I shared the partnership practice in stories of collaboration, shaped by each project, its tempo, cadence, its feel, and vocabulary. In backyarding we found our feet. Ambitiously systematic, we pushed ourselves to figure out a way to complete the project, to survey all the backyards in the neighborhood.
Sewende Laan felt special, a chance to document an almost impossible victory. Agste Laan brought new territory, its layers complex, its pace contested, dissonant. In our celebration of Klopse, we found a tempo, improvised, inspired in the neighborhood’s passion, pride, the hustle to make it happen.
Punctuated by challenges of making ends meet, the home-based business project immersed us in business closures and xenophobia.
The Civic project was diffuse, fractured, like the myriad issues that shape this neighborhood, the demands pulling it in a hundred different directions.
The narratives make the collaboration and its rhythms tactile, visceral, felt. The partnership’s rhythm was syncopated: in the tempo, timing, and language of the community, its activism; in the tempo, timing, and language of the university, its curriculum. Side by side, syncopated rhythms shaped our teaching, the research outputs, our mode of working and being together. It drove the ways we improvised, worked with contradictions and conflict, and compromised.
In stories of collaboration, I wrote this rhythm, its unexpected beats, its multiple tempos and contingencies, its dissonances and harmonies. The narratives make the rhythm of the partnership and its participants visible: the partners, myself, my students, neighborhood residents. They show the ways in which, through the partnership over time, we built a way of working together, an embodied form of practice and knowledge.
Narratives invite readers into the partnership, into its thick context, its intricacies, its costs, its complicities, and its inspirations. Stories share the day-to-day work of teaching and researching together, the small, mundane, banal elements. Stories track teaching and assessment that moved in and between the university classroom and township neighborhood, in and out of ordinary people’s households; through these movements, the stories track the changes in learning—of students, of research partners, of myself. Narratives share the contingencies of our partnership, our feelings and hopes, our forms of critique, the epistemologies and ethos that sustained our work.
Narratives lay bare the feel, the emotion, the visceral elements that shaped how we worked together. The writing is laced with affect, with the emotional labor through which we threaded the partnership together over the decade. Stories share a range of emotions, from joy and pride, to love, to occasional anger and fear, to inspiration, to the care and generosity that sustained the partnership. Across this terrain, narratives share the pleasure of the relevance of this form of partnership, its learning, and its dimensions.
The partnership grew as we grew with it, as others joined and left, as issues to work on shifted, as our politics and preoccupations moved in time. The stories are themselves political. I chose stories that show the work, the commitment and the perseverance, the patience as well as inspiration that led us to keep going year after year, for a decade. The stories describe the varied risks and stakes, and the ways we worked through them. They are epistemological, in their repositioning of the work of teaching and research, and of the community and university in it.
Stories bring into view our collaborative practice across its contingencies, in its fullness. They share the process, the organizing, the strategizing, the evaluating, the thinking on our feet, the long-term planning. I share the fun, the humor, the organized and the unexpected pleasures, what made us happy, what we loved, what inspired us to return to our work together, again and again.
The stories share the weight of our purpose. They describe the seriousness with which we took our research, our chance to document and engage. They unearth the everyday struggles, their layers and histories of injustice, the politics of the possible wrought through the Civic’s commitment to activism, and the slog of everyday life. Stories share mistakes, compromises, complicities, as well as surprises, humor, love, and care. I recalled stories where scholarly notions of rigor, critique, and progress were turned upside down. I chose stories that shared articulations of justice and legitimacy, moments when the possibilities and the contradictions of our city were laid bare.
In these narratives I reveal moments when we shifted our assumptions, moments that challenged us, moments that brought us together in unexpected ways, the resonance and discomforts felt when we confronted critical questions. The narratives disrupt categorical notions of the neighborhood and university. They confirm ideas and reshape them, thickly textured in content and layers. They reveal the contingent contradictions that shaped our work together, the paradoxes that entangled us across the city. The stories reflect choices, thinking, and learning, rooted in the partnership work, rooted in the city.
In this interpretative form, stories make the world of the partnership visible. They juxtapose the difference it embodied. In narrative technique, stories thread competing ideas and contentions loosely together. In these juxtapositions, the narratives show ways we inhabited difference, and sometimes reworked it.
Stories offer an epistemic break with characteristic scholarly writing. They are a form of “truth-telling.” They situate claims and partialities, rendering commitments readable, located. They show the ways in which the partnership made it possible to shift thinking and theorizing. They articulate conflicts and compromises. They are written to resound with the urgency of partners’ truths, to juxtapose and position my truths. All of this is truth-telling: truth-telling in ordinary words.
The partnership stories, its archive, are infused with ordinary words. They are a product of these contingencies of choices, of context, of thinking and doing. They are a product of each project, its practice. In the partnership’s practices, over time, ordinary words became more than the sum of their parts. They became conceptual tools. They had a genealogy, transparent in our process, visible through the stories of our collaboration. My words were in English, a reflection of the hard limits of my Afrikaans, the circuits of my knowledge and (in)capacities. My partners had other words, vocabularies in Kaaps, a Cape Town creole, in Afrikaans, and in English. These ordinary words emerged in the partnership work, simple, and powerful.
•Dignity found in, and fought for, in homes, in organizing, in the Civic’s work.
•The endless search for work, the struggle to make ends meet, to put a pot on the table.
•“Not once, not twice, but thrice,” the imperative to stay vigilant, to defend and claim rights and resources, to struggle in and against the city.
•Community work, “only finished when there’s someone else behind you to carry on.”
•Family and its power to sustain and shape, to authorize in households, across generations.
•Pride, deep-seated in the neighborhood, in its struggles and its history.
•Violence, an everyday household pain, a jagged neighborhood edge, a structured city reality, an epistemic stigma.
•Compromise, in the contradictions and conflicts in which we collaborated and were complicit.
•Community, in everyday knocks on the door, in the contingencies of crises, in the work of building belonging and insisting on justice.
•A partnership, an invitation across the city, the legacies and structures, the languages that divided us.
The words, and the phrases in which they appeared, were pedagogical and conceptual. They reflected context, their location in the contradictions and struggles of each project, its focus, in precise interviews and intimate conversations. They reflected the expertise and experience of the partners, the debate so evident in projects and their conflicts. They were reviewed and engaged, tested, and discussed, assessed in ways that ensured they held traction. The partnership’s ordinary words, and the stories through which they emerged, reveal their location, a genesis in the partnership’s biography, the genealogy of our work together.
Ordinary words also articulate the partnership’s mode, its practice, and methodology. They developed from the partnership’s practices, its ethos, its epistemology. These vocabularies emerged in the substance and rhythm of the collaboration. These words were collective rather than singular, twinned together.
The partnership entwined us,
back and forth,
incremental and long term.
We learned and documented between neighborhood and university.
Words emerged in the writing, in the genres of publications, in the publics, in our archive; in substantiating the partnership. They were
rooted and mobile,
durable and fragile.
They track narrative pathways, written in the stories, developed from the partnership’s practices, its ethos, that which allowed us to build relationships and sustain them with
rigor and respect,
trust and compromise.
In the expertise and experience of our partners, in struggles for justice, for recognition, we built a way of teaching and researching together, through
struggle and care,
critique and love.
The partnership offers this vocabulary as methodology and epistemology. It was the literal and conceptual means by which we were capable of travel, across the city, across a decade. I brought these ordinary words back to the university, to the classroom, to my scholarship. They became part of the rhythm of my thinking and theorizing.
In the research party at the end of one project, Raksha held up a bright red page. On it in bold black marker she had written the words, “insightful, inspiring!” She explained, “Valhalla Park, you have inspired me.” As she sat down, another student jumped up. He held up a blue page. It read “perseverance.” He called out, “You have taught me how important it is not to give up.” Other students joined in, a cascade of words: courage, honesty, hardship, joyful. Each word shone, simple, an affirmation of struggle, the hard work, the graft of our partners in the neighborhood day after day.
The letters that partners wrote to students were equally full and meaningful. Zaaida commented that her student partners were “humble”; she appreciated that. Aunty Meisie had, she wrote, taken her student partners “as my own.” She remarked on their respect, which she would keep in her heart. Shireen appreciated “expressing her feelings” with her partners. Jamiela remarked that the work together in her team “made her feel different than before,” aware of a different side of the people “I have lived with all these years,” wanting “to help my community in future.” These words proved a means to share and to account.
They mark the ways we inhabited the partnership, as
•residents, neighbors, students, learners, and researchers;
•activists, minstrels, fans, struggle plumbers, parents, and leaders;
•timekeepers, caterers, logisticians, guides, and assessors; and, as
•friends, a professor, researchers, experts, partners.
Thick in its practice, the partnership was intimate, concrete, a substantive way in which to work together. Ordinary words trace the pathways we found to work together, a product of the partnership’s pedagogy, its process, its contradictions. Grounded and located, ordinary words are responsive to and reflective of the partnership and its life worlds.
In Verbs—In the “Doing Words” of Practice
Verbs formed a key set of these ordinary words.
•We mixed and matched questions and imperatives, partners and students.
•We unraveled and fused commitments and concepts, publications and research outputs.
•We juxtaposed and entwined the languages and commitments of the neighborhood and the classroom, community and university forms of expertise and accounting.
The verbs articulate the doing of the partnership practice. Ordinary verbs did not become tools overnight. They thickened over time in the partnership practice, in the trust that we built. In partnership, they became theoretical, condensed in their productive tensions, embodied as ways of working together and of theorizing.
IN TEACHING
Ordinary verbs emerged in teaching.
We mixed questions and imperatives for research. We matched that which we were invited to engage in the neighborhood. We fused together the work of research and teaching, the university classroom and the so-called field, the partners and students as research teams, processes of joint review and assessment. The teaching demanded precise unraveling, substantiation to delve deeper into that story, that argument. Our partners’ questions reframed debates, showed other truths. Like students and me, partners paused to listen and hear, to engage, troubled and inspired themselves by stories, depths of hardships, strategies to overcome, the complexities and contradictions of everyday life. In this contrast, I saw and felt the rhythm of my thinking, my comments, my criteria for rigor, the particularity of my scholarly norms.
In teaching we unraveled our questions and presumptions. The logic of the partnership fused our positionalities as researchers and learners within it.
IN VARIED RESEARCH OUTCOMES
We entwined neighborhood norms and protocols with scholarly methods and research systematics, respecting these varied forms of authority and legitimacy that shaped the neighborhood and university contexts. In these juxtapositions, we lived with the dissonances, we examined them and inhabited them.
We shared our research work in the neighborhood and in presentation sessions in class on campus. It was an obligation located in the neighborhood, not a privilege of the university alone. In these moments of reviewing, we paused. We stopped to share and to make apparent the travel between interview and conversation, between a neighborhood struggle and the research. Our tempo shifted to check, to ask: Could the person interviewed recognize their story? Could they trace and track between the conversation in their home or front yard and what appeared in these posters, in publications? Were our partnership and our process visible in these written layers? In conversation with our partners, and with me, students reshaped questions, extended ideas, discussed critical tensions, and rewrote. We adjusted and reacted, changed plans. We found new rhythms and ways forward when conflict emerged, when our legitimacy was questioned, when the partnership needed extending, its form shifting.
In the layers of review, we built the publication process across the community and the university. The layers of assessment went beyond protocols of informed consent—consent and accounting built in practice, over a decade, and layered in our process. Consent and its accounting were substantive, checked at multiple points, on posters shared in research parties in the neighborhood, at presentation stage on campus, at the draft book stage when permissions to use stories and photos were garnered, in the returning of photos framed and narratives printed for individuals and families. This thick form of accounting entwined university and community protocols, the invitations, and the refusals. It juxtaposed rather than erased difference and disagreement.
In the creativity and push to publish genres of writing in a variety of registers for multiple publics, we built an archive, a body of work responsive to the publics to which the partnership accounted.
The archive became a living web in its research products: the posters, the books, the maps, the Yellow Pages, the papers, the student work, this book. These varied forms of writing were threaded and textured. They embodied struggle and care, critique and love.
The partnership work together was necessarily slow.
It built an ethic and ethos of care, in relationships embodied in the partnership, in growing trust, in our capacity and confidence, and our wish to work together. This trust grew through my relationship with Gerty and in her relationships with others in the Civic—neighbors and friends, her daughters, community workers, activists, stalwarts of this neighborhood. It built on the trust of my colleagues, those with whom I taught, who had faith in my running practical sessions, laboratories off campus, in this partnership. It built on my growing confidence to extend this work, to push it further, to experiment and commit to the partnership. It was shaped by the ways in which we worked together to teach students, to think again, to see in a different way. It was malleable, able to adapt when rhythms were interrupted, punctuated by the politics of the partnership, of the city that surrounded us.
IN THE RHYTHMS OF EMBODIED THEORIZING
Practices emerged in and from the rhythms of our relationships, from the rhythms of our work together, from the pulse and the tempo of projects, their accumulation and layering.
The theorizing built in the rhythms of activism, its ups and downs, its stops and starts, in the Civic’s vigilance, its readiness to engage the city, to defend the neighborhood, to claim rights; in the imperative to get on with life in the meanwhile. It grew in the rhythms of university teaching, scheduled, regular, predictable, a weekly expectation, a curated syllabus, layered, a crescendo at the end of the semester. The theorizing evolved through the rhythm and structure of the partnership, its routine, its chronologies of events, conversations, meetings, and expectations, moments to touch base, to develop a plan.
In a partnership characterized by an incremental tempo, we improvised. We worked in and across the urban inequalities that divided us, navigating conflicts that so easily could have torn us apart. In moments of rupture, epiphanies of understanding were wrought, presumptions torn aside. On this foundation our rhythm was both slow and quick. We jumped to respond, to shift when things went slightly wrong. We tinkered, sometimes changed plans radically to make things work, to check and rework, to entwine and fuse.
Research teams eased into intimacies in their repetitions, in uneven, incremental jumps of confidence, in a steady building of collegiality. Off the bus by Gerty’s house, with quicker greetings each week, clear on a plan, teams moved up and down neighborhood streets, in and out of homes. This process had a meter, paced across the research process, its flow, its modulations. Its punctuation was marked in my insistence that we “turn assumptions into questions.” The lingering goodbyes at the bus lasted longer each week. Picking up tempo, collectively and individually, we moved forward. This mode was the heart of our process, through which we researched, the mode through which partners and I taught together.
In this was the hard work of active listening to respond carefully to university notions of rigor, of some sense of social science truth, my partners’ truths rooted in hard-fought experience, in struggle, in life in this city. In the partnership’s back and forth, in these syncopated rhythms, these imperatives sat side by side, juxtaposed, a powerful mix, entwined in their contrast. The way we worked together was no longer method; it became substance, the inspiration for our questions and our practice. The sharing of the work was no longer at the university alone, it was in the neighborhood, inspired in the city, rooted in everyday critical urgent questions, in debates on justice, in rights, in claims to the city. The teaching was no longer my work alone, it was joint, rich, resonant, responsive, rooted in real life.
Across the slow time of a decade (or two), I changed form to write the rhythm of this partnership. In its stories and ordinary words, I found a vocabulary, a register of the partnership, its beat and dissonances, the tempos in and through which we worked. In this powerful, syncopated, sometimes discordant rhythm, we built theory in partnership: relational, embodied, experimental, sustained over a decade.
This book has celebrated theorizing in partnership. This is a mode of theorizing the city otherwise: in its inspirations; in the practices of teaching and research that shaped it; in the publications through which it lives on; in its complexities, the compromises that made it functional, as well as meaningful; and its end. The partnership proved a collaborative problem space, a vehicle in which Gerty and I could build a process, a form, and a logic of researching and teaching collaboratively. We built an ethos to work and research together, to overcome and live with tensions. It shaped the logics of our research questions, of the conversations we encouraged and provoked, of the themes we pursued. Its intellectual logics sprang from movements for justice and rights and debates about access and knowledge.
In these fundamental tenets, we found a rhythm, a way to work and move, a practice. I found a way “to stay, not run,” to return to the chairman’s provocation with which I started this book. In this practice, I reimagined and refigured scholarship, rooted in context, transparent to its making, its travels, immersed in its collaborative form. Interlaced together, the partnership’s content and form embodied a politics and poetics of collaborative knowledge production, resonant in the partnership’s publics in and across the city.
The partnership decentered scholarly knowledge, making it one of many elements that constituted our collaboration. Through it we embraced partners’ expertise and recalibrated the community—and neighborhoods like it across the city—as places of valid knowledge making. It shifted research, the analytical objects that came to view, the matters of concern and preoccupation, the commitments in which they were rooted, the registers through which they were made visible and gained traction and relevance. In this refiguring, we broadened the “intellectual” terrain and its theorists—us—partners and collaborators, inhabitants, urbanites. It opened understanding of the urban to multiple voices and arguments, to city publics, to diverse forms of knowledge and power. It opened it up to its high stakes, its politics, the urgency of multiple crises, the labor of everyday struggle, the politics of inequality that shape this city and cities around the world. It opened us up to its high hopes too, unearthed in the contingencies and surprises, in successes and achievements, accomplishments large and small, to the textures of life, its joys, passions, anxieties, and pain.
Urban theory in partnership is an imperative that urban theory open itself up to its making, to its practices, to its contexts, to thick forms of theory building.
At the heart of urban research are the myriad ways in which urbanists of all sorts speak, work, and learn with community leaders and residents, activists and policy makers, and the state. In our research and in our teaching, we interview, listen to, engage, argue with, and lobby experts who range from ordinary people to policy makers, activists, public intellectuals, artists, and politicians. Our questions are rooted in and are inspired by the soil of the city itself, its land divisions, its geopolitics of wealth and inequality, in varied city infrastructures, the way they work and fail, in city politics, its mobilizations and contentions. These debates preoccupy us, and our field. Collaborations of all sorts, even if not named as such, are an imperative, a condition of access, of entry into city sites and processes, a form of participation and association at the heart of urban work. They root urban work in expertise in the city and beyond the academy. Urban theorizing in partnership is an epistemological and political recalibration, which decenters the university and expands sites of knowledge production and intellectual work across the city. In the relationalities at the heart of collaborative urban work we can be open to multiple voices and arguments, to city publics and diverse forms of knowledge and power.
Urban theorizing in partnership is an invitation to build collaborative practices and to write the varied stories that make them work. It is a call to put at the heart of our university practice and scholarly work that which matters to those with whom we make knowledge, those with and by whom we are inspired. It upends a presumption that scholarly research holds relevance for communities and the city in and of itself. It challenges simplistic notions that the university might extend itself, in its present form, to engage the city, to be “socially responsive.” It is a rupture through which we can rethink university practices by embracing the collaborations that inspire our work. It is an invitation to form partnerships, liaisons of many sorts; to commit to them, to nurture them, to account to them, and to return to them.