Tinashe Chikunichawa, the Lab’s Assistant Project Manager, recently participated in the PhD Academy on Wandering Across Sustainable Terrains and Environments, hosted by Venice International University. The Academy brought together doctoral researchers from across the globe to engage in a week-long programme focused on sustainability, policy and place-based learning. Set on San Servolo Island, the Academy created space to explore how systems, including environmental, social and political dimensions, intersect and evolve.
Tinashe’s PhD research focus in health systems engineering provided a unique lens through which to engage with the Academy’s theme of urban waste management. Through lectures, site visits and collaborative workshops, participants examined how Venice, a city shaped by water, tourism, and history, has built a complex waste management system that reflects broader concerns of urban sustainability and labour. This experience echoed key themes in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), while also engaging with SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 13 (Climate Action), and SDG 15 (Life on Land), which were core to the Academy’s interdisciplinary focus.
The Academy’s field-based learning offered an in-depth look at how waste is managed in the historic centre of Venice. Participants explored how the city’s infrastructure accommodates the absence of roads, the volume of tourists and the environmental sensitivity of the lagoon.
For Tinashe, the opportunity to observe Venice’s unique service delivery system in action strengthened her appreciation of how infrastructure, labour and regulation function together. The experience also reinforced the value of systems thinking, a perspective shaped by her background in industrial engineering. Seeing a city optimise its operations under constraints provided practical insights into how urban services can be designed to serve both people and the environment.
A key component of the summer school was collaborative project work. In a final presentation titled “Pyramidal Waste Chain Management in Venice: Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses through an Ethnographic Approach,” Tinashe worked closely with fellow participants Blondy Kayembe Mulumba and Busra Nur Kilinc. Their team used ethnography as a methodological tool to explore how waste flows through the city and how labour and policy shape that process. This approach, introduced during the Academy, encouraged deeper reflection on the social and experiential dimensions of waste management and how observation and narrative can complement technical analysis.
The experience of working across disciplines, from environmental humanities to engineering and urban planning, provided new perspectives on sustainability. It also aligned with Tinashe’s ongoing commitment to collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving, which she advances in her role at the Policy Innovation Lab.
Venice’s waste management system is supported by a long-standing commitment to public policy that prioritises environmental protection, decentralised responsibility, and citizen participation. For Tinashe, this provided a reminder of how governance frameworks can support sustainable infrastructure and optimise service delivery. These lessons are relevant to the South African context, where there is growing interest in applying system-wide solutions to persistent development challenges.
As she returns to her work with the Policy Innovation Lab, Tinashe brings with her new insights into how design, policy, and lived experience converge. The Academy not only enriched her research perspective but also reaffirmed the importance of working across boundaries, whether disciplinary, geographical, or methodological, to support more inclusive and effective systems.