Editorial: Addressing urban inequalities: co-creating pathways through research and practice

I. Introduction: Framing Multidimensional Inequalities

Growing inequalities are one of the most pressing issues for cities, threatening the fulfilment of the rights of millions of urban residents. The combined effects of the climate emergency, wars, forced migrations, COVID-19, increased housing insecurity and commodification of basic services, the crisis of care and the precarization of working conditions have deepened existing inequalities and created new ones. With three-quarters of cities now more unequal than in 1996, urban inequality has increasingly been recognized as a key global challenge.⁽¹⁾ The Sustainable Development Goals and the UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda have recognized that addressing growing inequality has to be a priority for local and national governments, establishing global commitments that are in dialogue with localized efforts of urban transformation towards more equal futures.

Concerns for the growth of inequalities have been accompanied by an acknowledgement of their multidimensional character. It is now well established that concepts such as poverty and development require multifaceted understandings, moving beyond income-based concerns, and taking into account social, spatial and political differences. Multidimensional approaches to poverty and its measurement have been gaining centrality for at least the last 30 years,⁽²⁾ alongside an increasing recognition of more comprehensive approaches to development, growth and well-being, mainstreamed by measurements such as the Human Development Index.⁽³⁾

This shift towards multidimensional approaches has also been taken up within urban equality discussions. Building upon the seminal work on social justice by Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young,⁽⁴⁾ researchers have long argued that urban inequality is a multidimensional experience for urban dwellers.⁽⁵⁾ For us, as editors, and building upon our common understanding developed under the umbrella of the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality programme (KNOW),⁽⁶⁾ advancing urban equality requires a combination of four dimensions: equitable distribution of the material conditions for living a meaningful life; reciprocal recognition of diverse and intersecting identities and knowledge claims; parity political participation in decision-making processes; and solidarity and mutual care between people, and between people and nature.⁽⁷⁾

This special double issue of Environment and Urbanization, which will include both this issue and a second in April 2023, collects papers that advance our understanding of inequality and how it can be addressed at different scales. Some of these papers were produced under the international research programme KNOW, mentioned above, which reinforces an overall focus on questions of the co-production of actionable and transformative knowledge. These papers adopt varied formats and entry points, including research articles, reflexive pieces and poems, acknowledging that the multidimensional nature of urban inequalities implies that any effort to address them needs to deal with multifaceted complexities and multiple ways of knowing. To capture this challenge, in this editorial piece we introduce the notion of “pathways to urban equality” as an overarching framing to look at those efforts. We ask: what are and how can we define “pathways”? And what does this collection tell us about building pathways to equality in its multiple dimensions?

II. Pathways To Urban Equality

For urban practitioners, mobilized communities and scholars working for social justice, urban equality is a normative aspiration. It is an ambition that lies on the horizon as a guiding principle. Urban equality, as an aspiration that is always in the making, requires the constant construction of complex routes towards it. We have called these pathways.⁽⁸⁾ Pathways are trajectories that are made up of intersecting systems that shape what Leach and colleagues refer to as “alternative directions of intervention and change”.⁽⁹⁾ These trajectories – as well as the institutional structures they seek to navigate and transform – are embedded in power relations of class, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and ability. In this context, shaping pathways towards more equal futures involves strategic engagement with both material issues and discursive practices at different scales.⁽¹⁰⁾

The notion of pathways has been mainly used in the field of environmental adaptation. What has been termed a “pathways approach”⁽¹¹⁾ has emerged as a response to the growing recognition that linear and managerial responses to current complex and dynamic societal and environmental challenges are not able to bring about meaningful change. From a multidimensional understanding, urban inequalities represent one of those complex challenges that require non-linear responses, reframed governance structures and the engagement of a multiplicity of knowledges. In this context, pathways approaches offer several insights to questions of urban equality.

The first insight relates to the systemic nature of pathways. They are trajectories of change that seek to address the root causes of inequality, rather than only tackling its symptoms. This systemic nature allows inequality to be approached as the outcome of multiple and complex dynamics and their interlinkages, which operate through different scales and are embedded in power relationships.

Secondly, pathways are reflexive. Namely, a pathways approach reveals and challenges existing equality framings. There are multiple ways of defining urban equality, which frame the types of responses needed to address it. A pathways approach facilitates collective reflections about the implications of these definitions and, where necessary, allows these contextual notions to be reframed in order to develop more transformative actions. In this sense, pathways are multi-directional with reinforcing feedback loops, requiring a reflexive approach that is responsive to emerging, unforeseen trade-offs, and which is crafted and defined through the very construction of the pathways.

Thirdly, pathways are future-oriented, by offering the possibility of defining criteria for decision-making in future actions. While recognizing long-term historical trajectories that shape inequalities, a pathways approach aims to build alliances and institutional conditions, as well as design sets of actions for what is yet to come. Scenario thinking, aspirational politics and deliberations about future imaginaries unlock the politics of change.

Linked to their future-oriented character, pathways are agency-oriented. They highlight the agential and navigational capacities of individuals, collectives and institutions. Therefore, the systemic character of pathways is combined with the recognition that change also requires contextual and situated sets of collective actions.

The fifth insight is that pathways are about the governance of possibilities. Governance structures can promote “lock-ins” to certain trajectories, compromising and restricting possibilities for change. Therefore, pathways can challenge dominant constraining trajectories while opening up a range of possibilities to bring about more equal change.

Finally, pathways are about institutional change. They are concerned particularly with how a set of actions can change the ways of doing things. Changing routines and practices is challenging, as it implies affecting existing cultures and interests within institutions. Pathways seek to expand the room for manoeuvre to operate through existing systems, to reconfigure norms, policies and procedures that challenge asymmetries of power.

These six elements make the pathways approach a useful perspective for envisioning trajectories of change, while acknowledging issues of power and scale. In practice, pathways need to work carefully with the complexities, constraints and opportunities in each context, which will shape the limits and possibilities of change.

III. What Do These Papers Tell Us About Pathways To Equality?

The papers in this collection share original research, practices, experiences and theoretical reflections about the construction of pathways towards urban equality. They do so in different cities and regions, including Mumbai, Freetown, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Cali and networks across Latin America and Asia. The pathways to equality these papers discuss operate in distinctive and diverse ways and sites. They all, however, invite us to reflect on the ways in which the different dimensions of urban equality are advanced. Through the specific contexts they investigate, they present reflections that invite us to interrogate both urban planning practices and knowledge production processes. Considering the dimensions of equality mentioned above, and drawing from previous research about planning, knowledge and equality,⁽¹²⁾ we invite readers to look at these papers, asking a series of questions:

• What do these papers tell us about which experiences of material deprivation are treated as evidence for building redistributive pathways, and what blind spots or gaps continue to exist in urban policy-making and planning?

• What do these papers tell us about whose priorities, rationales, practices or worldviews are recognized in urban policy and planning, and whose intersectional identities are rendered invisible in those processes?

• How do these papers question and reframe which voices are considered valid in participating in decision-making and the framing of pathways, and what institutional capacities exist to engage with diverse knowledges?

• What do these papers tell us about relations of solidarity and care, as essential components of pathways, by shaping collective values in organizing, friendship and care for nature, mutual aid, respect and trust?

With these questions in mind, this editorial piece looks at these papers, recognizing that the pathways they discuss, while navigating all these dimensions, operate in at least four different and distinctive sites. Each of these sites represents an opportunity to interrogate the multiple characters of inequalities, and the many entry points to co-constructing pathways that tackle existing urban disparities. They also show us, however, that often the difficulties in identifying and building effective pathways, and the challenges in their development, provide important lessons about how inequalities are (or are not) addressed.

A first set of papers explicitly engages with the historical and long-term trajectories that shape inequalities, making it central to their arguments about current responses to urban disparities. They do so by discussing long-term pathways to equality that have emerged from both institutional and non-institutional spaces, highlighting the ways these different efforts intersect, amplify and are in tension with each other. By recognizing a multiplicity of overlapping and sequenced actions, practices, mobilizations and official and non-official responses to inequalities, these papers present an understanding of pathways that navigate discursive and material inequalities over time, illustrating the “thickness” of actions and transformations required to promote structural changes.

Revisiting an experience from 25 years ago in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the paper by Wilbard Kombe, Alphonce Gabriel Kyessi and Tatu Mtwangi Limbumba discusses how a co-production initiative in Hanna Nassif has impacted the spatial, environmental and socio-economic trajectories of the area. Researching this experience of the co-delivery of basic services infrastructure with low-income communities, the authors demonstrate that after more than two decades, the co-production initiative still has a practical impact on the well-being of residents. They suggest that several aspects should be considered to investigate to what extent co-production experiences are able to meaningfully advance urban equality: the creation of effective partnerships and platforms, the promotion of effective capacity building, and the consolidation of common socio-cultural norms and values. The paper calls for an approach to co-production that is built upon context-specific pro-poor concerns and priorities, while also recognizing the failure of co-production to address certain inequalities, and the difficulties for research to evidence the effectiveness of alternative pathways. By looking at the complexities of an initiative driven by state, agencies and grassroots actors, they show long-term pathways that navigate and challenge formal and informal institutions and dichotomies.

Another long-term perspective on pathways to equality is discussed through the historical mapping of the informal settlement upgrading agenda in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Joseph Macarthy, Braima Koroma, Camila Cociña, Stephanie Butcher and Alexandre Apsan Frediani discuss what they term the “slow anatomy of change”, describing how different knowledge paradigms have underpinned planning approaches over time and their consequences for urban equality in the city. Here, “slow” refers not only to speed, but also to the non-linear, complex, contextual and historically situated ways in which diverse knowledge claims are mobilized to build pathways to equality. The analysis engages with both these historical trajectories and colonial legacies, and with the intimacy of more recent experiences, focusing on stories in which coalitions built around the Sierra Leone Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor have been pivotal in mobilizing alternative planning knowledge and promoting transformation. In this way, the paper shows pathways that are built by negotiating power and knowledge in multiple sites, within and beyond formal planning instruments, highlighting the complex tensions and strategies embedded within them.

A third reflection that discusses the long-term trajectories that shape pathways to equality is Thaisa Comelli’s paper on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Looking at the historical struggles that have taken place in the favela of Rocinha, the author discusses different ways in which grassroots groups have pursued urban equality, unpacking the complexity of what she terms “hybrid insurgent citizenship”. The author identifies a series of political practices that pursue equality through different institutional and non-institutional spaces, which include claims for universal citizenship rights, the politics of difference, and care, solidarity and critical pedagogies.

Beyond these historical and long-term trajectories, we distinguish papers that centre on a second site where pathways operate, which relates to the importance of reframing narratives and recognizing multiple rationales emerging from these historical struggles. Two papers in this issue demonstrate how grassroots activism has been triggering and promoting counter-narratives about city-making, and in this way unlocking more equitable pathways to address urban inequalities. Comelli, again, draws on the experience associated with the development of the Sankofa Museum in the favela of Rocinha to demonstrate how history, memories and archives can disrupt hegemonic narratives about informal settlements and urban development trajectories. As cited in her piece, the museum is generating an “urban story from Rocinha about Rio and Brazil”. Comelli argues that in the context of Rio de Janeiro, this story has built pathways to urban equality by drawing attention to the agency of socially marginalized groups in the production of the city and in this way contesting relationships of patronage between local groups and governmental authorities.

Meanwhile, Paroma Wagle and Kavita Philip’s paper on responses to climate injustices in Mumbai, India, goes in a similar direction. The authors demonstrate the intricate relationship between struggles for basic services in Mumbai and the notions of urban climate justice and the right to the city. By discussing this link, Wagle and Philip capture the complexities embedded in the acts and practices of contestation. In this sense, the paper demonstrates that the reframing of narratives about social and environmental transformations of cities can be assembled, performed and promoted through grassroots activism and their everyday politics. This paper, along with Comelli’s, explores pathways for urban equality by tracing grassroots practices and connecting them to narratives, claims and discourses associated with justice.

Third is a set of papers revealing pathways to equality that seek to challenge the mechanisms through which everyday material disparities across discrete sectors and social groups are perpetuated through inequitable processes of urban development, planning or policy. Across Dar es Salaam, Cali and Johannesburg, they examine how multi-scalar collective actions challenge apolitical or socio-technical sectorial approaches to knowledge and planning. This becomes a way to re-politicize issues such as risk, informal vending and mining, through highlighting knowledges or experiences that are often hidden.

Cassidy Johnson, Emmanuel Osuteye, Tim Ndezi and Festo Makoba’s paper, for example, argues for the need to embed approaches to “disaster risk reduction” (DRR) within a wider developmental framework. Concretely, these authors argue for the need to better integrate community perceptions of risk into DRR. Some of these perceptions, shared by residents across two informal settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, might not typically be considered within disaster frameworks – including infrastructural access, crime or low incomes. Showcasing an innovative methodology called “Action at the Frontline”, these authors demonstrate how the co-production of knowledge can broaden top-down DRR frameworks, strengthen relationships with local government and help institutionalize community participation within planning structures.

Lina Martínez and Graeme Young reflect on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods and well-being of street vendors in Cali, Colombia. Through a survey methodology, these authors document the range of impacts experienced by vendors, with a particular focus on their socio-economic circumstances and their political engagement. They point to important differences among vendors – cautioning against seeing informal workers as a monolithic group – and advocate for more policy supports to embed pandemic responses within a wider approach to recovery, which places justice and equality at its centre. Importantly, this paper invites us to see the pandemic experiences and responses as a part of the expression of state power and wider classist inequalities which served to exclude vendors from public space and life, and which might in turn create trajectories that exacerbate inequalities. Recognizing the difficulties of building transformative pathways, the authors call for the leveraging of existing legal instruments and political structures to re-politicize informal vending.

Completing this set, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Lindsay Blair Howe examines the notion of ‘cooperative urbanism’ as a mechanism to promote the shared management of collective resources. This paper traces the legacies of the mining industry as embedded in processes of extractivism, colonialism and exploitation, and its enduring impacts in terms of peripheralization and segregation within the present day throughout the Gauteng City-Region. In response to this situation, using the case of the redevelopment of the Western Rand, the author imagines forms of cooperative urbanism which can prioritize human flourishing over the growth of landowning companies, engage productively with difference through associational democratic organizations and experiment with the cooperative management of shared resources and mixed-use housing.

A fourth set of papers discusses pathways to equality that centre on approaches to pedagogy, education and knowledge sharing as crucial elements of equality. These papers ask critical questions of the actors, methodologies and spaces in which we learn, research and teach the city, engaging actively with the reflexive nature of pathways, in which the very definition of equality, planning, values, learners and pedagogues is a field of contestation that requires constant revisiting.

Neha Sami, Ruchika Lall, Geetika Anand and Shriya Anand’s paper, for example, interrogates the extent to which higher education institutions, as integral and dominant spaces of planning education, can be sites for change in the construction of pathways to urban equality. They do so by looking at four planning education institutions in Tanzania, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, asking a series of critical questions of urban pedagogues and practitioners: what to teach; how to teach; whom to teach; who teaches; and where to teach. Acknowledging that these elements are interrelated, the authors suggest that building pathways to equality requires addressing them collectively, in ways that centre the importance of contextualizing research and education. In their reflections, they discuss how higher education institutions can reproduce inequalities but also offer the potential for change, building pathways that operate beyond curriculum intervention, and considering a broad range of situated concepts, empirics, skills and methods.

Another reflection that directly engages with the role of education and research building pathways to equality is Yael Padan, Tim Ndezi and Jane Rendell’s paper, which focuses on the ethics of research and knowledge co-production aimed at addressing urban inequality. The authors adopt a lens of feminist care ethics to examine ethical issues that emerged in the processes of planning for research data collection, looking specifically at dilemmas arising in the co-design of focus group discussions. By examining how issues around gender equality intersect with other differences among women research participants, the paper invites researchers to cultivate a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the universality and specificity of ethical values and principles. In doing so, it engages with important questions about research praxis as a constituent element of pathways to equality.

Finally, Adriana Allen, Julia Wesely, Paola Blanes, Florencia Brandolini, Mariana Enet, Rodrigo Faria G Iacovini, Rosario Fassina, Bahiá Flores Pacheco, Graciela Medina, Alejandro Muniz, Soledad Pérez, Silsa Pineda, Marilyn Reina, Luz Amparo Sánchez Medina, and Juan Xavier invite us to look at pathways to urban equality that are shaped by urban pedagogies taking place outside formal education institutions, transgressing the traditional norms and limits of the formal classroom. Exploring several grassroots schools of popular urbanism in Latin America and their critical pedagogies, the authors reflect upon the ways that citizens, activists and urban practitioners learn to become agents of change. They identify five core pedagogic practices: to weave, sentipensar (to feel-think), mobilize, reverberate and emancipate. By exploring the materiality, trajectories and rationales of these praxes, the paper showcases the crucial role of these alternative learning practices and their critical potential as sites of pathways to equality.

Complementing the research articles and reflexive pieces, we conclude this first part of this special double issue with a poem, authored by Fatmata Shour, a young poet and activist from Freetown, Sierra Leone. Entitled “Life in the Slums … Still I Rise”, it powerfully documents Fatmata’s lived experience through conflict and inequalities, reminding us of the multiplicity of everyday pathways constructed by individuals and communities to navigate these urban complexities.

This first issue will be complemented by a second in April 2023, which will continue the efforts to advance a more complex and diverse understanding of urban equality, exploring different trajectories co-created through research and practice. In the forthcoming second issue, experiences of uneven water infrastructure in Mumbai, reframed approaches to equality in policy and community actions from Lima, community-led Simplified Sewerage Systems in Dar es Salaam, the social construction of urban disaster risk in Peru, and poetry from a community leader in Manchester, among others, will illustrate new sites from which pathways have been advanced and explored.

The different sites illustrated by each of these contributions help us recognize the places from which pathways to urban equality have been conceived, explored and questioned. They also show us, however, what has remained unchanged regardless of the efforts of grassroots groups for building transformative pathways. In other words, by discussing what has gone wrong, these papers remind us of the difficulties of identifying and shaping trajectories that challenge the structural conditions that underpin existing inequalities, and the need for constant and responsive strategic reframings. Acknowledging these structural difficulties, the multidimensional nature of inequalities becomes central: these experiences show us that neither material distribution nor the recognition of identities by themselves is a guarantee for sustainable equality pathways; that ensuring political participation is a necessary principle for addressing inequality, but not enough to challenge structural disparities; and that a reciprocal recognition of multiple claims can only challenge inequalities if it is accompanied by redistributive efforts built upon principles of solidarity and mutual care.

Although the sites discussed in this editorial overlap and operate in intertwined ways, recognizing their singularities invites us to interrogate the different entry points through which questions about urban equality have been investigated and advanced, particularly by groups who experience the brutality of inequalities in their grounded everyday experiences. These sites showcase the difficulties and hope opened by trajectories that recognize the multiple nature of inequalities, the diverse voices that struggle against them, and their intersectional manifestations across class, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and ability. We invite the readers of this special double issue to keep in mind this multiplicity when looking at the content of this issue, interrogating how challenges of distribution, recognition, participation and solidarity and care intersect through these papers, as well as the consequences of the framings, questions and experiences they pose for urban planning practices and knowledge production processes.

IV. Feedback – From The Environment And Urbanization Editors

Feedback in this issue includes two papers on COVID-19, a paper on planning with children in Iran and one on the complexities of co-production in Kampala, Uganda.

One of the COVID-19 papers, by Emily Rains, is a follow-up to her earlier paper in a previous issue, where she reported on the impact of the pandemic’s first wave for residents of “slum” settlements in Bengalaru and in Patna, India. She found deep and widespread economic hardship in both cities, but fewer fatalities and illness than expected, especially within the 20 Patna settlements, which experienced only one death overall. This current field note on the second wave of the pandemic focuses on half of the previously surveyed settlements and looks at the differences over time, both between cities and between COVID waves. The economic hardship remained devastating in both places, although Patna residents characterized the burden as less severe the second time, given that government “interference” became less of a problem. The health impact continued to be negligible in Patna. In Bengalaru, though, the second wave was far worse, with an average of 18 deaths per settlement, and with symptomatic infections in between 20 and 50 per cent of residents. Rains points to how easy it is for aggregate statistics to obscure very different realities in different settings and stresses the importance of location-specific studies.

The other COVID-19 paper, by Sameh N Wahba, takes a global perspective from the vantage point of the World Bank, identifying emerging trends in the responses of local city governments around the world and speculating on some likely outcomes. While recognizing how COVID-19 exacerbated many pre-existing city challenges, he points to promising transformations in real estate markets and land use, and to new policies in support of more inclusive and liveable cities, including attention to slum upgrading and improved livelihoods. He also indicates, though, how much these optimistic scenarios depend on political will to address exclusion and disadvantage, and on well-targeted policies and investments.

The paper from Iran by Bahar Manouchehri, Edgar A Burns, Sina Davoudi and Ayyoob Sharifi takes a rather unusual approach to the subject of children’s participation in local planning, an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in a world where most nations have now ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Unlike most accounts of children’s participation, this paper focuses not on the children but on the perspectives of the urban planning professionals involved in these exchanges. The planners’ perspectives, the authors point out, are critical in this regard – not only are they often responsible for facilitating these engagements, they are also instrumental in representing the children’s views and incorporating them as part of the larger city agenda. Given that urban planning in Iran is largely top-down and technocratic, it is not surprising that the authors uncovered some rather mixed responses from the planners. There were conflicting views on the feasibility of the engagements, on their value and effectiveness and on the implications for the planners themselves. While some planners continued to feel that planning was a domain for experts, others found themselves captivated by children’s valuable insights, their involvement in the children’s emerging citizenship and the opportunity to reconsider their own roles.

Finally, the paper from Kampala by Gilbert Siame and Vanessa Watson offers another unusual perspective on an increasingly prevalent development phenomenon – that of co-production. Most commonly described in terms of the working partnership between the state (usually local government agencies) and civil society groups (generally grassroots community members), accounts of co-production often detail the dynamics and inevitable tensions between the two sides of this partnership and the navigation of their often conflicting objectives. This paper documents instead the equally inevitable conflicts within the civil society partner and the need for these internal divisions to be addressed and negotiated in order to be able to engage with the state partner in a unified way. The paper focuses specifically on the federation members of Kampala’s branch of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) and their support NGO, ACTogether, together undertaking settlement upgrading projects in collaboration with Uganda’s Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development. The internal conflicts in question revolved around decision-making processes, the mismanagement of funds, leadership issues and the resistance of capture by an autocratic state.

Vanessa Watson died on 15 September 2021, shortly after this paper was first submitted to Environment and Urbanization. At the request of her co-author, we continued with the review and revision process, and we are delighted to be able to share this work. Vanessa’s work in the field of urban studies is well known to many of our readers and we’re honoured to have counted her among our authors since 1997 – most recently in her 2013 paper, “African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares?” Rest in Peace, Vanessa.