The urban dimensions of inequality and equality

This paper has been produced as an Issue-Based Contribution to the sixth Global Report on Local Democracy and Decentralization (GOLD VI): the flagship publication of the organized constituency of local and regional governments represented in United Cities and Local Governments. The GOLD VI report has been produced in partnership with the The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (University College London), through the programme Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW). GOLD VI focuses on how local and regional governments can address the local manifestations of growing inequalities and contribute to create ’Pathways toward urban and territorial equality’. The GOLD VI report has been produced through a large-scale international co-production process, bringing together over a hundred representatives of local and regional governments, academics and civil society organizations. This paper is an outcome of this process and is part of the GOLD VI Working Paper series, which collects the 22 Issue-Based Contributions produced as part of the GOLD VI process. This paper was produced by Christopher Yap, Camila Cociña and Caren Levy from the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) programme

Localising the Sustainable Development Goals: An urban equality perspective

This brief outlines the case for the adoption of an urban equality lens to orient decision-making through localisation processes. The authors ground their understanding in a multi-dimensional and relational concept of ‘urban equality’, reflecting interrelated dimensions of: distribution, recognition, parity of participation, and solidarity and mutual care. ​Drawing on grounded examples of research and practice across a range of cities in KNOW, this brief outlines three opportunities in the adoption of an urban equality lens: as a way to maximise positive synergies across the goals and targets; to deepen engagement with local specificity and aspirations; and to re-orient local and global processes towards truly inclusive outcomes. This brief concludes by setting out four principles to support the operationalisation of an urban equality lens through the SDGs. This work has been collaboratively produced between Work Package 2 and Work Package 4 of the KNOW programme, focused on understanding how key global aspirations of resilience, poverty, and prosperity can be pursued through an urban equality lens, and localised through the SDGs. Through the generation of actionable knowledge, the KNOW programme seeks to contribute to a number of SDG goals

Agenda pública arquitectura, ciudad, desarrollo

El contenido de “AGENDA PÚBLICA” constituye el cierre del trabajo realizado en Revista Cientodiez entre los años 2006 y 2009. La motivación detrás de este proceso consistió en tender puentes entre problemáticas inicialmente surgidas en el campo disciplinar de la arquitectura, para avanzar hacia la construcción de agendas de desarrollo. El esfuerzo se concentró en dar algunos esbozos de respuesta a las demandas que estas agendas presentan para todos quienes aspiramos a participar y aportar en ellas

“Emancipatory circuits of knowledge” for urban equality: experiences from Havana, Freetown, and Asia

Feminist, Southern, and decolonial thinkers have long argued that epistemological questions about how knowledge is produced and whose knowledge is valued and actioned are crucial in addressing inequalities, and a key challenge for plan‐ ning. This collaborative article interrogates how knowledge is mobilised in urban planning and practice, discussing three experiences which have actively centred often‐excluded voices, as a way of disrupting knowledge hierarchies in planning. We term these “emancipatory circuits of knowledge”—processes whereby diverse, situated, and marginalised forms of knowledge are co‐produced and mobilised across urban research and planning, to address inequalities. We discuss expe‐ riences from the Technological University José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE), a university in Havana, Cuba, that privileges a fluid and collaborative understanding of universities as social actors; the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre, a research institute in the city of Freetown, which curates collective and inclusive spaces for community action planning, to challenge the legacies of colonial‐era planning; and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, a regional network across Asia, which facil‐ itates processes of exchange and co‐learning which are highly strategic and situated in context, to advance community‐led development. Shared across these “emancipatory circuits” are three “sites of impact” through which these partners have generated changes: encouraging inclusive policy and planning outcomes; shifting the planning praxis of authorities, bureau‐ crats, and researchers; and nurturing collective trajectories through building solidarities. Examining these three sites and their challenges, we query how urban knowledge is produced and translated towards epistemic justice, examining the tensions and the possibilities for building pathways to urban equality

'Participation as planning': Strategies from the south to challenge the limits of planning

Participation and collaborative approaches to planning have become central in urban debates and practices. Critiques to the limitations of ‘participation in planning’, however, have led to the development of a series of approaches that build beyond ‘collaborative’ understandings of planning. Approaches such as insurgent or post-collaborative planning, movement-initiated co-production, socio-spatial learning, agonistic practices or participation as political have moved the understanding of planning towards a wider spectrum of city-making practices, beyond disciplinary and professional boundaries, and in which some forms of participation become the very practice of planning. This article builds upon those debates, proposing an understanding of ‘participation as planning’. Building on Southern urban theory, and recognising the difference between a discussion about participation and one that looks at planning through participation, the article proposes to recognise that there is a range of experiences of participatory city-making taking place in urban contexts, some of which fall into one of the referred categories, while others have remained as a ‘blind-spot’ in planning debates. The article identifies and discusses a series of strategies that have emerged from Southern contexts, and that represent ways of dealing with planning limits: Collective forms of spatial production that respond to the inadequacy of planning instruments to engage with diverse processes of city-making situated beyond dominant practices; partnership-oriented practices that react to the neoliberalisation and financialisation of planning; and advocacy-oriented practices to contest abusive planning practices which violate human rights

Habitat International Coalition: Networked practices, knowledges and pedagogies for translocal housing activism

How do global coalitions of civil society, non-governmental and community-based organisations, social movements and academics, make visible, defend and produce habitat rights? This conversation with the President of the Habitat International Coalition (HIC), Adriana Allen, examines HIC’s perspectives on the practices, knowledges and pedagogies for translocal housing activism through reflections structured along several themes. These include understanding the horizontal democratic practices of working as a ‘network of networks’, with particular focus on how translocality can go beyond international mobility. The discussion also addresses the struggle for recognition and for pursuing epistemic justice, highlighting caveats and potentials of knowledge co-production and popular pedagogies; and the diversity of understandings of housing (including, radical housing) which the Coalition nurtures and reconciles. The conversation highlights the value of foregrounding an explicitly rights-based housing agenda, which has been continuously nurtured over the past 40+ years of HIC’s work on the social production of habitat