Amidst the whirlwind of dramatic stories that dominated the headlines in 2023, crucial stories often eluded attention. Delve into the year’s untold narratives to find the forgotten events and trends overshadowed by the news cycle’s relentless pace.

Eniola Harrison

Unveiling the often underreported, 2023 bore witness to Afrobeats international takeover and bold climate policymaking in Africa.

Africa's Cultural Renaissance

In case you missed it, Afrobeats has taken over the world. Walk into any fashion store, cafe, or club in the “West” and you’re more than likely to hear Afrobeats pumping through the speakers. Undoubtedly Africa’s most successful creative and cultural export, its biggest stars Wizkid, Burna Boy, Davido, and Rema are selling out arenas in London, New York and beyond. Art and creativity wield the transformative ability to reshape narratives surrounding people and culture, and nowhere is this transformation more crucial than in Africa, where pervasive stereotypical narratives contribute to underdevelopment and insufficient investment.

A New Narrative on Climate Action

Africa’s inaugural climate summit in Nairobi, Kenya, took place in September 2023 and was witness to the adoption of the game-changing Nairobi Declaration. This bold statement hails Africa’s potential to lead the charge in clean energy and environmental conservation, throwing down the gauntlet for wealthier nations to shift from crisis-mode aid to sustained investment. Despite weathering some of the harshest blows from climate change, Africa receives just 12% of the $300 billion it needs annually for climate adaptation. The summit’s main thrust was to fortify the case for climate financing, with African leaders pressing for swift action, especially from the West.

Anna Magdalena Wieck

Amidst the noise of the international news cycle, 2023 quietly unfurled profound artistic narratives, from a movement away from screens to the prominence of the 20th century’s female stars.

Put the screens down

It’s true that online resources and social networks give us unprecedented digital access to artists and artworks, but nothing replaces the experience of viewing art with your own eyes. This year, exhibitions of Mark Rothko and Lucian Freud, just to name two, showcased works with details and depths not visible in reproduction.

Returning looted artifacts

Activists, art historians, and politicians in Nepal and beyond are working hard to locate cultural treasures stolen from the nation during the past decades. Recently, they are meeting with success; both the Rubin Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are restituting sculptures that were looted from Nepalese sacred spaces.

Rediscovering women artists of the 20th century

It has been a blockbuster year for 20th-century women artists, with sweeping shows, and accompanying exhibition catalogs, dedicated to Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo.

Cem Kayatekin

Beyond the global spotlight, 2023 witnessed transformative urban shifts, from a focus on the periphery to New York’s taxiless future.

Remembering the Periphery

There are some noteworthy efforts in Thailand looking at rebooting the potential economic vitality of the countryside. While much of urban discourse naturally tends to focus on improving, refining, and reconsidering the nature of the modern city, rural settlements and the hinterland are often left in the periphery. This is a critical mistake, not only socio-politically and economically, but even intellectually. Infrastructure should be available to all citizens, regardless of whether they live in rural or urban areas. Migration to the city must be a choice.

The Expenses of Mother Nature

Recent assessments note that extreme weather events are costing the world approximately 16 million dollars an hour for the past 20 years. A rather mind-boggling and somewhat terrifying number, certainly, but one that does grant a bit of optimism as well. In the scope of changing both the footprint and regenerative capacity of our urban and rural settlement patterns, the financial scales are gradually tilting in favor of municipalities, regions, and nation-states taking on some actionable plans for the future. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

A Taxi-less New York

New York City has confirmed it will begin experimenting with a demand-driven toll for drivers entering the Central Business District of Manhattan. This type of congestion pricing has been used quite effectively in a range of cities since the early 1970s, but it typically requires a confluence of political, economic, and social forces to align for it to be pursued with rigor. How can this type of real-time pricing model subsequently be leveraged to refine the physical nature of our streets to create variations between high, medium, and low-traffic roads, changing our urban fabric for the better?

Gayle Allard

In a tumultuous year for the global economy, Nigeria’s bold decision to remove fossil fuel subsidies and the uncertainty around the US property market went underreported.

Nigeria's Fossil Fuels Surprise

Subsidies to fossil fuel consumption are the main culprit of climate change. The World Bank estimates that full fossil fuel price reform, allowing fossil fuel prices to rise to their market level without subsidies, would reduce CO2 emissions globally to 43% below baseline levels by 2030. Many governments are reluctant to remove them because they fear social unrest, however Nigeria, a huge emerging country, removed those subsidies when Bola Tinubu became president in May. Some very heartening results of his reform:

There was no citizen revolt, and the mass strikes that unions had threatened did not occur
Inflation and poverty have not surged
Renewable energy use is soaring in Nigeria because solar energy has now become cheaper relative to fossil fuels

The law of demand: it’s implacable!

Property Market Uncertainty

One of the victims of widespread remote working could be the property market.

Occupancy rates have recovered since the pandemic, but are still at only 50% in some major US cities.
Revenues from office rents are down, putting stress on owners and the banks that made their loans
Many banks have quietly sold off their commercial property loans
Small and midsize banks, the weakest in the US banking system, hold most office property loans

Miguel Otero

As the EU continued its support for Ukraine and worked to counter the cracks seen in its response to the conflict in Gaza, its policy decisions on China and Economic Security flew under the radar.

De-risking, not de-coupling, from China

On the 30th of March in Brussels, at the EPC, the European Commission President, Ursula Von der Leyen, laid out her new vision about de-risking from China. She made clear that the EU is not in favor of de-coupling from China, but wants to continue to do business and collaborate with China while reducing the excessive dependencies that Europe has with China.

Economic Security Strategy

On the 20th of June, the European Commission published its Economic Security Strategy. It determined that all member states need to de-risk and be more autonomous in the following areas:
1) Resilience of supply chains
2) Deep tech, and technology in general
3) Critical infrastructure
4) Protection vis-a-vis foreign economic coercion

Antonio Aloisi

AI has dominated column inches, but the legislation issued to regulate its rise has not been afforded the same buzz. While in the labor market, the determination of workers to retain their hybrid flexibility, and the transformation of the binary divide between employment and self-employment went underreported.

The Global Race to Govern AI

Regulatory attempts have intensified to capture new developments in AI and algorithmic decision-making. In the wake of initiatives such as Europe’s GDPR and the proposed AI Act, which is geared around the risk-based approach to governing highly uncertain matters, President Biden issued an Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy AI to establish standards for safety and protection, safeguard citizens’ privacy, promote equity and civil rights, and defend consumers and workers while fostering competition. The G7 issued the Leaders’ Statement on the Hiroshima AI Process, which emphasizes human rights and data protection. The global race for effective and future-proof governance of AI systems underscores the importance of avoiding laissez-faire processes and advancing fundamental rights: The digital era needs robust governance.

Worker-Centered Flexibility Matters

Technology has freed work from its spatial and temporal constraints. The pandemic has been a window into the future of work and has shaken deeply entrenched work cultures and norms. Traditional 9-to-5 office structure gave way to remote working accelerating a collective rethink of priorities. Many workers, especially the younger generation, reviewed their choices and sought better quality jobs, more purposeful work, and a more harmonious work-life balance. The issue of time and space sovereignty is now a crucial factor that candidates consider when evaluating their potential employers and companies looking to retain their talent are beginning to experiment with hybrid working arrangements, the four-day week, cyber-physical environments, asynchronous working patterns and the right to switch off. There is no going back, and working environments are beginning to put people at the centre.

The EU's More Universalistic Definition of Social Rights

In certain areas of EU social law, the binary divide between employment and self-employment is now complemented by a universalistic approach whereby the contractual status of working people is not a factor that can be used to exclude them from substantive rights. A case handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union dealing with non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation has laid the foundations for transcending the crude dichotomous switch to protect “everyone who works”. Novel legal instruments such as the Directive for safeguarding whistleblowers and the proposed Directive on improving working conditions in platform work (among others) show that the classical all-or-nothing approach is starting to fade. This more sustainable and comprehensive architecture, which is strongly advocated by supranational institutions such as the ILO, represents a Copernican leap in labour law.