“Chapter 1. In Partnership” in “High Stakes, High Hopes”
High Stakes, High Hopes builds urban theorizing in partnership, between a township neighborhood grappling with the legacies of apartheid, the neighborhood’s community organization (its “Civic”), and the university tasked to research and teach the city. This theorizing emerges within the political and physical realities of everyday life. The rhythm of this book—and its theoretical argument—unfolds in stories. Its aesthetic form pulses with narratives, which share the logics and rhythms of the partnership:
•in a city bursting at its seams, struggling to deliver services, to manage the conflicts that threaten to tear it asunder
•in a township neighborhood grappling with evictions, forced to fight for every right, service, and resource
•in a university, high up on the mountain slopes, whose mission is to theorize the city’s pasts and futures and whose legitimacy to do so is contested
The purpose of the partnership was to teach and research the city together. Over the course of a decade, neighborhood partners and I experimented to build the research process and pedagogy. The motivation for the approach we crafted was political and urgent. Through it, the partnership engaged durable, intractable neighborhood challenges and conflicts, the rapidity and violence of city change and its shifting geopolitics. Our partnership immersed us in everyday urban realities that shaped the demands of activism, the hardships of structural inequality, and the struggles for a right to the city. The partnership enmeshed us in the complex challenges that shaped the neighborhood—its racialization and segregated history and present.
In its collaborative method and pedagogy, our approach rooted teaching and research in the struggles of the neighborhood, embodied in the literal and epistemic violence that entangled and divided both it and the university. Our approach was inspired by the neighborhood, in the often-contentious organizing and mobilizing by the neighborhood Civic, and by the practices that neighborhood residents enacted to survive, to make do, to live fully. The partnership was a means to work together collaboratively to engage and understand—to teach and research—these realities. Through the partnership, teaching was grounded in the city, in its racialized inequities, its materialities and creativities. It infused the city and ordinary people into the classroom. Through this collaboration, we engaged the perspective of ordinary residents, the activism of the Civic, its location and positioning in the city.
An always productively compromised collaboration, our partnership stretched us, extending university notions of critique and truth. We reworked conventional academic practice, reshaping the nature of critique. Doing so allowed us to forge a space for creative methodologies and epistemologies, for ways of knowing together. The partnership offered collaboration with substance. Through it, partners, students, and I reflected critically on epistemological questions: how we produced knowledge, with whom, and for what varied and multiple agendas.
The analysis unfolds in narratives built on ordinary words and acts. The way partners and I worked together became substance, the inspiration for our questions. Ordinary words, and the stories in which they emerged, show the genealogies of our partnership practice and its process. They share the ever-extending and always partial ways in which we came to know and work together. These collaborative practices encompass the conceptual tools that enabled our theorizing together.
In its narrative form, High Stakes, High Hopes shares the ways the partnership proved a vehicle for neighborhood partners, my students, and me to travel back and forth across the city and between the campus and the neighborhood. The stories in this book show ways in which we (partners, my students, and I) navigated thinking and theorizing in these spaces and through these relationships. The partnership shaped our questions. Teaching and research deepened and my writing shifted, immersed in these multiple publics and political questions. Provocations and challenges created a collaborative form and praxis. We produced an archive, a celebration of diverse ways to know the city, a celebration of urban research. The construction of this book—its aesthetic form—invites your engagement as a reader. This fuller accounting aims to bring the reader into the complexity of choice, of context, of thinking, of doing.
Through this narrative analysis, I consider a set of critical questions for urban scholarship. I examine the ways in which collaborative partnerships open provocative conversations on everyday urbanism: what it takes to sustain households in overcrowded homes and shack settlements; the realities that shape the demands of activism; and, finally, the hardships of structural inequality that intertwine in this neighborhood and city. I track ways the partnership was built, incrementally, through pedagogies to work and teach together, to research, to write, and to share our thinking in and across the urban inequalities that divided us. I reflect on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times conflictive, evolution. What changed in learning when teaching and assessment moved in and between the university classroom and township streets and ordinary people’s households? In what ways were academic practices of research and assessment reshaped when they were framed through township questions, realities, and commitments, as well as scholarly debate? What was reoriented in urban theorizing when Civic activists and community struggles were recalibrated as places of valid knowledge making? The partnership allowed me to engage such questions, and in doing so, to reflect critically on how my partners and I, together with students, produced knowledge, with whom, and for what agendas.
High Stakes, High Hopes contributes to an archive of alternative kinds of urban knowledges, experiments that work to inspire more varied forms of urban theorizing. Its stories, my turn to narrative writing, comprise ordinary words that become conceptual and can travel. These conceptual tools offer a way to rethink practices of collaboration, teaching, and writing in our field. Urban theorizing in partnership offers ways for urbanists to engage the city, its substance, its stories, its everyday contradictions and possibilities in located and embodied ways. It offers forms of practice, grounded in teaching, to train the next generation of urbanists to understand and engage the city and its urban futures. Through it, I argue, we might in small and incremental ways reimagine the university, its mission, and its mode, embedded in multiple publics and politics across the city.
The Partnership’s Cast of Characters
Gerty Square and I were the partnership’s core protagonists. Together, we directed the partnership, deciding on its focus, building its work and strategy, its methods and its pedagogies and ways to share our research findings. We created this process step by step, overcoming obstacles, living with irresolvable tensions, and celebrating our successes over the years. We did not have a master plan, an ideal vision, or a timescale. This was work that developed incrementally. It was close to our hearts, often hectic, nearly always deeply satisfying.
Gerty was a strong and courageous woman, who, among many other things, led the United Front Civic Organisation in Valhalla Park. She brought to our partnership a lifelong commitment to justice and to building a fairer, more accessible city. I am an urbanist; trained in geography in the United States, I held a teaching position at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I brought to this partnership my own research interests and questions and a passion for and commitment to collaboration.
Incrementally, we created a way to work together. I oversaw the university side; Gerty was in charge of the neighborhood work. She coordinated our Civic partners, mostly women, a few men, who lived in this neighborhood and worked with her as activists and Civic workers. Fearsome and loving mothers, sisters, friends, “struggle plumbers,” land invaders, churchgoers, devout Christians, Moslems, a Hajji, minstrels: these complex, concrete, lived identities shaped their passion for the neighborhood.
As our partnership progressed, we found our roles and filled them. Mina, Gerty’s daughter, became our human resources consultant, keeping track of hours worked. Dan was the timekeeper, helping us stay on track in every session. Zaaida was our cook for collective events, the caterer. Koekie loved the camera; when she was happy, we all smiled. Fatima was a constant—quiet and present. Suki embraced this work; it was, she told me, the only time she felt smart, intelligent. Rosemary and Naomi worked with us some years and not others. Daughters joined their mothers. Shireen came in and out of projects, at the start a youngster, by the time we were done, a mom of two, growing up with us across this decade. Our partners’ roles were manifold: teachers, translators, guides; they kept us safe from the real possibility of violence, legitimated our presence, tutored us in local protocol, welcomed us as friends, and taught us what they knew, what they loved, tolerated, and hated.
I brought to the partnership my students, at first undergraduates, then postgraduates, who signed up to study the city, to learn urban geography. There were high stakes in this venture, bringing students out of the classroom onto the street, into homes. From varied places and backgrounds, privileged and poor, white and black, foreign and South African, the students brought to this work a richness, wearing multiple caps, with assumptions and feelings, energy, anxieties, and interest. This mix infused our work in Valhalla Park, our readings in class, our writing in journals and papers, the ways in which we shared and explored. Some undergraduate students loved this work and stayed on for postgraduate studies. Some even came back to help: Saskia, Siân, Robyn, Raksha, and Jo.
I started these projects and this partnership a young, fresh, enthusiastic lecturer. My senior colleague made clear to me that my approach to this practical teaching, in the weekly afternoon laboratory session, was over the top. I was “making a mountain out of a molehill” and should not expect extra credit for it, or expect my “colleagues to compensate for these choices.” This wise advice referenced the inordinate amount of time that the partnership consumed, what it demanded, the choices I made in this collaborative mode. In the partnership I found a voice, a way to experiment and engage, to root myself in the city and in South Africa, to teach and research. It brought my worlds together, a way to be a white academic, in this inequitable city, in a privileged university, in this period a decade after the end of apartheid. In the partnership work, I juggled my roles as academic, writer, researcher, and teacher, strict and rigorous, quirky and quick, with a sense of humor most days.
Narrated in stories of the partnership, the book is not conventional. The narratives build a thick, richly layered, and textured understanding of our practice that demonstrates and shows rather than explains. While this book and project have been shaped by scholarly bodies of work that experiment with ways “to do” urban studies “otherwise,” these literatures are not at the forefront of my analysis. They do not dictate the book’s form. Instead, an engagement with these literatures is boxed alongside the narrative, spaced across the book. Discussion in the boxes places my work in relation to an archive of “doing urban studies otherwise.” It shows the work with which I am in conversation and helps direct the ways in which I am thickening the archive through this partnership and its practice. The boxed-off literature discussions offer further reading; they engage the literature; they are part, rather than a disavowal, of the scholarly work I draw on. They situate this literature in the background, threading it carefully into the fabric, the texture, the work of the book.
The book’s visuals work in relation to the narratives as well. Like the narratives, they are rich and varied. Working in partnership produced a diversity of intentional and incidental artefacts: from designed books and research products to letters and notes, to syllabi, to events, and relationships. These visual artefacts live in different ways—sometimes in a file in a partner’s house, as a map I’ve kept for another decade on the top shelf of my office bookcase, as treasured letters, artefacts that remind us of our work together. The book shares some of the visual elements of the archive of the partnership. They work as well to visualize and bring into the book those more ephemeral moments, the relationships, the feel, the engagement, the encounters. From photographs, to maps, and so on, they make these moments concrete and intimate. They make visible the materialization of partnership across its practices, across the decade.
To the reader, some of the visuals are directly legible; like some narratives, they offer a precise message and measure. Others offer texture, rather than precise interpretation. In sum, the visuals offer the feel, the presence, the mix that shapes the partnership’s work. Like the book’s stories, the visuals and their textures are designed to “wash over you.”
Each chapter in the body of the book concludes with a coda. The codas are analytical. They articulate crisply “what is at stake” for that chapter. They work as the link to the next chapter. They conceptualize the tools I developed through the partnership, across the book. Lightly threaded, they bring together, rather than foreclose, the argument. In doing so, they embody the complexity and the multidirectionality of the partnership and its practice. Through the codas I step out of the particularities of this partnership, distill some of its learning, and share what is at stake.
In this mix of narrative techniques, I share the partnership’s creativity and experimentation, its layered and multiple practices. In doing so the book’s form offers an alternative means of interpretation. Through it, I share the journey that brought Gerty and me, the Civic and the university, to work together to form the partnership. The book goes on to track the partnership, its evolution, and its development in the everyday struggles we researched, the city inequalities that shaped the Civic’s activism and our research. And, of course, we bumped into contradictions in our work, in the neighborhood and university, in our city. These crisscrossing compromises and complicities shaped our work.
Teaching was of the utmost importance to our partnership. In the book, I trace the ways it oriented us to work back and forth between the neighborhood and the university. I share the research we produced in publications from each project, what sustained our partnership beyond projects and semester-long courses, across the years. I draw the book to a close by pulling together the conversations, the tools, and the concepts that the partnership offers as a means to theorize the city otherwise.
In this spirit, I offer this book, its stories and analysis, as a meditation on collaboration, an ethnography of our partnership and its practice. I offer this book as a change of form, a different kind of academic writing. I offer this book as an experiment, part of an archive of alternative practices that work to reshape teaching and research in urban studies. I offer the book as a source of conceptual tools and collaborative practices for urban theorizing in partnership. I offer this book as a celebration of our partnership across a decade.
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