Possibilities of urban research: Temporal difference and the politics of the future

Abstract

Reflecting on Ihnji Jon's contention that urban conflicts emerge from the ‘different conceptualisations of temporality’ that groups of residents hold, this paper considers how urban practitioners might productively engage with time as a situated experience. Specifically, it considers the methodological techniques, forms of collaboration and modes of engagement that enable a focus on the entanglements of past, present and future times which underpin different ways of thinking about urban issues and generate new possibilities for building solidarity in the process. Orientating research enquiries towards non-linear and relational conceptions of time unsettles traditional forms of problem-solving in which historically set goals are prioritised over the exploration of different ideas and trajectories as a means of enacting new urban realities. This requires a commitment to a distinctive way of working in which new ideas, meanings and effects are seen to emerge slowly from a creative and collaborative process of academic engagement, which runs counter to expectations of quick and time-limited interventions in both academia and urban policy and politics.

Ihnji Jon's (2023) ‘Bubble clash’ proposes that urban conflicts emerge from groups holding and sharing knowledge that is consistent with their cultural and religious beliefs and passing over any views that challenge or contradict their ideological predilections. Using struggles over the management of the seagull population in Greater Dandenong, Australia as a means of empirical illustration, she outlines how a landscape of ‘bubbles’ in which groups are cocooned in separate ‘worlds within a world’ can have implications for urban planning. Not only does ideological segregation elicit a view of ‘difference as a given’ – with little concern for how it is manifest or what the nature of difference is – but the existence of closed, insular groups risks reinforcing negative stereotypes of others and, in turn, a reluctance of groups to reach compromise over a specific urban problem.

Jon argues that what urban practitioners should do to transcend ideological separation – which makes it difficult to develop communal agreement – is to work ‘to reconstruct the storylines of a particular problematic situation’ (2023: 29). Rather than seeing and responding to rising seagull numbers as either a threat to economic prosperity or a positive indication of human and nonhuman cohabitation, practitioners should bring forth new understanding of the present as being in a constant state of transformation. Pre-existing views, she suggests, are implicitly imbued with a group's concerns for what is to be done as if emerging issues are fixed and static. Instead, the seagull problem should be approached as something fluid – formed and reshaped in dialogue with experiences, histories and futures that are in flux. The implication is that in seeing the complexity and ongoingness of each (problematic) situation we can open up the sensibility of the current moment and position urban research as a critical resource for cultivating and inhabiting liveable worlds.

In engagement with Jon's paper, I explore the challenge of creating and exemplifying new possibilities for living with difference through attention to the complexities of time and becoming in urban research. More specifically, I ask how orientating empirical enquiries towards the endless unfolding of knowledge, understanding and experiences might allow us to approach urban problems differently. Building on the work of feminist scholars such as Iris Young, Patricia H. Collins and Elizabeth Grosz, Jon's paper proposes a ‘transitionist pragmatist approach’ in which the emergence of any given problem is brought to the fore and its relations with multiple and different entities studied to enable a movement beyond the understanding of urban conflict as produced – and fixed – by a constellation of independent ‘bubble’ groups. By drawing connections across historically and spatially interrelated actors, discourses, practices and events, Jon argues practitioners can come to view conflicts as dynamic processes, rather than static and bounded concerns, and through attention to their evolution and transformation access as many alternatives to the present as possible, expanding the conditions of political opportunity. What might be further explored, though, are the possible methods by which empirical research within this tradition could proceed. A question I pose here, then, is how to innovate with methods to capture the spatial and temporal contingency of urban conflict and embed ways of understanding group knowledge not as discrete or detached entities but as processual formations that emerge only in relation to one another.

The paper proceeds by positioning Jon's concern with the process of becoming as part of a wider interest within the social sciences with the temporal mode of futurity. Such interest can be broadly characterised as taking up ‘the material and symbolic potency of time’ (Chakkalakal and Ren, 2022: 849) in order to work out how that which is invisible and implicit becomes ‘real’, and thus our inherent ‘capacity to create and exemplify new worlds by thinking, speaking, acting and associating differently’ (Davies, 2014: 50). It then discusses the role of methodology and the potential for urban research to attend to both the present and the prospective through methods that are directed towards relational rather than absolute interpretations. Final reflections centre around the various implications for conceiving moments of controversy, tension and conflict as indeterminate, unfolding and malleable, including what this conception might do for urban politics, policy and research practice.

Time, difference and becoming

Through Jon's paper, we are directed to think about the (over)population of seagulls in Greater Dandenong not as a set point in time, society or space but as an emergent development formed and reshaped in relation to the experiences, histories and imagined futures of local residents. The seagulls are a problem which surfaces in this specific context because of the ‘different conceptualisations of temporality’ (Jon, 2023: 24) that groups of residents hold. While some value the brief moments of direct human and nonhuman encounter that seagulls provide, others fear the damage to their homes and business premises that might ensue necessitating costly repairs, as well as the future potential for declining property values should there not be a cull. A teleological reading of the situation might see the tension between these different orientations to the seagulls as insurmountable. Yet Jon promotes an alternative conceptualisation. Commensurate with non-teleological interpretations that resist the assumption of a straightforward transition from the past to the present and future, she implores us to transcend the assumption of a specific ‘end’ in an effort to capture the range of alternative outcomes that might emerge but are in no way predetermined.

A non-teleological approach, as Holdsworth and Hall (2022: 1052) note, ‘implicitly brings the temporal into interpreting practice in a non-linear way’ thereby unsettling political or normative codes of how people should respond to a given situation. Although not described as such, Jon's concern to discover the multiple histories, plural realities and diversity of visions that exist concurrently in Greater Dandenong is aligned with this (re)new(ed) concern within the social sciences, and thereby attends to ‘the complexities of time and becoming’ (Grosz, 2000: 230). It involves ‘a refusal to accept current thought and organisational structures as fixed’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 654) by bringing to purview how differentiated ‘sense-making’ can only be grasped as certain knowledge ‘transform and become, that is move from “the past” and are re-experienced and assembled as different, novel, intensive, temporalities’ (Coleman, 2008: 93). This has a political utility in emphasising the continuous capacity to create something new: the past does not determine the present; there is not a linear progression of ideas and practices which survive unchanged, but rather an openness that ‘may prove central in reinvigorating the notion of a transgressive, radical future, a political future without specification’ (Grosz, 2000: 228).

To bring home the possibilities for deflecting the linear trajectory of time which gives rise to fixed stories and expectations, Jon suggests that a topological sensibility – in which ‘power relationships are not so much positioned in space or extended across it, as compos[ing] the spaces of which they are a part’ (Allen, 2011: 284) – be supplemented with an understanding of time as multiple and assembling. The assumption that time (only) progresses from past to present to future privileges a politics that is ‘wedded to particular coordinates – of intention, linearity, opposition’ (Hughes, 2019: 1142) that serve to determine in advance a particular course of (in)action. Rereading time as dynamic and heterogeneous provides for the vital and important re-assertion of alternative ways of knowing and being that while never nostalgic, can build on and affirm solidarity through the creation of new liveable cultures and relations – an ethos of research that is resonant of recent scholarship on resistance which exhibits a concern for envisioning ‘alternative knowledges, ontologies and pathways towards an undetermined future’ (MacLeavy et al., 2022: 1564).

This sense of creation, multitude and liveliness is also found in anthropological work which encourages a movement beyond stories of progress or decay in favour of new kinds of stories where pasts and futures are entangled with the many experiences of the present, and there is a vocabulary of living processes that shows us the potential for alternate and beneficial interactions with other humans and nonhumans. Eloquently describing ‘the remaking of liveable landscapes through the actions of many organisms’, Anna Tsing's (2015: 51) work invites an understanding of environmental resurgence as ‘a process that emerges through ecological relations in which humans often play constructive and laborious roles’ (Searle and Turnbull, 2020: 293). In viewing emergent ecologies as shaped by a host of creative agents, we are alerted to the task of the researcher ‘to notice the micropolitics of liveability, and to spotlight and augment them; to activate their nascent creativities and practices of hope’ (Dawney, 2020: 47). In geography, similar attention to the relationships and processes that emerge in and through time and space/place is visible in the efforts to generate knowledge of land and living ecologies with indigenous research partners, in which the land – ‘country’ – is also a collaborator. Insisting on a situated experience, which is ‘both dynamic, always shifting toward an emergent and imagined future, and coherent, being reproduced and sustained through the practices and ways of knowing [the] past’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 465), such work positions the past and future as coterminous with the present, and recognises that ‘temporality, like spatiality is contextual, knowing/knowable and affecting/able to be affected’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 466).

Multiplicity, temporality and innovative methodologies

An attention to temporal becoming in which everything exists in a state of emergence and relationality is simultaneously an ecological and anti-colonial political endeavour, given that it positions ‘knowing, doing and being’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 468) at the centre of research. It demands methods that facilitate a deeper understanding of how knowing and being emerge, and how through this process one does. Focusing on the multiplicity of knowledge, understanding and experiences that shape or produce actions provides a means of attending to the constant movement and transformation that everything and everyone is involved in, or more specifically the elaboration of different worlds through this interconnectedness. At the same time, it signals the value of an uncertain and largely unknowable present as a ‘frame or scene of political and ethical engagement’ (McCormack, 2017: 11). By orientating research towards the diversity of consciousness so often obscured by the presentation of a singular trajectory of time, and the related assumption of fixity in social and political practices, Jon's paper suggests urban practitioners can help to transcend the group antagonisms that appear initially difficult to reconcile. Yet there is space remaining to consider how this is to be done, in terms of developing empirical techniques that might prove helpful in accessing the stories of individuals and groups and progressing an understanding of them as situated in grounded contexts. In a spirit of generative critique, I therefore place Jon's paper in conversation with scholarship seeking to innovate methodologically using approaches that centre relationality and the complexities of time and becoming.

Reprising and reasserting a life course approach in geography, Hall and Barron's (2021) work provides a model of how to attend to people's memories of the past and imaginations of the future within the present, as well as how an ‘oral histories and futures’ methodology could feed into policy-making processes. To supplement interviews probing people's everyday experiences and recollections of the past, they suggest the use of creative participatory tasks in which there is a focus on future expectations, hopes and possibilities. This multitemporal account of people's lives can in turn be used to solve policy problems – for instance, in workshops structured around the sharing of lived experiences. Creative participatory tasks might include biographical mapping in which research participants record personal biographies on layers of paper to build up a holistic picture of an event or circumstance (Jupp et al., 2019); photo elicitation in which historical or contemporary photographs are used as a prompt for individual or group discussions (following Rose, 2016); and storytelling activities in which participants are encouraged to outline possible futures as continuations of, or alternatives to, the situations they currently see themselves as occupying within the present (for an example, see Cuzzocrea, 2018). As within the oral history tradition, it is a methodological approach that can be used to bring in the views and experiences of those from minority groups and communities not often included in (urban) policy discussions, inviting reflection on the concepts and boundaries that are the grounds for much political thinking.

In bringing to the fore how time is important for how people conceive of themselves, others and the objects of political, social, cultural and economic reflection, this type of participatory approach has the potential to unsettle assumptions of chronological time by making evident how the past is not a bounded earlier phase but is engaged and extended within the present, which exists as a space of ‘betweenness’ from which to imagine, act and live the future differently (Katz, 2017: 596). The effort to excavate other ‘minor’ stories vibrating in, through and against ‘major’ productions of knowledge is valuable, because it undoes broad brushstroke analyses of urban problems from within, revealing their limits in ways that imply new means of addressing them. As Cindi Katz (2017: 598–99) explains, ‘Indexing the ways these problems are encountered and lived, refused and reimagined in different forms, places and scales might enable the construction of [new] assemblages’, reminding us that the future is not restricted or pre-empted by the present but is always ‘open to others, surprise, and change’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 654).

What is clear from geographical work on futurity, however, is the extent to which the task of imagining and creating futures beyond those represented and opposed in the present can be impacted by institutionalised practices which alter the discursive and spatial environments in which groups (inter)act. An ongoing challenge for urban practitioners, then, is fostering shared understanding and a wider sense of what might be possible without triggering social closures in which group boundaries are redrawn, identities strengthened and differences reasserted. Similarly, questions pertain to the most effective means of building from localised instances of solidarity and understanding without precluding alternative arrangements for living, dreaming and doing politics within another time and space. It is often the case that co-production techniques are promoted as a means of generating knowledge about urban problems whilst holding to an understanding of subjectivities, spatialities and temporalities as ‘embodied, situated, and fluid; their productions of knowledge inseparable from—if not completely absorbed in—the mess of everyday life’ (Katz, 2017: 598). And yet case studies also show how power relations can continue to condition the participation of citizens in policy-making and urban governance processes, risking the co-option and capture of experiential expertise and locally generated innovation.

In this respect it is also useful to reflect on time – and the time it takes to work and think with difference – in the research process. Synthesising creativity, conviviality and co-production in projects can allow the idea of an uncertain and largely unknowable present to unfold in and through time. But this requires the slowing down or suspension of the dimensions of temporality relating to government demands and the needs of policymakers or research funders for ‘quick wins’, in favour of a research strategy that allows for slowness ‘to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilising us’ (Stengers, 2005: 994). It is not simply that establishing the conditions for participatory knowledge production (or co-production) requires an investment of time, but that orientating research practice towards diverse and contradictory ways of understanding requires a willingness to confront the plethora of institutional constraints that prevent the urban from being ‘a generative space for encountering difference’ (Jon, 2023: 13). In short, it is not only how research is conceptualised but also the way researchers act while engaged in the process that creates possibilities for remaking urban futures.

Concluding comments

The seagull problem in Greater Dandenong acts as an illuminating case study from which Jon proceeds to explore the temporal dimensions of the urban experience. While at first glance the differing views of the situation are presented as giving rise to a ‘bubble clash’, her paper provokes us to consider residents’ perceptions as provisional, multilayered and forward-looking, rather than singular and staunch. Foregrounding time and temporality enables a detailed insight into the concerns of urban dwellers. Specifically, by uncovering how past, present and future are perceived and linked together by individuals and groups we can gain a view of identities and understanding not as fixed, but anchored through ‘spatial processes, material engagements, embodied practices, and affective atmospheres’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 645). This in turn enables an understanding of the facility of alternative rememberings of the past, observations of the present and imaginings of the future but – given the context of uneven power relations that contextualise and sometimes shape participatory research and governance – the possibility of ambivalence and constraint remains, always.

In reflecting on Jon's paper and the questions and possibilities it alerts us to, I have offered suggestions of methods that can help us to achieve temporal depth in our research enquiries. These are already present in (and beyond) geography, and could in turn productively inform approaches within urban research, to ensure urban policy is not just a product of the ‘weavers’ (Jon, 2023: 29) view of the ‘problem’ that needs to be solved, but is constructed in such a way that allows us to discern ‘the historical and geographical circumstances in which the present becomes an object of close reflection’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 655). For urban policy researchers, slowing down may similarly provide an effective way of ensuring practice is responsive to locally situated rather than externally imposed expectations, and – in keeping with and extending Jon's concerns – it might also offer a means to engender an affirmative prefigurative politics that is responsive to the multiplicity of human and nonhuman needs.