Sean Cooke

Student Affiliates

Sean is a researcher and PhD candidate in the Centre for Transport Studies and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. His focus is on the evolution of transport planning as a practice, in African cities, and he is working on the transitions to access-based planning and transport justice planning approaches. He also works on ways to institutionalise innovation and knowledge co-production in the transport planning process to grapple with the uncertainty that these transitions, and others like digitalisation and climate change, will bring in the future. He has been embedded within the Cape Town city government for six years and been a research partner to the UNEP Sustainable Mobility Unit over the past eight years, working on walking, cycling, and the just transition in African countries.


Sean will be working on three projects with CSUD, related to complex risk and deep uncertainty in planning African mobility systems. The first will be developing a set of recommendations for transport decision-makers on the climate risk and adaptation potential of African transport systems, in time for COP27, based on his and other colleagues’ work on the IPCC AR6 reports. The second will be distilling learnings from his use of Decision-Making under Deep Uncertainty techniques with his colleagues at the local government to develop the City of Cape Town’s long term transport plan. And finally, he will be working with us on the development of a collaborative research agenda and curriculum proposal for Transport Planning under Deep Uncertainty.