly persistent gender pay gap – estimated at nearly 22%.

Our research shows how having children plays a significant part establishing and maintaining these inequalities.

What we studied

We looked at how household earnings in Australia have changed over the past two decades. We also examined the degree of women’s economic dependence on their partners, especially after childbirth.

To do this, we modelled longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

From this large, nationally representative dataset we looked at the household “breadwinning arrangements” of 8,570 heterosexual Australian couples.

We differentiated between male-breadwinning households (where women contributed less than 40% of labour income), equal-earnings households (women contributed 40% to 60%) and female-breadwinning households (women contributed more than 60%).

We then tracked the share of couples in each of these household categories every year between 2001 and 2019 (the most recent survey year available).

For the 1,379 couples who had their first child during the 20-year study period, we compared partners’ income contributions to the household in each of the ten years before becoming parents and the ten years after.

This analysis revealed the impact parenthood has on traditional earning roles.

What we found

Household breadwinning arrangements are slowly moving towards gender parity, according to our initial findings. This is shown by a growth in equal earnings households and fall in households where men contributed the most.

However, households where men earn the most still dominate. In 2019, they accounted for 54% of Australian households – compared to 29% of those where earnings were equal and 17% where women were the biggest contributors.

Our research found the transition to parenthood is a key cause of this gender imbalance. Having a child increased the likelihood couples relied on the male partners’ income and reduced the chance of equal-earnings arrangements.

For example, the percentage of equal-earnings households dropped from 45% in the year before parenthood to 19% two years after. In contrast, male-breadwinning households accounted for 40% of all households in the year before parenthood, but a much larger 71% two years after.

Importantly, we found little evidence of a return to pre-parenthood arrangements a decade after couples had their first child.

By that point, 56% of households relied on the man’s earnings, 20% on the woman’s and 24% contributed equally. These results underscore the long-lasting impacts parenthood has on women’s financial and economic independence.

Our findings mirror claims from decades of feminist scholarship showing couples often revert to traditional gender roles when they become parents. This is evident in both attitudes and behaviours.

Such shifts are motivated by personal beliefs about who should look after the children and by broader workplace and government policies. This might include a lack of workplace flexibility or expensive child care discouraging mothers from taking on paid employment.

Breaking the cycle

The federal government last year announced a plan to end gender inequality, including violence against women, the unequal sharing of domestic and care work and the under-representation of women in leadership. Central to this was promoting women’s economic security and independence.

Our research shows achieving this goal requires careful consideration of how parenthood affects households’ financial arrangements. It reveals that, under current policies, childbirth marks the start of a long period of economic dependence and insecurity for Australian women.

Fairer paternity leave schemes, tax incentives for two income households and tougher legislation protecting working mothers against discrimination would help ensure women’s job prospects do not worsen upon motherhood.

Becoming parents represents a cherished and transformative event for many couples. But it doesn’t have to see a deterioration in women’s employment and finances.

Janeen Baxter receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a Centre of Excellence grant (CE200100025) and a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellowship (FL230100104). She is a member of the Council for the Committee for Economic Development in Australia.

Francisco Perales and Ruth Steinbring do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How having a baby makes it more likely Australian couples rely on the man’s income – https://theconversation.com/how-having-a-baby-makes-it-more-likely-australian-couples-rely-on-the-mans-income-238673

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Hazel, Associate Professor, School of Animal and Veterinary Science, University of Adelaide

According to Britannica, “art” can be described as something “consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination” – whereas Wikipedia defines it more narrowly as a human activity. But are humans the only species that makes art?

If we take art to be something that is beautiful and consciously created – and animals consciously create things that look like art – shouldn’t we accept these productions as art, too? As Edgar Degas put it, “art is not what you see, but what you make others see”. Indeed, we see beautiful creations all across the animal kingdom.

Some of these works, such as the bowerbird’s nest, are defined in the eyes of their animal beholders. Others have a largely functional purpose, such as mating or feeding, yet manifest in patterns and/or colours that make them beautiful to behold.

On that note, here are some of our favourite animal “artworks”.

Molluscs

Walking on the beach, you can’t help but notice the beautiful patterns on seashells scattered across the sand.

Molluscs such as sea and land snails have delicate bodies, so they need protection. They create their shells by layering a calcium carbonate secretion that hardens once it leaves their bodies.

On these spiral shells, you will find all manner of stripes, swirls and oblique lines that resemble geometric abstraction in art.

Pufferfish

In 1995, some divers off the coast of Japan noticed intricate and beautiful circular patterns etched into the sea floor. These “underwater crop circles” remained a mystery for more than a decade. In 2011, it was finally discovered a pufferfish – in this case the white-spotted pufferfish (Torquigener albomaculosus) – was responsible.

Male pufferfish spend several days creating these circles by repeatedly swimming in and out while digging into the sand with their fins. The circles themselves have two uses. They help attract a mate – wherein the males that make the most beautiful circles are more likely to have success – while the centre of the circle functions as a nest for eggs.

Some of these circles have even been found off the coast of Western Australia.

Bowerbirds

Bowerbirds are found across Australia and Papua New Guinea. While it’s unclear what their nests looked like before the plastic era, today they are often dominated by blue plastic.

The male birds scavenge and steal all things blue to take back to their nest, where the objects are scattered around two walls of carefully formed sticks bending towards each other.

Beauty is definitely in the eyes of the beholder, as researchers have found these nest decorations are linked to mating success for male bowerbirds.

Other bird nests

Apart from the bowerbird’s uniquely bedazzled nests, a range of other bird species make nests that are as beautiful as they are functional.

Hummingbirds, for instance, will often make nests with contrasting green and white moss and lichen, thought to be added for camouflage.

Meanwhile, male weaver birds build intricately woven nests to attract potential mates. These are made using twigs or plant material (whichever is readily available) and can contain more than 1,000 strands of grass.

Whales

A humpback whale can eat up to one tonne of fish in a day. This includes shoaling fish such as herring and mackerel. Humans catch large amounts of these fish using nets. But how do whales catch them?

The answer is something called bubble-net feeding. This cooperative activity requires two or more whales which dive deep below schools of fish and blow bubbles through their blowholes to stun and trap the fish closer to the surface. As one whale blows the bubbles, the other/s follow the fish to the surface in spiral patterns to keep them trapped.

The patterns made in this process are stunning. One photo of bubble-net feeding by humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) even won the 2024 Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year competition.

Sticklebacks

Great art is sometimes made with innovative materials.

The three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) is a small fresh-water fish that develops a bright red throat during breeding season. But that’s not enough to attract a mate, so it also creates an underwater nest made from weeds held together by spiggin, a secretion that comes from the kidneys.

The stickleback’s spiggin is highly adhesive and sticks the weeds together, even in water. As many teenage boys know, you can’t leave the house without hair gel.

But the displays don’t stop there. Once the nest is ready, the male will try and lure females to it through a rather erratic courtship dance.

Beavers

While many artists make sculpture from natural materials such as stones or wood, beavers are arguably the experts at this.

Beavers make dams using trees they fell using their large front teeth, as well as other branches, mud and stone. These dams change the flow of streams, converting them into slow-moving lakes that provide the beavers protection from land-based predators.

Beyond helping themselves, the new lakes also create an ecosystem for lots of other animals, and can even help reduce flooding in human habitats.

Whether you agree animals make “art” or not, you can’t deny they make plenty of beautiful and functional works.

Susan Hazel is affiliated with the Dog & Cat Management Board of South Australia and RSPCA South Australia.

Jono Tuke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Can animals make ‘art’? These examples from nature suggest so – https://theconversation.com/can-animals-make-art-these-examples-from-nature-suggest-so-237126

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Lomb, Honorary Professor, Centre for Astrophysics, University of Southern Queensland

In addition to the annual parade of star pictures or constellations passing above our heads each night, there are always exciting events to look out for in the sky. The year 2025 is no exception and has its fair share of such events.

Though the night sky is more spectacular from a dark country sky, you can see the events outlined here even if, like many others, you live in a light-polluted city. For most events you do not need a telescope or binoculars.

Here are some of the highlights.

March and September: eclipses of the Moon

During the early morning of Monday 8 September, the full Moon will move into the shadow of Earth and be totally eclipsed. The Moon will turn a red or coppery colour, because sunlight is bent or refracted by Earth’s atmosphere onto the Moon. The bent light is red, as we are looking at the reflection of sunrises and sunsets from around the globe.

Total eclipses of the Moon are more common than those of the Sun. They can be seen from all the regions on Earth where it is night.

Unlike eclipses of the Sun, lunar eclipses are safe to watch with the unaided eye. They are also safe to photograph. A tripod will help, as will a camera or phone able to take timed exposures.

The eclipse starts with Earth’s shadow gradually covering the Moon over about an hour. Similarly, after totality the shadow takes about an hour to leave the Moon.

Seen from Australia’s east coast, the total eclipse will last from from 3:30am to 4:53am on September 8. From New Zealand, this will be from 5:30am to moonset; from South Australia or the Northern Territory, 3:00am to 4:23am, and from Western Australia 1:30am to 2:53am.

Earlier in the year, on the evening of Friday March 14, people in Aotearoa New Zealand will be able to see a totally eclipsed Moon as it rises above the horizon just after sunset. Watchers in eastern Australia will also get a brief glimpse of a partially eclipsed Moon after moonrise, for 34 minutes from Sydney, 43 minutes from Brisbane and 16 minutes from Cairns.

March: Saturn’s ‘disappearing’ rings

Gazing at Saturn and its rings through a telescope is always a thrill, whether you are seeing them for the first or the hundredth time. However, in early 2025 the rings will seem to vanish as Earth passes through the plane of the rings.

This phenomenon occurs twice during Saturn’s 29-year path around the Sun, that is, at roughly 15-year intervals. Unfortunately, on March 24, the date when this will occur, the planet will be too close to the Sun in the sky for us to observe.

However, in the evenings until mid-February and in the morning from late March we will be able to see Saturn with quite narrow, tilted rings.

Note that a small telescope is needed to see Saturn with or without its rings. If you don’t have one yourself, you can go on a night tour at a public observatory like Sydney Observatory or an observing session with a local astronomical group, such as those at Melbourne Observatory with the Astronomical Society of Victoria.

May and December: meteor showers

The two main meteor showers of the year are the Eta Aquariids and the Geminids.

In 2025, the Eta Aquariids are best seen on the morning of Wednesday May 7, while the Geminids will be most visible on the mornings of Sunday December 14 and Monday December 15.

This year, viewing conditions for both meteor showers are favourable, in the sense that there will be no bright Moon in the sky during those mornings. To see them, look towards the north-east (Eta Aquariids) and north (Geminids) before dawn starts brightening the sky.

The darker the sky you can find, the better. Keep away from street lights or any other light.

January, April and August: planets

The five planets you can see with the naked eye – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – move across the sky along a line called the ecliptic.

As the planets move, they sometimes appear to pass close to each other and take on interesting patterns. Of course, they only appear close from our point of view. In reality the planets are tens or hundreds of million kilometres apart.

In 2025, these patterns include:

• January 18–19: the brightest planet, Venus, is close to the ringed planet Saturn in the evening sky

• April 1–15: Mercury, Venus and Saturn form a slowly changing compact group in the eastern sky near sunrise

• August 12–13: Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets, are only separated by two moon-widths in the morning sky.

June and August: constellations

As the year progresses, different constellations appear in the evening sky. The perpetual chase of Orion and Scorpius (the hunter and the scorpion) across the sky was noted in 2024.

In 2025, keep an eye on the Southern Cross (known as Crux to astronomers) and Sagittarius (the archer).

The Southern Cross is the best-known constellation in the southern sky. It is easy to find, as it is made up of a compact group of bright stars in the shape of a cross.

Two pointer stars from the neighbouring constellation of Centaurus, the centaur, also help to show its position. From Sydney and further south, the Southern Cross is always above the horizon. However, in the evenings, it is best viewed around June, when it is high in the southern sky.

The constellation Sagittarius is next to Scorpius. In the evenings, it is best placed for observation in August, as at that time of the year it is directly overhead.

A join-the-dots look at the brightest stars of the constellation gives the impression of a teapot, and it is often referred to by that name. Sagittarius is an important constellation for Australian astronomers, as it contains the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

The information in this article comes from the 2025 Australasian Sky Guide. The guide has monthly star maps and has much more information to help with viewing and enjoying the night sky from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Nick Lomb has received author’s fees for the 2025 Australasian Sky Guide.

– ref. A total eclipse of the Moon, Saturn’s rings ‘disappear’, meteors and more: your guide to the southern sky in 2025 – https://theconversation.com/a-total-eclipse-of-the-moon-saturns-rings-disappear-meteors-and-more-your-guide-to-the-southern-sky-in-2025-242601

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Peden, NHMRC Research Fellow, School of Population Health & co-founder UNSW Beach Safety Research Group, UNSW Sydney

It’s the morning after a big night and you’re feeling the effects of too much alcohol.

So it can be tempting to “refresh” and take the edge off a hangover with a swim at the beach, or a dip in the cool waters of your local river or pool.

But you might want to think twice.

The day after heavy drinking can affect your body, energy levels and perception of risk in many ways. This means you’re more likely to drown or make careless decisions – even without high levels of alcohol in your blood.

Alcohol + water + summer = drowning

Alcohol is one of the main reasons why someone’s more likely to die due to drowning. And Australians consume a lot of it, including around the water.

The risk of drowning, and injury, including incidents involving alcohol, dramatically increases over the summer festive period – in particular on public holidays and long weekends.

Among people aged 18 and over who drowned in rivers where alcohol was
involved, we found some 40% had a blood alcohol concentration of at least 0.20%. That’s four times the upper legal limit of 0.05% when driving a car on a full licence.

When we breathalysed people at four Australian rivers, we found higher levels of blood alcohol with higher temperatures, and particularly on public holidays.

At the beach, intoxication due to alcohol and/or drugs is involved in 23% of drowning deaths with an average blood alcohol concentration of 0.19%.

How about if you’re hungover?

Getting alcohol out of your body is a relatively slow process. On average, alcohol is metabolised at a rate of 0.015% per hour. So if someone stops drinking at 2am with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.20%, their alcohol levels don’t drop to zero until 4pm the next day.

Although hangovers can vary from person to person, typical symptoms include headache, muscle aches, fatigue, weakness, thirst, nausea, stomach pain, vertigo, irritability, sensitivity to light and sound, anxiety, sweating and increased blood pressure.

As well as feeling a bit dusty, the day after an evening of heavy drinking, you’re not so good at identifying risks and reacting to them.

In a pool, this might mean not noticing it’s too shallow to dive safely. In natural waterways, this might mean not noticing a strong river current or a rip current at the beach. Or someone might notice these hazards but swim or dive in anyway.

In one study, we found that after a four-day Australian music festival where people drank heavily, even people who were sober (no longer had alcohol in their blood) were still affected.

Compared to baseline tests in the lab we ran three weeks before the festival, people who were sober the day after the festival had faster reaction times in a test to gauge their attention. But they made more mistakes. This suggests hangovers coupled with fatigue lead to quicker but more careless behaviour.

In and around water this could be the difference between life and death.

Positive blood alcohol readings, including of alcohol from the night before, are commonly implicated in drowning deaths as a result of risky behaviours such as jumping into the water, both at a river and along the coast. Jumping can cause physical injury or render you unconscious, leading to drowning.

Alcohol, including the day after drinking, can also make drowning more likely for a number of other reasons. It also reduces people’s coordination and reaction times.

What else is going on?

Alcohol makes the blood vessels near your skin open up (dilate). So more blood flows into them, making you feel hot. This means you may stay in colder water for longer, increasing your risk of hypothermia.

Alcohol can even make CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) less effective, should you need to be resuscitated.

Normally, your body controls levels of certain minerals (or electrolytes) in the blood. But electrolyte imbalance is common after heavy drinking, including the day after. It’s the reason why hangover symptoms such as muscle pain can lead to cramps in your arms or legs. This can become dangerous when being in or on the water.

Low blood sugar levels the day after drinking is also common. This can lead to people becoming exhausted more quickly when doing physical activities, including swimming.

Other hazards include cold water, high waves and deep water, all of which your body may not be capable of dealing with if you’re feeling the effects of a big night.

What can we do about it?

Authorities regularly warn about the dangers of alcohol intoxication and being near the water. Young people and men are often targeted because these are the groups more likely to drown where alcohol is involved.

Beaches may have alcohol-free zones. Rivers rarely have the same rules, despite similar dangers.

How to stay safe around water if you’re drinking

So take care this summer and stay out of the water if you’re not feeling your best:

• do your swimming before your drinking
• look out for your mates, especially ones who may have had a few too many or are hungover
• avoid getting back into the water after you’ve drunk alcohol or if you’re not feeling your best the next day.

Over the past five years, Amy Peden has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Meta, Surf Life Saving Australia. the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the NSW Government Office of Sport. Dr Peden is affiliated with Royal Life Saving Society – Australia as an honorary senior research fellow.

In the past five years, Emmanuel Kuntsche has received funding from La Trobe University, National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council, Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, University of Bayreuth Centre of International Excellence ‘Alexander von Humboldt’, Veski Foundation, the University of New South Wales, Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, Healthy Canberra, Swiss National Science Foundation, Queensland Mental Health Commission, and New South Wales Department of Family and Community Services.

Jasmin C. Lawes is the National Research Manager at Surf Life Saving Australia. Over the past five years, Jaz has received funding from the Australian government and the Australian Research Council. Jaz is a co-founder of the UNSW Beach Safety Research Group and is also an invited member of the International Lifesaving Federation’s drowning prevention commission.

– ref. The surprising ways ‘swimming off’ a hangover can be risky, even if alcohol has left your system – https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-ways-swimming-off-a-hangover-can-be-risky-even-if-alcohol-has-left-your-system-243243