Decolonizing Urban Planning Research in Global South: A Call for Shifting the Gaze

Abstract

Given that urban planning has served colonial and imperialist purposes, this commentary explores the existing challenges for early-career researchers conducting research designed in the Global North and carried out in/on the Global South. We offer a series of questions and provocations as an invitation to colleagues facing similar dilemmas to reflect on their own research from a decolonial methodological critique (theory, practice, and politics). We aim to broaden the questions that should be asked when choosing to study marginalized communities, with the hope that these reflections can shift the gaze and move research toward more just and rewarding practices.

Introduction

The transdisciplinary nature of urban planning research (social sciences, natural sciences, arts, and humanities), its explicit action orientation, and its normative focus pose particular challenges. Silva and colleagues’ (2015, xxvi) compilation of the key disciplinary specificities of research in this field—which include the impact of knowledge produced in practice, the entanglement of the local spatial context with phenomena happening elsewhere, and the dependence on political-institutional contexts in which knowledge is produced and used—underscores the socio-political importance of research and calls for an ethical approach with “explicit attention to what and whose values are in play.” However, this discussion only partially addresses the unique challenges faced by researchers working in/with the so-called Global South. This is because these challenges do not explicitly address the specific research conditions shaped by the power structures that have historically guided and sustained planning practice in these geographies.

Such structures can be traced back to the extended temporal span over which colonialism and imperialism shaped spatial organization at global and local scales (King 2004), while masking the central role of colonial cities in the project of modernity (De Bruijne 1985). The legacies remain in a largely unaltered field (Escobar 1997). Efforts to mitigate social (Bonnett 2002; Stam and Spence 1983) and environmental injustices (Adger et al. 2001; Gilberthorpe and Rajak 2017) through urban planning continue to further a civilizational discourse cloaked in the supposed neutrality of planning (Escobar 1997). This neutrality in relation to socio-historical conditions has been conceptualized as planning innocence (Melgaço and Coelho 2022). In this context, structural issues are packaged as urban or social problems, disconnected from the effects of colonialism in producing the “socio-economic and cultural configuration that we describe today as underdevelopment” (Escobar 1997, 145).

Planning research is also to blame when it comes to understanding and theorizing cities. The use of the Global North as a reference point has led to opaque theorization of the Global South. Their historical trajectories of urban development have been overlooked, and the particularism of cities like Rio de Janeiro, Kinshasa, or Mumbai has been reduced to “empirical variation” (Roy 2012). Generalizations of “non-Western” urban forms dangerously erase the “other” in the production of cities (Bhambra 2014), or at best, consider them as “objects of research.” This approach also channels research toward specific themes. In cities of the Global South, understanding the emergence of “slums” and trying to find solutions to them has been a favored object of analysis. However, the focus on marginalized communities is, as Eve Tuck (2009) has denounced, a trend that has “long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken,” calling for a rethinking of the “damage-centered research” (p. 409).

Tuhiwai Smith’s ([1999] 2012) work pioneered the decolonial critique of research, exposing the systematic over-study of, and the little impact on, marginalized groups. The author exposes the links between the term “research” and European imperialism and colonialism, and how its practice often reveals “things already known, suggests things that would not work, and [makes] careers for people who already [have] jobs” (Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2012, 3). In Rio de Janeiro, a collective formed by favelados (slum dwellers) is challenging the relationship forged between universities and favelas, asking “What and for whom does favela research serve?” (SINTIFRJ 2019). Not seen as knowledge producers, residents were critical of the research gaze, questioning: “Why do they only research oppressed people, instead of understanding/researching how many of their privileges oppress us?” (SINTIFRJ 2019).

We are four early-career women researchers, partly trained in our home countries (Brazil and India) and currently employed in European institutions—the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden—doing urban research mainly in the Global South. We are motivated by our individual and collective challenges and discomforts in doing research, and our unease with the structural power system that shapes it. We aim to contribute to the conversation by focusing on the contented nature of the research interest in “slums,” questioning how key questions that guide the research design—who, what, how, and when—often precede and inform the methods used. These questions are still imbued with coloniality and continue to contribute to the reproduction of the knowledge hierarchies that shape the discipline of urban planning.

This commentary is divided into two parts. In the first, we critically engage with the theoretical discussion on decolonizing methodologies and its entanglement with urban planning research. In the second, we offer some provocations to shift conventional/established ways of doing research to reflect on how we can construct ways to decolonize research methodology theory and practice.

Decolonial Methodologies: A Call for a Process of Unlearning

Decolonial methodologies seek to disrupt the entrenched colonial legacies that continue to shape research paradigms, knowledge production, and institutional frameworks, and are increasingly influencing planning scholarship (cf. Winkler 2024). They build on the fundamental distinction between decolonization, decoloniality, and decolonial practice, which are often conflated or insufficiently differentiated in academic discourse. Decolonization, historically rooted in the political struggles of the Global South, refers to the dismantling of colonial structures and the attainment of sovereignty (Fanon 1963). However, decoloniality, as articulated by scholars such as Quijano (2000), Lugones (2010), and Rhee (2020), goes beyond political independence to critique the ongoing coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Decoloniality addresses the deeper, epistemic violence that persists in postcolonial states and calls for a radical rethinking of knowledge production that focuses on non-Western epistemologies and worldviews.

Confronting coloniality requires a twofold movement. First, it requires the adoption of a decolonial praxis. This means that researchers must move beyond theoretical critique to engage directly with communities, fostering alternative ways of knowing and being that challenge dominant Western narratives (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Winkler 2024). However, as critical scholars point out, there is a risk that decolonial praxis can be diluted or misapplied if its principles are applied too broadly without sufficient attention to its transformative intent. While decolonial praxis seeks to operationalize decolonial theory, without critical reflexivity, it risks inadvertently reinforcing the very power structures it seeks to dismantle. Coloniality is so ingrained in our ways of being, in how we are trained to think and see the world, that attempting to decolonize before fully understanding the “colonial”—and how it affects us—can be a trap. Walsh’s emphasis on praxis as a form of embodied, lived engagement with decoloniality provides a framework for navigating this tension, but it also underscores an ongoing commitment to self-critique and reflexivity.

Second, and deeply connected with this decolonial praxis, is the challenge of decolonizing university structures. These institutions remain “Westernized,” maintaining oppressive systems and gatekeeping over Eurocentric knowledge (Mbembe 2016). Tuck and Yang (2012) caution against the superficial adoption of decolonial discourse, which can serve as a “settler move to innocence”—a way for institutions to appear progressive without addressing the fundamental redistribution of power required by decolonization. They argue that decolonization should not be reduced to a metaphor or symbolic gesture, but should focus on the material and structural changes needed to address colonial legacies. This is evident in the fact that the growth of theories from the margins, including radical, insurgent, postcolonial, and Southern theories, has yet to be translated into the emancipation of Western systems of thought (including progressive and critical research), and as such, “engage with altogether different ways of knowing, doing, and being that are deliberately de-linked and distinct from Western praxes” (Winkler 2024, p. 4).

In planning too, decolonization demands transformation both at the discursive/ethical level, calling for reflexive practice, and at the level of rights to ensure institutional change (Ugarte 2014; see also Vasudevan and Novoa 2022, Porter 2010). Both approaches challenge the conceptual boundaries between the planner and the planned and call for a fundamental rethinking of governance categories, identities, and positionalities (Barry and Thompson-Fawcett 2020). In research, this can be translated into a process of unlearning, that is, unsettling “universal answers” and “best practices” and disrupting urban theories so that we can ask different questions.

The Shortcomings of Urban Planning Research Design When Researching from/about/within the Global South

A critical reflection on the entanglement of planning research and decolonial critique forces an often uncomfortable reassessment of our research priorities in relation to the interests and priorities of the groups being researched. Starting from three questions about how we design research on and about “slums,” we offer the following provocations as an invitation for further study of planning research practice:

1. Why do we still over-research marginalized communities, while neglecting that urban inequalities and spatial production are situated within wider patterns of oppression?

2. How can we study urban inequalities by shifting the focus from “slums” settlements to affluent neighborhoods in order to highlight the structures of oppression?

Shifting the Gaze

The first provocation encourages critical reflection on who and why we study marginalized groups. This is perhaps the most important consideration for those who still study “slums” or are willing to engage in meaningful research on spatial justice. We echo the question posed by the Favelados collective from Rio: “Why only research oppressed people, instead of understanding/researching how your privileges oppress us?” (SINTIFRJ 2019).

In the initial stages of the research design, this question must trigger our critical engagement with what we want to research and lead us to challenge conventional extractivist forms of problem formulation. The following questions provide a starting point for us to shift our research gaze, to assess what we consider to be the research problem and where we need to look for answers. Do we need to study marginalized communities to understand how the logics that govern cities reproduce spaces of violence, disinvestment, precarity, and dispossession? Can we focus on formality to understand the mechanisms that produce informality? Can we focus on power structures, actors, and spaces to understand how their reproduction creates value and profit globally while perpetuating inequalities locally?

For example, shifting the focus from the “slum” to the white-segregated/affluent areas or patterns of urban investment and disinvestment by race/gender/class can reveal colonial patterns of property protection and titling, as well as patterns of de-territorialization and dispossession. Goetz et al. (2020, 150) have raised the importance of unpacking whiteness in urban planning, by arguing that “addressing issues of regional inequity requires attention to white spaces as much as to communities of color.” The authors question the over-attention to high-poverty communities and suggest that a broader analysis of land use, fair housing, and planning legislation in relation to white affluent neighborhoods could provide a comprehensive understanding of racial spatial disparities. Similarly, Roy (2005) presents a compelling argument about the “differentiation within informality” by focusing on the gated communities in metropolitan fringes. Unlike the slum settlements, these areas often enjoy premium infrastructure that, in many instances, is even promoted and encouraged by the state itself (Roy 2005).

Property regimes tell much of the story of urban inequalities, especially in postcolonial contexts. Bhandar’s work on the colonial lives of property provokes us to unravel the interconnected formation of racial and property subjectivities. The author shows how “political ideologies, economic rationales, and colonial imaginaries that gave life to juridical forms of property and a concept of human subjectivity that are embedded in a racial order” (Bhandar 2018, 22). Starting from this assertion, looking at property regimes, double standards of ownership legitimacy, or the legacies of colonial legal systems offers different ways of understanding and theorizing contemporary spatialities. Furthermore, the intertwined nature of urbanization and racial logic connects the workings of colonial mechanisms to contemporary logic, unraveling how the capacity to produce surplus value relates to “inherent rights to land and property” (Dantzler 2021, 6).

In the above cases, the gaze is shifted away from the oppressed toward the structures that shape the conditions of inequality that we study, inviting us to reflect on how we identify and develop a “research problem” as affecting/related to marginalized communities. We invite urban planning scholars to consider whether the traditional research designs conceived for studying marginalized groups could be extended to other groups and their places, especially non-marginalized ones. Researchers should consider whether the chosen set of analytical tools and scope could be applied as a way of explaining contrasting realities relationally, including different spatialities. Shifting the gaze challenges essentialized views of marginalized communities, connecting them to the urban processes that unfold in the city, and treating them as equal recipients of political, economic, and policy considerations.

Beyond Self-Reflexivity

Conducting critical qualitative research in international and cross-cultural settings during the “fieldwork” period (see Noh 2019; Saharan et al. 2021) requires going beyond individual self-reflexivity and expanding to understand how research is designed as a whole. This shift also calls for a broader understanding of the structures that reproduce the historical division of labor in research, where the postcolony provides raw data and the metropole theorizes it (Connell 2014). Furthermore, it invites critical reflection on which sets of values and norms dictating “good research” are still legacies of Western methodologies, ontologies, and epistemologies imposed during the colonial period to control, dominate, and exploit (Waldmueller 2015), affecting both researchers and research participants.

On one hand, researchers often reproduce such practices and uncritically believe that research does good for humanity (Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2012). This assumption can be dangerous because it can easily lead to a savior position as part of the engagement with a community, reproducing old colonial practices and violence. This relationship can be reproduced not only within classic outsider/insider dynamics (white researchers/racialized research participants, urban middle class/rural lower class, etc.), but also in situations where there is a perceived insider-insider dynamic.

On the other hand, research participants may also have expectations about how research should be conducted. Let us offer a vignette to illustrate the challenges faced by early-career researchers in addressing systemic barriers to research in “slum” settlements. One of us, researching social, spatial, and environmental justice in Indian cities, was confronted by participants and stakeholders in the research who found the (decolonial) research approach inappropriate, probably due to their own conditioning by colonial attitudes and perceptions.

We must not forget how a self-reflexive practice is deeply shaped by the unequal distribution of resources, which forces early-career researchers in particular to direct research according to the interests of funders for academic survival. Globally, this means attributing to large institutional funders an extractivist politics of knowledge production (cf. Noxolo 2017). Locally, it requires confronting the “historical contradictions between the colonial-capitalist State and the interests of Indigenous, colonized peoples” (Zavala 2013, 66).

Participatory action research, for example, unravels the complexity of addressing these issues in the face of the disproportionate benefits between researchers and the researched. Claiming that both parties have equal ownership of a project can produce a “false egalitarianism that results may be benignly patronizing at best, and oppressive at worst” (Nygreen 2009, 19). Progressive research tools and methods may not be sufficient to equalize power in a society permeated by structural oppression, and this requires constant recognition and critical evaluation.

Engaging with decoloniality as a research praxis (Dulci and Malheiros 2021) also calls into question the temporalities of research—the when—including project timelines, funding, publication deadlines, research scope and scale, but also the political processes embedded in urban phenomena. Recognizing these limitations raises further questions that we should ask when designing research: Can we really commit to a particular struggle that might last beyond our research time frame? If my contribution, even if timely, is aligned with the interests of communities, can I commit to delivering results when needed for the political process rather than my research timeline?

Who Decides What to Research?

The struggles facing context-based research outlined above are closely related to how local struggles or pressing community needs have been largely neglected in research design (Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2012). As early-career researchers, we struggle to change a research modus operandi based on rationalities that exclude the “other” and that seem to be the only way of “doing and being in academia” (Silva et al. 2020, 504).

There is a growing awareness and resistance among activists and “trendy” communities about the lack of commitment to producing relevant knowledge for and with the communities that are being “researched.” An activist, a quilombola leader, interviewed in Rio de Janeiro in 2019, expressed that “research must be related to the agenda that the movement proposes to do, I no longer want to participate in research that is only in the interest of the researcher” (Coelho 2023). This interview took place the day after the quilombola activist presented the results of a study carried out by an NGO and the social movement she coordinates on racist violence against the quilombos (ancestral lands of black communities in Brazil). The activist argued that despite all the research done on the communities, a detailed account of the violence related to their struggle for land (murders, land grabs, threats) needed to be done outside the university. This vignette echoes Tuhiwai Smith’s account of the need for research but also illustrates how research design still fails to respond to the pressing needs of marginalized communities or place them at the center (Sletto et al. 2023).

This ambivalence creates tensions within the academic world and brings the geopolitics of knowledge production to the fore. In a final vignette, one of the authors was doing postdoctoral research with a large international group in the same city where she did her PhD research. She was confronted by a local researcher who argued: “You people come here, do the research, and write about [the city]. So we have to read about our own city from someone who is not from here.” In this case, the local researcher felt silenced by the international researchers and exposed the unjust ways in which knowledge is produced and reproduced.

Drawing on these experiences, we reflect on the implications of being early-career researchers in a global context and grappling with the colonial framework that still shapes research. We are aware that positioning ourselves and conducting research is a dilemma that shapes our work, especially in fields such as urban planning, where research is intertwined with the performativity of the field and measured by its impact on the real world. Given our privileged access to resources that allow us to amplify struggles, we must also acknowledge the risk of marginalizing locally produced research and the need to engage with them.

The considerations in this subsection call for critical reflection on who selects the communities to be studied and our role in conducting this research. Can researchers based in Europe maintain a close and politically relevant relationship with communities that allows for this co-design at an early stage? If so, how do we engage communities without raising false expectations, especially when funding is limited? And how does our work contribute to the critical scholarship emerging from these regions? Addressing these questions requires an examination of the researcher’s position within an unjust research landscape, where contract research and disciplinary norms create a “docile researcher” and an uncritical approach to knowledge production (Allen 2005). By interrogating the coloniality embedded in research practices, we can better understand both our responsibility to engage with marginalized groups and how our own experiences are shaped by modernity.

Discussing Future Directions

Learning from Tuhiwai Smith’s ([1999] 2012) decolonial reflections on working with Māori communities and their own determination of needs and priorities, we argue that raising research questions is a crucial moment for adopting a decolonial perspective. First, it requires abandoning preconceived models of society that assume forms of social organization often permeated by racist, sexist, and Eurocentric assumptions and hierarchies. These models often trap planning research and practice, for example, in the study of urban development programs or in dealing with the “urban poor” in postcolonial contexts. Second, it requires framing research problems from a different angle or seeking answers elsewhere. And third, it also requires that positionality goes beyond merely acknowledging privilege—which absolves researchers from actively engaging with colonial legacies—to connect with broader structures of power, including the university.

Certainly, engaging in a reflexive process that starts with understanding the epistemological, political, and ethical implications of our research questions, and therefore our research design, can be powerful if we are committed to decolonizing research practices. But more importantly than questioning research choices and pathways, it can also expose how the university environment leads us to reproduce oppressive conditions to thrive in the field. We are asked to value “slum” residents as knowledge producers, but how can we do this if we are not taught to do so? We agree with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2019, 490), who argues that in order to decolonize research, we must turn our gaze to research training. The methodology remains a “technology of sustenance of Eurocentric knowledge,” blocking “any attempt to know otherwise than what is already laid down as legitimate ways of knowing.”

Researchers continue to be trained to reify a particular view of rationality in institutions in the global North and South, where coloniality remains. This, in turn, can only happen if we are given the space and tools to question and challenge the legacies of colonial research structures. Adopting decolonial perspectives as researchers requires, among other things, the development of an entirely new language of research by locating and confronting colonial and hegemonic narratives and their implications, be it the neglect of marginalized communities or the disregard of knowledge produced in the South. In this commentary, we do not venture to provide answers to questions as big as those we raise. However, we see it as an invitation for researchers to continue seeking other ways of producing knowledge, recognizing that research can harm (Tuck 2009). While there is an obvious obstacle to decolonizing research in urban planning—a colonial discipline in its own right—there is also a unique opportunity to develop pathways/approaches to decolonizing methodologies.