“Chapter 2. A City, a Community, a University, a Partnership” in “High Stakes, High Hopes”
A City, a Community, a University, a Partnership
On a damp and chilly Cape Town winter’s evening, in an informal settlement community forum meeting, in a school classroom across the road from the settlement in Khayelitsha, the chairman of the forum challenged me with a question. He pointedly asked, “Will you run away like all the university-based researchers we’ve met before you?” I start this book with this moment, where a research home truth hit me hard.
The chairman’s question had two parts. I had come to him and the committee to ask permission to do research, as part of my doctoral work, on his settlement’s housing struggles. His question challenged me to account for my research, to explain how my questions were relevant to the settlement’s struggles. But his question was as much an invocation “to not run away,” to account for what and how I would write, and for whom, to ensure that, at a minimum, the forum would have access to my findings.
Underlying both these questions lay a deeper provocation. The chairman rightly insisted that I focus my research on his housing conditions as a problematic of housing justice. He demanded that I be explicit about the relationship of my analysis to the settlement and its residents’ hard daily struggle, to frame my research beyond the metrics of the university and scholarly debate. His challenge questioned the ways in which I would locate my work in the settlement’s fight with the city over its legality, in the area’s struggle for secure land, in the dreams of settlement families to build a decent place to live, in their aspiration for formal homes on the edge of the City of Cape Town.
This provocation was not unique. Questions like it shape research and its practice in South African cities—and in divided and unequal contexts elsewhere, contexts in which researchers engage and work with activists and ordinary people, movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the state. In South Africa the university, its modes of research, its mission and purpose as a public research institution, have been placed under scrutiny. Universities are accused of upholding and reinforcing the status quo, of perpetuating harsh inequalities and forms of injustice that painfully fracture our society. Highlighted powerfully by post-2015 student mobilization for decolonialization, such demands have challenged the university to rethink its epistemological foundations and researchers to reimagine and build public ways of learning and researching. In part, this is a challenge “to think ourselves not apart from the world, but rather deeply and irrevocably caught up in all its contradictory entanglements” (Pieterse 2014, 23).
A South African Imperative
Urban Studies “Otherwise”
In this work I build on a tradition of anti- and post-apartheid scholarship that, rooted in engagement, aims to challenge injustice and to invigorate scholarship. Immersed in the city, engaged with ordinary people, we might build “meaningful dialogue” (Nyamnjoh 2012, 146) that entangles epistemologies across divides that fracture and interlink city spaces. Ordinary people bear the brunt of inequality and injustice, and, as Ari Sitas suggests, their organizing and everyday life therefore have profound theoretical relevance (2004, 23).
Edgar Pieterse frames the contemporary challenge pointedly, arguing that urban South African scholarship “demands contamination; it demands immersion into profoundly fraught and contested spaces of power and control” (2014, 23), the racialized spaces and processes of the South African and southern city. In the post-1994 democratic period, researchers in and outside of universities have worked actively to engage institutions in and outside of the state, projects rooted in a mix of activist and applied forms of research to create change (see Oldfield, Parnell, and Mabin 2004; Oldfield 2015).
While contentious and challenging, this context pushes the academy to reflect critically on questions of knowledge and its politics. What is, for instance, a socially engaged university (Favish and McMillan 2009) or relevant research and teaching in the contemporary context (Mabin 1984; Lalu 2012; Parnell 2007)? In what ways do scientific practices claim the authority and expertise to “know for,” or claim through research to “service” communities, those disenfranchised and impoverished in the past and the present (Oldfield 2008a)? How might we disrupt the invisibility of working in “their” name (Selmeczi 2014), in the name of those with whom we collaborate and engage?
Although not exclusive to South Africa, these questions are urgent in this conjuncture where protest is rampant, democracy nascent and contested, and durable and painful histories of inequality shape everyday life in violent and creative ways.
These layered provocations have shaped my thinking and approach to urban research and its practice. I struggled with the limited and unsatisfactory ways my and others’ conventional academic practice responded to the chairman’s question, “Will I run away?” His question prompted and pushed me. It inspired me to experiment with collaborative modes of research and learning, to build in and on a debate on community-based work and collaborative practice.
FIGURE 1. Valhalla Park, an introduction
Built incrementally over a decade, my partnership with the Valhalla Park United Front Civic Organisation (hereafter the Civic), a township neighborhood-based organization in Cape Town, became a long-term commitment to develop a research and teaching practice in which I could “stay and not run.”
A series of collaborative experiments led to my research partnership with the Civic. For instance, at the Urban Futures Conference in Johannesburg in 2000, shortly after I finished my doctorate in urban geography, I listened to an NGO director scathingly ask why universities failed to engage creatively to teach with NGOs working in township spaces and with township organizations. A new academic, a novice in my job, I approached her, cautiously, to ask if we could discuss this idea further. She agreed. For three years my undergraduate students and I worked with her NGO and affiliated community organization in New Crossroads, Cape Town, a township formerly segregated racially as African under apartheid rule with a celebrated history of resisting that regime. This experiment was a first attempt to build a collaborative approach to my teaching.
I explored, as well, ways in which collaboration might anchor my research. In 2000, with a Norwegian colleague, Kristian Stokke, I began a project on the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and the politics of access to services in increasingly privatized Cape Town. We approached campaign leaders to discuss the research. Without their approval, activists were unwilling to discuss their thinking and their strategies. They were suspicious of academic motives and intent, and of my and my partner’s politics. To address their demand that the research prove useful to their struggles, we produced articles based on our research, as well as a report tracking the campaign, participating neighborhood organizations, and their struggles. It was through this research project that I met Gerty Square and Washiela Arendse, leaders of the Valhalla Park United Front Civic Organisation. Initially I interviewed them about the genesis of the Civic, an amalgam of a tenants’ association and a concerned citizens group formed in the 1980s in this then-new “coloured” neighborhood produced to the specifications of segregation and the laws of apartheid Group Areas.
My colleague and I struggled in our conversations to reconcile what we did together in this research with what we “owed” the anti-eviction campaign: how we engaged the campaign, what we as researchers had the right or savvy to assert. Awkward, and unresolved in this project, these discomforts shaped my impetus to try something different; in this case, a closer collaboration with the campaign itself. The campaign’s strategies were multiple. I worked with activists to develop the Community Research Group, which ran in 2004 and 2005. It aimed to fuse the needs and resonances of activist struggles with the rigor and legitimation of university-based research approaches to support activists’ search for information, for data, for ways to articulate their experiences and draw evidence together. This approach to research aimed to support the everyday work that activists undertook to challenge the city precisely and powerfully, as well as to figure out what to do in their areas to solve problems, to strategize around city and national policies, to work together as a movement, no small challenge for activists with few resources.
The Community Research Group included the Valhalla Park United Front Civic Organisation. Through the group, we developed a survey to document informal housing conditions in backyards in Valhalla Park. The research project aimed to bring into the city’s view the hardships and severity of informal housing that residents built in the backyard spaces of public housing units. These “backyards” in their neighborhood, fifteen kilometers from the city’s center, were “off the map” of the city’s housing development priorities; hidden from view, on the one hand, low on the list of urgent housing needs, on the other.
The Civic began an extensive survey of backyards in the neighborhood to demonstrate this housing crisis to the city government. After the first week of surveying backyard conditions, we met in Gerty’s small lounge in her home to debrief. Three people sat on the sofa, Gerty in the single chair by the telephone stand, another person on the narrow wooden stairs that steeply ascended to the second floor. I was perched on the arm of a chair, the room in view. “This is so boring,” Koekie stated emphatically, when I asked what was wrong, why everybody looked so depressed. Gerty explained, “Look, we’ve done fifty houses and it took so long. How will we get through the neighborhood’s 1,700 households?” I felt the frustration, the impossibility of the survey scale. It was time intensive and tedious. On campus, in the coming semester, I was teaching an urban geography class, for fifty third-year students. I tentatively asked if my students could help complete the survey with the Civic. The others expressed interest.
This was the kernel from which our research and teaching partnership grew. An annual research project anchored the mode of our collaboration. Three principles shaped our approach. First, the research agenda was decided together. In each project we built from an issue that the Civic was working on, something that social science research could do, that my students and neighborhood partners could do together, a topic with some type of linked urban studies and geography research literature. Second, neighborhood residents (activists, community workers, Civic members), my students, and I conducted research together, a pedagogy through which we learned research skills and the neighborhood and city. Third, we produced publications of varied genres: from posters to popular books, from academic articles to local directories and maps, to this book. Publications aimed to work and resonate in and across neighborhood and university contexts.
The research projects documented and analyzed struggles to access and self-build housing, a critical issue in the neighborhood. The Civic had mobilized to occupy land and build an informal settlement, responding to the severe lack of homes, the realities of families living in overcrowded rental public housing and in shacks in backyards of homes and settlements. The research also focused on struggles to make ends meet, in a context of extreme unemployment and disappearing steady work, real everyday struggles to put food on the table. We completed research on the Civic itself, the wide span of its work, its leadership, its strategies to build a better and fairer neighborhood and city, in the context of varied forms of structural everyday violence and dispossession.
The partnership became a space through which, over a decade, we worked together. The process initiated a different sort of conversation on research, one that was slow, collaborative, ongoing, and which the Civic and I charted together. In this collaborative work—in the annual projects—neighborhood residents and Civic members and students honed research skills and built knowledge. The Civic and I shared our expertise in teaching my students together. The partnership introduced provocative conversations on everyday urbanism, realities that shaped the demands of activism, the hardships of structural inequality, debates on the right to the city, the substance of much urban theorizing.
The partnership built across shifting political and economic contexts. There were moments when development was imminent and services improved. Other moments emerged when a housing project fought for and promised remained elusive, unbuilt, postponed. The university context also shifted. Initially a small project built as part of my own “laboratory,” practical work, the partnership work was integrated fully into a curriculum, with its own logic and intent; at one point funded, at another not at all. In incremental steps, across a decade, we worked together, feeling out, sometimes stumbling over, our differences, our commitments, and our aspirations.
Through the partnership, I found ways to refigure the relationships at the heart of my research practice, repositioning my research and teaching. In its always-varied rhythms, in its productively compromised nature, collaborative work offered ways to refigure my teaching and research, to build a foundation for epistemological and political critique.
In this book, I share the evolution of my collaborative practice, inspired by activists and activism across Cape Town. My partnership with the Civic gives the book its substantive problem space (Scott 2014, 157). As a problem space, the partnership emerged as a context and process in which we could work together, in which, as co-leaders of the partnership, Gerty and I could share the questions and issues that mattered, the hopes and worries with which we were preoccupied. It was a space in which, with neighborhood partners, we could figure out the means and ways to develop projects, the processes to teach and engage students in varied conversations in different physical spaces—in homes, front rooms, and backyard spaces, in the neighborhood informal settlements, and on streets across the area.
Refiguring
Collaboration and Its Inspirations
In an edited collection on transnational feminist practice (2010) Amanda Swarr and Richa Nagar challenge researchers to rethink the relationships between processes and products of collaboration; to be more conscious of the interweaving of theories with collaborative methodologies; to reimagine reciprocity in collaboration to produce knowledge that can travel beyond the borders of the academy. One way to do this is to “turn our theoretical goals from a ‘northern’ (university) academic project to the struggles of those with whom we collaborate” (Nagar 2002, 184), practices that Nagar (2014; 2019; Sangtin Writers with 2006) develops in her varied experiments with collaboration. I draw on collaborative approaches to urban research (see Oldfield and Patel 2016), which embrace a variety of forms of knowledge and forms of accountability (Bunge 2011; Nagar 2012).
Yet collaborative work, as a commitment and a practice, is “always productively compromised” (Pratt, 2012). As Pratt demonstrates, theorizing through collaboration is “open to other geographies and histories. It puts the world together differently, erasing some lines on our taken-for-granted maps and bringing other borders into view” (xxxiv). Pratt suggests “what makes such encounters ethically and politically promising, in Sara Ahmed’s view, is the possibility they offer to get ‘closer to others in order to occupy or inhabit the distance between us.” Inhabiting this distance, she argues, “opens each person in such encounters to other unheard or unfinished histories and geographies, to other encounters, or in Ahmed’s phrasing, ‘other others’” (xxxiv). This frame offers a language for collaboration, not as a recipe for useful or equitable work but as always “productively compromised,” as a “problematic rather than a social fact” (Chari and Donner 2010, 76), a practice rather than a solution (Routledge and Derickson 2015).
Through the partnership and its processes across the years, we saw and felt the durable legacies of colonial and apartheid rule, physically and racially evident in injustices and inequalities, inscribed in physical infrastructure, in the everyday realities of who walked, who drove, who ate, who was hungry, who worked, who barely made ends meet. In it, we encountered the inspiration and anger that has driven activism past and present, that persists as a search for justice, a legitimate call to arms, a way to reclaim dignity in the city. Through the partnership, we engaged the university, a contested and dynamic site, a product of a racist past, a site where contemporary privileges were easily remade, a site of change, the home of the next generation of students, diverse and dynamic. In this partnership, we came together, we inhabited—and sometimes reworked—the differences between us. On the one hand, we sought, and sometimes found, a politics of hope; on the other, we hit intransigence, the limits of change, the deepening of difference and inequality.
In this spirit, this book offers our partnership as a collaborative problem space. Through it, we might imagine any range of other partnerships, in cities elsewhere.
I found it challenging to write about the partnership. I grappled with my normal, scholarly, ethnographic, and argumentative mode, its limits, the ways in which it foreclosed the things that really mattered in the partnership. I wanted to write about the labor of love that sustained the relationship, those things that built trust, the practices that enabled our research and teaching to grow.
At a feminist writing practices workshop in Cape Town in 2013, my colleagues encouraged me to experiment with writing stories of the partnership, its incremental building, our movement between neighborhood and university. They introduced me to the narrative turn in the discipline of international relations, to Naeem Inayatullah’s approach to the autobiographical, the “I” in “IR,” as Inayatullah’s pithily introductory edited book is titled (2011).
I found Dauphinee’s work resonant and inspiring. A Bosnian interlocuter, her friend, asked of her, “What do you know about Bosnia? Why did you come, and what did you think you would find?” (2010, 801). In her response to his questioning of what she knew of war, violence, guilt—the focus of her research and career—she recounted, “What expert am I? This is what Stojan Sokolović demanded of me and to which I had (and have) no good answer.” (2010, 802) To engage his questions, to respond to his critique, she shredded the conventional academic book on which she was working. Through a turn to narrative, she wrote a different book, The Politics of Exile (2013a), because
narrative approaches allow us to think about the worlds we encounter differently. They allow us to encounter worlds that we normally do not see. They give us different languages and different angles of vision . . . Human communication is enframed by these elements that rarely make their way into the texts of our professional lives. And yet, it is this very social world within which our texts seek to produce meaning. (2013b, 348)
Like Inayatullah, I was intrigued by this book and Dauphinee’s writing. Inayatullah explains that Dauphinee returned to Bosnia, where “she uncovers an arrogance in her assumptions. She wonders if her research is a kind of violence perpetrated against the fullness of life there. There and everywhere” (2013, 337). He argues that in writing this second book, The Politics of Exile, Dauphinee “moves to a form that transcends the usual academic venture but that readers cannot reject as the ideographic portraits of ‘mere’ fiction” (339). For Inayatullah, “through her interaction with Stojan [the Bosnian friend], the professor generates an intimate awareness. And, by writing through these characters, Dauphinee builds a bridge to herself via the world at large. She constructs a systematic wholeness, an intimate systematicity” (343). He understands her change of form as “a protest against the homogeneity of forms in our field” (339).
Inayatullah proposes that we change form “so readers feel, think, and experience the overlap fictively” (2013, 342). He suggests we fuse strategies and writing from fiction to shift ways of building arguments and theory. Conventional academic modes of writing aim to “make the argument more forceful, cleverer, more anticipatory of reader defenses, or more packed with evidence,” more paranoid. Yet this conventional mode of writing fails. As Dauphinee explains herself, “I could not find an academic language to say the things I wanted to say” (2010, 813). The beauty and care, the generosity both of Dauphinee’s writing and of Inayatullah’s questioning grabbed me.
Dauphinee’s struggle resonated. I abandoned my original book proposal, a conventional ethnography, framed by activist-academic collaboration. It did not work. Bifurcated, categorical notions and languages of activism and the academy paralyzed me. I experimented with narratives. I found this form of writing my partnership energizing. In this writing I could share the heart of the beast, the partnership itself, what had made the partnership flow, sustain itself; what and how we had learned and navigated, what we had managed to overcome; what we left behind, or worked around. Through narrative I was able to write the layered, nurtured, contingent ways collaborative work and theorizing traveled and unraveled back and forth across the city. The turf of theory emerged, enmeshed in my writing about our work together.
As I was ensconced on sabbatical, caught up in my writing, the solid-state drive of my sleek MacBook Air failed. It had not been soldered sufficiently. I lost all my text, literally and forever. Foolishly, I had failed to back up a word. I slowly recuperated from the shock, recovered from the loss. I wrote this book “again.” I signed up for a writing workshop, tentatively offering some initial rewritten stories for comment. Through this workshop, in its collegial love and care, I started the book-writing again. We worked together. I wrote more boldly, more bravely. The words poured out, the work of the partnership, its complexity, its richness. Its dynamics unraveled on my screen; the keyboard clattered. I wrote the practice of the partnership in detail, from the mundane to the bold, from the success to the failure. I tracked the partnership, my sense of its ups and downs, the trajectories of our engagements, from our interviews and public events to the field notes and meeting notes. I paid attention to our affect, the evolution, the logics that layered our conversations. In this narrative form, our practice became more transparent, the decision making, its contingencies, the objects and the subject of the teaching and the research. In this writing, what made the partnership tick—our varied roles, our ways of working—came into view, making visible the layered ways in which we worked together.
Experimenting
Writing Urban Studies “Otherwise”
The book’s form breaks from the mould of urban ethnography that dominates urban studies. It offers an approach to scholarly writing built in narratives, inspired by Dauphinee’s and Inayatullah’s autobiographical turn and developed in conversation with Nagar’s (2014, 2019), Selmeczi’s (2012; 2014; Choi et al. 2020), and Salo’s (2004; 2018) work. In this book I draw on stories and on a narrative structure. Stories “‘induce feeling,’ they ‘woo, engage, surprise, persuade, rattle, disarm, or disquiet the reader,’” they generate a particular mood” (Lorimer and Parr 2014, 543). They offer “an acute awareness of the tones and textures, memories and feelings, logics and poetics—of people, places, and times as well as the seemingly mundane truths of life that remain distant or insignificant in the imagination of mainstream academia” (Nagar 2019, 33). They matter, as planning theorist Leonie Sandercock proclaimed: “The way we narrate the city becomes constitutive of urban reality, affecting the choices we make, the ways we then might act” (2003, 12).
As a mode of experimentation, stories unsettle mainstream scholarly forms of writing in urban studies. “The multiplicity of narratives are important for presenting contingent and, sometimes, more uncanny links between seemingly disconnected sites of imagination and experience” (Dickens and Edensor 2021, 17). The work of narrative in this book “embrace[s] ‘play and experimentation,’ juxtaposition and compression in ways that academic text (normally conceived) does not” (Cresswell 2021, 37). In theorizing through narrative, as Laurel Richardson persuasively suggests, writing is “a method of inquiry, a way of finding out about yourself and your topic. Although we usually think about writing as a mode of ‘telling’ about the social world, writing is not just a mopping-up activity at the end of a research project. Writing is also a way of ‘knowing’—a method of discovery and analysis” (Richardson 2020, 923).
I drew on my partnership archive to write these stories: the documents, my field notes, research interview transcripts, group reports and project maps, papers, drafts, the varied project publications, collected notes and reflections, and many layers of interviews and conversations with my partners, with Gerty, with students, across and beyond the decade of the partnership work itself. As I pieced them together, they built on memories, on personal notes and diaries, on research letters and photographs, on the minutiae of keeping in touch, on discussions of materials in the process of drafting. I wrote the textured, intimate nuances of this partnership, its forms of collaboration, its smells, sounds, contradictions, and conflicts. Narratives examined openings and closings, contingencies and surprises, places where we felt, saw, moments in which we knew the city, the neighborhood, and the university in banal and remarkable ways, in ways that opened and enriched, in ways that also closed. This transparency of purpose, this fuller accounting, revealed the complexity of choice, of context, of thinking, of doing. As we moved between the university and the neighborhood, building urban theorizing in partnership, we shifted binary notions of who researches whom, of the subject of the research. This shifted the presumptions of expertise, of knower and known in research. In this change of form, I wrote the partnership, our means to weave a way to work together across this city, its segregation and inequality, its varied and deep forms of violence.
Making Visible the Partnership and Its Practices
My change of writing form was not a simple, aesthetic choice. In the narration of the partnership, stories work to make its nuance and texture visible. Storytelling in narrative form brings into view that which constitutes the partnership, its practice, built in and between the categories of neighborhood and university, of partner, student, activist, and resident. It renders this terrain entangled and intermeshed. The stories are a figurative and argumentative way of moving back and forth, through this partnership, across this city. They track the evolution of the partnership in the projects we worked on, the incremental building of our pedagogy, and the partnership itself. They situate the project work and the partnership in the contradictions and inequalities that interlinked and shaped the neighborhood and university, in and across city. They examine the teaching practice across these projects, its planning, its reworking of the syllabus, and the learning it produced. They reflect on the research, its forms and uses in the varied publications we produced.
The stories of collaboration introduce surprises, humor, the openings and closings, the possibilities and limits of the partnership. Stories invite the reader into the partnership, its context, its intricacies, its costs, complicities, and inspirations. They work to make visible a mixture of urban acts and objects. In varied ways they unsettle and reposition arguments about the neighborhood and the university, the complexities of township life and research on it, the contentions of the partnership, its process and politics. Across the book, the layers of narrative intertwine evidence and story, competing truths and conflicting notions, multiple commitments, and forms of accounting.
In writing the partnership, I draw on varied notions of “I” and “we.” Stories include me, my partners, and my students. There are moments across the book and in narratives where the “we” is the partnership working as a unit, doing interviews, hosting neighborhood research events. There are others where the “we” is me and my partners, assessing and evaluating students and their research work. There are moments where the “we” of the partnership comprises the partners themselves, negotiating the project in the neighborhood. Across the book I also draw on a repeated and shifting sense of “I,” myself. I am the author of this book, visible, a subject of the stories. “These stories interpret and theorize the narrator as much as the narrator theorizes the content and cast of the stories” (Nagar 2019, 33). My curiosities, my interactions, my blunders are woven into the narratives. By design, the writing works to render the “we” and the “I” transparent, through the varied labor, care, authority, and expertise on which the partnership built.
The writing works to reflect the complexities of our collaboration, its practices, our roles as collaborators, laden categories and identities that shift in context, in relation to each other. Collaborators can be friends, comrades, and partners, as well as a vehicle for debate and argument; a context, a façade for broader conflicts. In a more negative and pejorative sense, collaborators can also be traitors, double agents, spies, a difficult, shifting, and contentious terrain. I played many of these roles, as did my partners and students. This mix proved more difficult to write about. It was sometimes harder to see. It shaped how we responded to invitations and navigated refusals. Behind the scenes, this territory shaped what we did, where and how we traveled, together and apart.
The narratives aim to take the reader to a different place, another context, another way of understanding, rooted and fused in the partnership and its collaboration. As such, they summon and enroll; they encourage the reader to think about moments and spaces, conflicts and inspirations. They interweave threads of generosity and trust, heartbreak and love, conflict and compromise, the epistemologies of care and struggle that sustained and invigorated us. They show and share the ways in which, through the partnership, we were implicated in this work together. It is through this narrative approach that I can turn an experiential lens on the partnership, its place in the university and neighborhood, its teaching and research, the foundations from which we theorize the city. In always productively compromised ways, through it we inhabit and rework our differences, we make visible the partnership’s flesh, the warp and weft of its fabric.
The way we worked together was no longer method; it became substance. The sharing of the work no longer occurred at the university alone: it was in the neighborhood. The teaching was no longer my work alone, it was joint; my partners taught the neighborhood, they interviewed neighbors. We made mistakes, we blundered, and we fixed. The partnership was substantive and epistemological. Its thick form of implication intertwined evidence and story, competing truths and conflicting notions, multiple commitments and means to account.
In the narratives of this book are ordinary words, an urban vocabulary incrementally built in the partnership. Ordinary words emerge in the stories through which I narrate the partnership. They arose in conversation, in interviews in homes, in interactions on neighborhood streets, in events in the neighborhood hall; they surfaced in the classroom, in visits and presentations on campus, in the sharing of work, in seminars and assessments at the university. In the stories in which they emerge, they show the genealogies of our partnership practice and its process.
I track the ways they arose in the partnership practice, how we taught and learned together, our research methods, each project and its evolution, the publics with whom publications were shared. I map the ways they surfaced in the neighborhood, articulations of (in)justice, the substance of struggles for recognition, an artefact of the city’s contested and shifting power dynamics. Rooted in the practice of the partnership, rather than theoretical provocations alone, they are a product of the partnership, its juxtaposition of neighborhood and university, an outcome of our method, its layered substance, its entanglements in practice. Thickly theorized, built in partnership, ordinary words offer a vocabulary, a mode of theorizing (Bhan 2019). They are a means “to generate and imagine theories and practices of the urban” (Dasgupta and Wahby 2021, 420). They are a product of practice, rooted and located, epistemological and political conceptual tools. They offer a vocabulary, a mode of theory building.
An Invitation
Urban Theorizing “Otherwise”
In this book I build conceptual tools for urban theorizing in partnership. Through the narratives of the partnership, in ordinary words, I build a mode of theory building (Bhan 2019, 2), “socio-politically rooted in the margins of the everyday” (Dasgupta and Wahby 2021, 420). This work is part of a global call for new thinking on urban futures resonant with the global south as the epicentre of urbanism (Bhan, Srinivas, and Watson 2018), a call for “southern theory” (Connell 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).
The imperative to engage the city in its complexities and dynamics is an invitation to experiment, to build alternative methods and epistemologies (Roy 2020, 20). It is a means of theorizing that “see[s] value and political power in smaller, ‘in‐ between,’ uncomfortable, and multiple theoretical contributions” (Saville 2021, 100). It reflects the partnership’s anchor in “insurgent planning” (Miraftab 2009), in partners taking charge, “by dodging, resisting, defying, commandeering, diverting, building homes, earning incomes and attempting in many other banal and spectacular ways to improve their lives” (Ballard 2015, 220).
Building urban theorizing in partnership is a “way of doing theory differently, of working inside out, of fugitive moves and emergent practices” (Katz 2017, 599). In partnership, “what is at stake is not whether but how one theorizes. Thinking of theory in this way affects how we read; the concepts we use; how, for and with whom we do our research; and how, for and with whom we write” (Oswin and Pratt 2021, 595). Through urban theorizing in partnership, I contribute to the call to build alternative cultures of theorizing (Robinson and Roy 2016, 183–186) rooted in “the everyday struggles of urban dwellers” (Peake 2016, 225).
Across the book’s narratives, I draw from the partnership’s ordinary words. They expand the turf of urban theorizing. In flashes of understanding, moments of conflict and compromise, in the hopes that kept the partnership working together over a decade, the partnership offers in its methodology and epistemology a way to create a located, embodied mode of urban theorizing. It is in this spirit and sensibility that I share its projects and evolution in the chapter that follows.
Initially, our collaboration was a pragmatic solution to our parallel needs. Yet, beyond this start, so much more was at stake. For Gerty and the Civic it was to have an arsenal of research branded by the university to support the issues of their activism. As Gerty explained, despite all their activism and hard work, they still faced a stigma, as a group from a violent, poverty-stricken, gangsterism-ridden neighborhood. The partnership affirmed our partners as residents, community workers, and activists, as researchers and experts key to the making of this neighborhood, to the building of a better city.
Through the partnership, I could build a radical form of pedagogy, one in which I rooted my teaching and research in concrete struggles that addressed and challenged the injustices and the inequities that shaped the city. At stake was a means to make my teaching and research relevant and rigorous, to “engage the city.” At stake was an imperative to do urban studies differently by building a form of urban theorizing in partnership, to respond to the deeper, challenging layers that underlay the chairman’s provocation: would I stay or run?
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