Coproducing Urban Knowledge From Below

Across contexts of deep urban inequality, we will discuss the ‘high stakes and high hopes’ implied in situated strategies and practices of bringing together multiple voices, registers, expertise, and accounts of the city. Thinking with cases of anti-eviction activism, urban learning on ‘slum upgrading’, and trader organizing, we will explore the everyday ways in which researchers can work with urban social movements to convoke radical alternative imaginations, build solidarity, and further struggle towards a more just city. 

Join us to hear our three speakers share their engaged and collaborative research and activism!

Professor Sophie Oldfield is internationally recognized as an urban and human geographer for research on cities in the Global South. Sophie is a leader in her discipline, serving as president of the Society of South African Geographers from 2012 to 2014 and helping to establish and develop the Southern African City Studies Network from 2007 to the present. Sophie’s latest book is “High Stakes, High Hopes: Creating Urban Knowledge Collaboratively”. 

Dr Catalina Ortiz is an Associate Professor at the Development Planning Unit. Catalina is committed to a negotiated co-production of urban space grounded on ethics of care and engaged scholarship. Using decolonial and critical urban theory through knowledge co-production methodologies, Catalina engages with critical urban pedagogies, planning for equality, and southern urbanisms in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Catalina’s latest work can be found in the pages of Planning Theory and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Dr Myfanwy Taylor is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning. Myfanwy works across urban economic development, planning and politics, with a particular focus on collaborative research with grassroots groups, market traders, industrial firms and other small businesses. Myfanwy is also Trustee of West Green Road/Seven Sisters Development Trust in Tottenham (London) working to advance the Wards Corner Community Plan and other community- and business-led initiatives in the local area.