Prologue A Note to the Reader

Every book has a biography. This one is no different. Its origin story is of a collective endeavour responding to the privilege and problems of working together as colleagues, peers, and friends in the years since 2017.

Individually, our four lives have been routed through very different biographical trajectories. We come from and work in different places, were trained in different disciplines at different times, and have charted very different paths. Collectively, however, we have come to realize that we have much in common. Core to what we share is a desire and (gratefully) a series of opportunities to work inside and outside the institutional boundaries of academic scholarship. Even when within it, we have been able to be gently disrespectful of the boundaries of disciplines and departments. We have lived lives of ‘research’ and ‘practice’ deeply enough to lose sight of the differences between them and focus more on how real life, cities, and all their problems bring them both together. We have all worked both deeply in particular places and across regions and countries. Through it all, we have sought to craft an enduring relationship with teaching, research, and practice that is curious, inventive, and productively disruptive while, like so many others, we struggle with real constraints and the inherent complexity of the world in general and the urban world in particular.

Our trajectories have taken us in many directions: emplaced work within China, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; moving into and out of both elected and appointed government positions; working and learning within the formal academy in four different continents; being part of urban movements as activists; becoming teachers; circulating in global fora on both the research and practice side; being part of large, international research projects as well as holding onto our individual creative practices. Much water, it feels, has flown under many bridges. These experiences have brought us to this text, but our readers will be relieved to know that the book is not about our personal urban journeys. It is instead about what finding our way through these different places, sites, times, and scales has taught us about living, coping, thinking, doing, and feeling within the contemporary urban.

We know that we write in a moment where even the usual complexity of the urban condition seems particularly vexed. The future is far from certain. Things feel like they are in a logjam of impossibility. Paradigms that have shaped much of our working lives feel shaky, language appears insufficient, categories appear limited. We feel this as learners, researchers, practitioners, and teachers, all at once and in different ways. At the same time, we know there is also emergence, newness, innovation, around us. As we sit to write, we think of this moment as ‘critical’ – that favoured academic word – not in its often misunderstood sense of something negative, but in the sense of it being timely, particular, and important. We are not fully able to describe this moment. Yet what we know – perhaps, more accurately, what we can feel in our bones – is that a new urban practitioner starting out today, as well as a seasoned player looking for a step change, needs to move and think differently. What this differently may look like – analytically, normatively, operationally – and how to get there is what we have tried to construct in this book.

We did not want to write another book about cities as objects of attention, or add one more urbanism to the lexicon of urban studies. Instead we thought that reflecting critically from the joys, difficulties, and commonalities that shaped our work might become a worthy subject for wider intervention. We hoped that this would resonate with the dilemmas of others, informing and disrupting the imaginations of those wishing to reflect on or reconfigure their own practice. Recognizing the plurality of folk embedded in and curious about the machinery of cities globally, we want to address those working within the academy, activist configurations, disciplines, and urban professions that are interested in moving beyond comfort zones of individual institutions of the similar to create communities of practice of the multiple.

This is not, then, a book to read for empirics, new urban theory, or for a survey of existing and emerging literature. You will find fewer endnotes attached to the text compared to the world of scholarship that has shaped us. We teach this scholarship to others in the belief that the rigour of thought of those who have gone before us has deep individual and collective value. We could not take this scholarship out of our language even if we tried. Our hope here, however, is to write a different kind of book. It is one that we anticipate will offer readers something else: a way to make their way to finding a sensibility rather than an argument, an approach rather than a methodology, a disposition rather than an ideological position. The tone and structure of the text, our writing choices in it, all stem from this. We hope that we have succeeded in finding something that both a lay reader, a young professional, a more experienced practitioner, and a curious scholar will all take something from. We recognize that this is not a ‘quick fix’ – cultivating a disposition is a lifetime’s work. Yet every step on the way, incremental as it may seem, has its rewards. The point, in some ways, is to begin, no matter where we end.

A collective enterprise

Across the text, those who know us might recognize who holds the authorial pen at different moments and most will discern, at times, a slight shift in styles within and across chapters. We hope not always. We have sought to smoothen but not remove the tonal variations among us, letting the individual have their place within the collective. While we concur that a new urban disposition is necessary and productive, how we have come to it and how we, and any readers, might operationalize it is not uniform. It is significant that this text is not a singular voice, but a collective one. Honing a dialogue among ourselves into this voice itself has been, and felt, enormously generative for us, as we hope it will for our readers.1

A brief note on our process. A series of encounters in 2022 and 2023 allowed the four of us to develop this book incrementally and collectively. Outside internal bilateral configurations, the one programme where all four of us worked together and inspired this collaboration was called PEAK Urban,2 a multi-country research project on the urban condition. The project consciously started from a recognition of the specificity of place and the importance of enabling a next generation to define their responses and modalities of working on these places. Unlike some major research projects, we did not start by trying to do the same thing in each of the locations where our work was based. Instead, early career and senior researchers were encouraged to collaborate in developing a multiplicity of peer-reviewed projects across the programme that were shaped by the umbrella of the PEAK Urban conceptual framing.3 Notwithstanding the extraordinary opportunities the programme offered to each of us, there were also inevitably challenges, dilemmas, and barriers throughout that we feel were less a product of research design or the friction of COVID than a symptom of something more significant about the nature and complexity of research in cities of the world in the 21st century.

Despite our roles in conceiving and driving the architecture of the programme, we felt still more than PEAK’s deference to interdisciplinarity or complexity was needed. Undoubtedly, PEAK made inroads into engaging cities in the round, drawing together methods as well as modes and practices from inside and outside the academy to ensure credible accounts of urban change. As fairly established figures in global academic hubs, we were able to facilitate opportunities for younger scholars to think carefully about their research position and challenge their research training. The programme crossed boundaries between city governance, publics, and scholarship; crossed locations of cities in very different parts of the world geographically; crossed disciplines of humanities, science, and social science. It did so in ways in which the goodwill of colleagues we want to acknowledge in this prologue smoothed the glitches of the border crossings.

Yet what are seemingly the commonplace axioms of contemporary research good practice – the interdisciplinary configuration, the co-production, the international collaboration, and the search to make a difference in the world – were also troubled terms. These sticky border crossings, in a sense, were moments of the translational that reminded us that moving knowledge, practice, and cultures is a freighted practice. Despite our best efforts, PEAK struggled hard to lift beyond an argument that collective approaches to the urban are imperative and, we believe, possible. In the pages that follow, we try to say more on how such collective approaches can be achieved through an alternative urban disposition. As we do so we wish to acknowledge one of the origins from where we began.

Collective writing in itself could be the subject of its own book. As this volume evolved, online and in person, we excavated common irritations, inspirations, and ill-formed concerns about the fragmented way we interfaced the city across our urban responsibilities. Yet through it all, nobody was moaning. We recognize the...