Abstract
In this plenary for the new journal Dialogues in Urban Research, I discuss what constitutes (and should constitute going forward) engaged dialogue in urban research. Engaged dialogue is the process of working collaboratively with groups of people, whoever they are, in relation to particular issues that affect them, to understand those issues better. So what does engaged dialogue in urban research look like? Who is engaging with who, where, why, and how? Has it changed over time? Most, if not all, urban research engages beyond academia, but that engaged dialogue rarely makes it into the pages of academic journals in an inclusionary way. Who usually takes part in conversations on urban research in journals, but also who does not (or is less likely to), and who should? In a new world of publishing and government-funded research that is promoting open access, making research more publicly accessible and inclusive, there has been much less discussion of those engaged in the dialogue that is published. And, if academics do publish with nonacademics it is not usually in an academic journal; this is not inclusive, indeed it is exclusionary.
Introduction
In this paper—an invited plenary for the new journal Dialogues in Urban Research—I discuss what I think constitutes (and should constitute going forward) engaged dialogue in urban research. I am a female urbanist in my mid-50s, entering the latter part of my career—I moved to the US last year to take up a new job as Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, in so doing I stepped outside of my home discipline of geography (I was tenured in sociology because BU does not have a geography department), and I am now working in a new academic system in the US not the UK. This “rupture” has triggered all sorts of reflections, as such the timing for writing this paper could not be better. As someone who did not come from a position of class privilege (my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, on both sides did not go to university—indeed I had no idea what a university was, nor had I ever visited one, when I began as an undergraduate) the paper and position that follows is both personal and political.
My own positionality I now realize has been significant in more ways than one, and I continue to be an “outside-insider” in urban research in the academy. This position in which I feel and operate outside but have gained enough academic recognition to have been given some insider status is a complex one. It stems from my first-gen experience, and I am long enough in my career now to realize that I have trodden this outside/insider line my entire career partly because of feeling excluded and/or uncomfortable due to my class identity but also partly by choice. It is this in-between position that has influenced my stance on what constitutes engaged dialogue in urban research. In what follows, I extend both Dialogues in Urban Research editor Mark Davidson's (2023) recent discussion of dialogues with and between, I touch on some of the great new papers in Dialogues in Urban Research, and I turn to my own writings and activities on how I have undertaken engaged dialogue in urban research, going back to my early writing on complementarity (Lees, 1994) up to my more recent thoughts on engaged dialogue in Space and Polity (Lees, 2022). In what follows I pivot between the first person singular, a more conversational tone, and more formal text, this is deliberate and plays with my insider/outsider position and stance.
Engaged dialogue—what is it?
The word dialogue comes from the Greek dialogos—logos is “the word,” and dia means “through”—the meaning of words in a conversation then flows back and forth through and inbetween two or more people. Talking and thinking together is a dialogue. This reminds me of the double hermeneutics at play in the human/social sciences, what Giddens (1984) calls “understanding of understandings.” “Dialogue” has become popularized in organizational, managerial speak—“we should really engage in dialogue around this,” usually in reference to dealing with something tricky, a conflict, a difference of opinion. It is presented as an approach to resolving issues.
People often go through the motions of dialogue (as we see in many academic literature reviews) which is why I want to focus on engaged dialogue as the way forward in urban research. Engaged dialogue is about conversation as opposed to presentation, but more often these days in urban studies presentation and in particular self-presentation overrides engaged conversation. As my old friend and New Zealand colleague from my Waikato days, Yvonne Underhill-Sem (2017: 122) has pointed out, dialogue is an embodied practice, replete with its own power asymmetries and social hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality, age, (dis)ability, language, and geographical location. But in our current neoliberal academic environment, I think it is even more than that as academics have become much more circumspect, strategic, and adept in how they present themselves.
Engaged dialogue is more than just talking, listening is the key—listening to other people and even at times listening to ourselves (allowing, even inviting our opinions and assumptions to be open to criticism)—this kind of listening fosters collective intelligence on urban issues. It can be, and to some extent, I would argue it needs to be a messy, ambiguous, uncomfortable process. It needs to disrupt as much as settle. A dialogue becomes a monologue when we enter the conversation with an outcome in mind, in proper dialogue we need to be open to adopting a different stance, position, creating new ideas. It is a process whereby we could/ought to learn new things and consider different points of view to our own. Of course we all enter dialogue with our own baggage and biases, but we need to check, acknowledge these assumptions, and prepare to be shifted outside our comfort zones. It might be that all we manage through dialogue is a “conflictual consensus” (Mouffe, 1993: 4) or even strong disagreement but that I would argue does not matter, for we grow and learn through engaged dialogue.
Engaged dialogue in urban research is a process of working collaboratively with people, whoever they are, in relation to particular urban issues that affect them and/or us, to understand those issues better. It is an ethical stance whereby we try to respect (or at least listen to) other views, be curious of other views, and in so doing challenge both our own and other's assumptions. It is a participatory way of thinking together (see Perry, 2022, for an excellent review of co-production and the participatory turn and critiques of it).
Toward engaged dialogue in urban research
So what does engaged dialogue in urban research look like? Who is engaging with who, where, why, and how? Has it changed over time? Most, if not all, urban research engages beyond academia, but that engaged dialogue rarely makes it into the pages of academic journals in an inclusionary way. Who usually takes part in conversations on urban research in journals, but also who does not (or is less likely to), and who should? In a new world of publishing and government-funded research that is promoting open access, making research more publicly accessible and inclusive, there has been much less discussion of those engaged in the dialogue that is published. And, if academics do publish with non-academics it is not usually in an academic journal; this is not inclusive, indeed it is exclusionary.
Engaged dialogue, with who?
Most dialogue in urban research is between academics focused on the urban. This dialogue is undertaken by an intelligentsia, a class of its own made up of university-educated people who do mental or intellectual labor for their job. The intelligentsia is made up of academics (but also journalists, writers, policy makers, and others), who have a privileged position and a platform on which to discuss their critiques of society, politics, and culture. Most academics become or at least aspire to be part of the intelligentsia, I never did. In my early career my class background excluded me, my PhD supervisor said I would never succeed in academia because of my Mancunian accent—I was told I “mumbled too much”; and later on I was called a “meritocrat” by my head of department, in a quite derogatory way—the meritocracy that my Irish immigrant mother believed in was education as a way out of poverty and she pushed me on this track—my upper class, English, privately educated, but socialist head of department would never get this. In contrast with many of my urbanist peers I do not see myself as an intellectual nor do I want to be an intellectual, indeed there is a large part of me that finds the class position of the intelligentsia deeply problematic and I feel more comfortable outside of it. The critique of urban research as a field operates largely by and for the intelligentsia, there are ethical (and indeed intellectual or practical) problems with this navel gazing. It can lead to ideological arguments that are empirically unproven and methodologically weak. The critique that intellectuals do is a luxury and a privilege but like Perry (2022) I do not believe it is “a simple choice between co-production and critique, or the rejection or embrace of academic identity and position,” there is real value in the co-production of critique (see also Clarke, 2019, on thinking through the collaborative and dialogical processes of critical thinking in social science more broadly).
The problem with dialogue in academia is that it mainly takes place amongst the intelligentsia and as such it ignores, erases, and marginalizes other significant voices on the urban. This intelligentsia has long been male, white, Euro-American and heterosexual, but this is changing, as more women and more people of color and queer people are getting their voices heard. Whilst the intelligentsia itself is diversifying for the better, its politics (and social class) we could argue are not. It rarely engages beyond its own with those who do not share its political views of the world, distasteful as engaging with, for example, the Right might be, or for some—non-intellectuals or non-academics, it is something that we should be doing if we are to be properly engaged in dialogue. The intelligentsia is also a social network of academic colleagues, even personal friends, and any dialogue that takes place is constrained by this. There are complex relations involved, friends to side with, enemies within, insiders and outsiders. The intelligentsia do what Perry (2022) calls “distanced scholarly critique”—they take a detached territorial stance as opposed to starting from a place/position of engagement on the ground. Like me, it seems Perry (2022) wants to see acknowledgment of the critical competences of other (non-academic) actors. As Pain et al. (2015) say, recognizing the relationship between theorizing and critique can “extend processes of theorising and knowing beyond campus spaces” (121).
In thinking about who we engage in dialogue with in academia there are other insularities too. Most scholarly dialogues typically occur within the interpretive communities of specific disciplinary subfields, despite the inter and trans-disciplinary push that university research (especially in the global north) has faced. In urban studies, development geographers still seldom talk to urban geographers, urban sociologists rarely talk to urban economists. Engaged dialogue across and between disciplines has a ways to go, there is still too much pressure to be disciplinary in one's career and work despite the inter/trans-disciplinary push. Universities and systems of academic promotion are still set up in a very disciplinary way.
And what about engagement with other non-academic urban experts in the intelligentsia, for example, urban policymakers? In Lees (2022), I discuss the fact that urban scholars have not engaged purposively with urban policy, urban policymakers, and other institutional actors to make our research on the negative impacts of gentrification known and develop alternative and better policy practice. Early on I was told by critical urban geographers (with whom I identify/ied) that I should not be talking to, or working with, policy makers (and the state) to change policies that promote or lead to gentrification, I should be protesting out on the street. This “critical geography” position was pointed out by Harvey (1974), and has been summarized by Boyle et al. (2020: 98): “lest their intellectual labor be appropriated, academic freedom impaired, and capacity for criticality compromised, there must exist a clear distance if not dissonance between scholars and the corporate state, construed as a ‘proto-fascist’ technocratic instrument to preserve and strengthen the status quo.” In Lees (2022) I discuss the opportunities and the risks:
The opportunities are—to learn from others who do not share your own worldview; to learn from those who are “disciplined” differently, even not disciplined at all; to stop gentrification and keep low-income communities in place; to develop long-term relationships with policy makers, city officials, etc., as a first step toward changing their mindsets.
The risks are—to personal safety, litigation, professional reputation, increased workload, and the exhaustion and burn out that comes with that (some of these I discuss in Herzfeld and Lees, 2021, as they relate also to being a scholar-activist); and ironically (given the British REFs impact push) damage to academic careers.
I will not repeat the paper here, we had a great discussion on it in David Wilson's Illinois Urban Theory Reading Group last year, suffice to say that those in attendance all agreed that urban scholars should be engaging with urban policy makers. Going forward, I would like to see much more thought about who we are engaging in dialogue with and why, and expansion of who we engage with, making it a much less exclusive club.
Engaged dialogue with (else)where?
Since the early 2000s debates on comparative urbanism have dominated English-speaking urban studies urging us to “think cities through elsewhere,” not to look at global cities at the expense of learning lessons from ordinary cities, to focus on the particular rather than the universal, to avoid the hegemony of Euro-American urban theory making that focuses its conceptualizations on a limited number of particular American or European cities, and so on. My wonderful friend Jenny Robinson (2022: 5) says: “thinking through ‘elsewhere’ can inspire new reflections and insights.” I agree. In his discussion of dialogue with and between, Davidson (2023) highlights the polarized debates over “planetary urbanization” and the two camps to emerge—the supposedly universalizing, abstract, Anglo-American capitalism of Brenner and Schmidt (2015) versus the more particularistic takes of their critics, such as Robinson (2005, 2016) and Roy (2016), or the more extreme particularism of Jazeel (2019). 1 It is notable that research that has tried to undertake engaged dialogue that straddles both camps, for example, that on planetary gentrification, is not mentioned, and nor is such work referred to within the discussions in these polarized camps themselves. These camps (and of course in academia there are embedded incentives for remaining in the same camp), and seemingly urban studies, does not like work that seeks to straddle different camps—doing the engaged dialogue I have described above. Why? Is it because engaging in dialogue between two polarized camps shuts those camps down, dampens them, makes them unstable, and reminds us that all ideas and theories are merely competing parts of a wider picture. For all its talk of border crossings, nexuses, etc., urban studies does not seem to like or do this. Dialogue in urban research is often quite singular, positioning itself in a particular camp, adversarial jousting between the camps supposedly pushes urban theory forward—in the next dialectical quest for a new paradigm shift where academic names and reputations are made. I am not sure that this jousting is any more antagonistic and combative than it has been in the past, it is the way academic dialogue is done. But like Rose-Redwood et al. (2018: 110) I do think that neoliberal modes of university governance that privilege competition and individual achievement among academics at the expense of collaboration and community building have accelerated and heightened it. The engaged dialogue in urban research I want relates to, but extends, Barnes and Sheppard's (2010) concept of “engaged pluralism” which suggests more productive possibilities for dialogue amongst researchers whose agendas are too often viewed as incommensurable or antagonistic rather than as interconnected, and, potentially, commensurable (but see Peake et al.'s, 2018, critique of “engaged pluralism” and its need to think more deeply about historically conditioned realities of hierarchy and division, the need for a redistribution of power, and to be sensitive to academic's privileged engagement with theory).
At the moment, certainly, in my own discipline of geography, it looks like the elsewhere (not the planetary urbanization) camp are dominant, mostly because they are positioned on an anti-colonial high ground, but they have not won. Their focus on the multiplicity of both experiences and conceptualizations is really important (see Robinson, 2022; Roy, 2016; cf. Randolph and Storper, 2023) but they refuse, obfuscate, avoid, sideline, and erase the reality of capitalist urbanization as a globally omnipresent process. In many ways, this reminds me of the capital versus culture debates in gentrification studies in the 1990s that dominated the pages of urban journals but that ultimately evaporated, collapsed, as both camps met somewhere in the middle, and accepted their complementarity (although I note Shaw, 2023, who says that Neil Smith's acknowledgement was fleeting and he retrenched). I expect that with time, the elsewhere and planetary urbanization camps will also collapse into each other too, recognizing that they both have stances, points, that make the whole more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, to some degree this is now happening around the promotion of “conjunctural” analyses (see Hart, 2023; Leitner and Sheppard, 2020): “to invoke ‘conjuncture’ is to address and problematize relational, inside/outside connections, ‘hinges,’ and articulations, not to sever or circumscribe them” (Peck, 2023). Conjunctural analyses begin with an initial theoretical sketch along axes of concern, but theorization is ongoing. Yet these conjuntural conversations are happening in closed access, exclusive journals, academic silos, despite their more open claims.
As Brenner (2018) has pointed out, in the adversarial jousting that occurs between camps, critics are inclined to present core arguments in “polemical, simplified, or superficial ways.” Denunciatory references to the other camp's writings are used “to serve mainly as a rhetorical foil against which to highlight the contributions of other (important) research projects” (Brenner, 2018). This is exactly what occurred to me recently when the British sociologist Paul Watt (2021: 8) positioned the decade plus of co-produced with communities research I/we have done on council estate demolitions in London, in the face of his own individual research on the same topic, as having analytical blind spots, for being “anti-gentrification.” This was/is unnecessary, disingenuous, and achieves nothing—rather than properly engaging with other urban research he simply sought to erase it in order to platform his own research. This is not the engaged dialogue I seek.
Anyway back to theory built elsewhere, its translation from there to here and back there will no doubt become more important in urban research but we are a ways off of understanding methodologically how we might do this. It will take concerted, even team, and collaborative efforts to overcome the linguistic, contextual, and historical issues that we face. Yet in the neoliberal world of academic social science individualist research and writing trumps teamwork, especially teamwork with non-usual suspects.
At the book launch of Planetary Gentrification at the 2016 RGS-IBG conference, Canadian urban geographer David Ley praised the project for its engaged dialogue—first, he praised our team which was international, multilingual, and trans-disciplinary (myself, Hyun Bang Shin, Ernesto Lopez-Morales and the late Hilda Herzer) for doing the learning that Colin Mcfarlane (2011) asked for, one that actively involved bringing together assemblages of “people-sources-knowledges” to expose and unlearn existing conceptualizations/theories, ideologies, and practices/policies and second, he praised our bravery in adopting a critical political economy perspective while methodologically doing comparative urbanism which of course draws on post-colonial theory.
Gentrification scholar Geoff DeVerteuil subsequently reviewed Planetary Gentrification in the LSE Review of Books and recognized the complexities of what we were doing: There is much to commend in Planetary Gentrification, particularly its ambitious scope and scale. It maintains a knife-edge tension between building on Global North gentrification theory but ensuring a relational approach, opening gentrification up to new perspectives and theories to better frame the rise of “spectacular urbanization” and real estate-led mega-development, mega-infrastructure and mega-upgrading. Along the way, this is an excellent example of collegiate production, rather than extensive and globe-spanning travel by one scholar. (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/10/25/book-review-planetary-gentrification-by-loretta-lees-hyun-bang-shin-and-ernesto-lopez-morales/)
But he felt uncomfortable with us being on this knife edge: The explicit combination of “planetary urbanization” and post-colonial critique is an example of unintentional incommensurability. Rather than being complementary, the two theories are actually opposing, emerging from very different ontologies and politics, the former totalising while the latter much more about everyday life and everyday theory.
Yet in our book, we wanted to sit on and explore this knife edge. It is useful to summarize (6–8) what we said back then: We have done the comparative urbanism or transurban learning that underpins this book “together” … Although the theory behind critical political economy has been produced in the context of Euro-American cities, as Roy (2009: 825) argues: “this is not to say that this analysis is not applicable to the cities of the global south. Indeed, it is highly relevant.” In fact it would be naïve to claim North-South cultural and theoretical exchanges are a recent problem. Capitalism has unfolded in the South following its own trajectory of development … What we have to be alert to though are the different ways in which the uneven production of urban space, the production of differentiated spatial value, takes place in non-Western cities. Ours then is an open, embedded and relational understanding of gentrification, a stance that is (as we say) historical, and that draws on Massey (1993: 144): interdependence [of all places] and uniqueness [of individual places] can be understood as two sides of the same coin, in which two fundamental geographical concepts—uneven development and the identity of place—can be held in tension with each other and can each contribute to the explanation of the other. On the other hand, in unpacking “global gentrification” we also draw on a recent wave of scholarship on postcolonial urbanism that seeks to unhinge, unsettle, contextualize or “provincialize” Western notions of urban development. Like Glass (1964) we see the need to breach the divide between what was until recently called “development studies” and urban studies which has long been dominated by Western scholarship. This means unpacking Western-based approaches, including being careful to deal with theories on neoliberal urbanism Although the postcolonial urban critique that we undertake in this book means “unlearning” what we have learnt (Spivak, 1993 in Lees, 2012) it also, we would argue, necessitates not throwing away what we have already learned from more established (Western) urban theories in gentrification studies. Instead we ask which elements in the South as well as the North could enrich gentrification theory and concepts. We follow Ananya Roy (2009: 820; see also Parnell, 1997, who made a similar point) in this regard: The critique of the EuroAmerican hegemony of urban theory is thus not an argument about the inapplicability of the EuroAmerican ideas to the cities of the global South. It is not worthwhile to police the borders across which ideas, policies, and practices flow and mutate….
Ours was a relational comparative approach that acknowledged both the territorial and relational geographies of cities (see Ward, 2010), it involved looking at how cities’ pasts, presents, and futures were and are implicated in each other, posing questions of each other. And like the “Subaltern Studies School” (e.g., Chakrabarty, 2000) we questioned universalizing Western Marxist categories for studying historical social and economic change outside of Euro-America, separating ourselves from Marxism's universalist history of capital, the nation, and the political, and from readings of class consciousness that do not travel well to contexts outside of the industrialized West. As Robinson (2022: 20) says: “The point of a reformatted comparative practice is to provoke new conceptualisations, starting anywhere, with a strong orientation to revising existing concepts…Rather than seeking to prevent conceptual ‘overstretch,’ a revised comparativism seeks to deliberately stretch concepts, perhaps to breaking point.”
As my long-time co-author/editor Elvin Wyly (2022) has said: “The adaptive ‘worlding’ strategies by which today's nationalist and urban elites across Asia pursue ‘global’ status, for instance, may be varied, contingent, polycentric, and diverse (Roy and Ong, 2011); but there can be little doubt that a shared, universal trend involves the intensification of competition for urban space seen by Smith in Philadelphia in the 1970s, by Ruth Glass in London in the 1960s, and by Friedrich Engels in Manchester in the 1840s.” And again more recently: “There are compelling antecedents in the conception of gentrification and the rent gap, too, if we are willing to entertain the risks of a Collingwood (1946) historiography (see, especially, Lees et al., 2016: 1–5)” (Wyly, 2023). I am willing to entertain the risks.
Indeed, throughout my career, I have sought engaged dialogue and explored complementarity, and it is worth returning to my very first academic publication as a PhD student in 1994 where I wrote about this. In that paper, I wanted to straddle the capital versus culture camps in gentrification studies at the time, to exploit the tension between them, to “transcend the oppositional thinking produced by the dualism” (137). I was interested in the notion of complementarity being used as part of a dialectic in which I would specify the contradictions between both camps, and show how these contradictions could be transcended in such a way as to improve our understanding of gentrification. Like the American geographer Julie Graham, I did not want to choose between economic Marxism and cultural postmodernism; I wanted the stability of the former and the destability of the latter. I wanted to utilize a productive tension between the two. I was into Swedish geographer Gunnar Ollson's work at the time and following him said: The creative act of integration … consists of a breaking of categories, of a merger or transcendence of opposites. The present task is therefore to isolate some of these contradictory forces and then indicate how what is now split comes together again. (Olsson, 1980: 20e; Lees, 1994: 138)
I argued in Lees (1994: 140) that it is important to look at the correspondence of Marxism and postmodernism not as two universalistic metanarratives but as instruments of prediction. I said: Through complementarity a synthesis and a concern for contradiction and dialectical oppositions become equally important (Richards, 1972: 110). Complementarity uses concepts and methods of thought which are mutually exclusive in tandem. Incompatible conceptions can be represented without direct conflict and the outcomes will support and complement each other (see Richards, 1972: 114). Commensurability will be constructed through dialectical inquiry. But although complementarity patches the split between Marxism and postmodernism, it is not a profound solution (see Holton, 1970: 1029). There is, though, the possibility of achieving a higher mode of representation which could synthesize the two explanations. This higher mode of representation need not be foundationalist (see Sayer, 1992: 2–15, on the fallibilism of contemporary realism). The game plan is essentially differentials followed by interdependence (Sayer, 1992: 22). This is a dialectical inquiry by nature, and thus guards against the immobile juxtaposition of opposites. By revealing the internal tensions between Marxist ideas and postmodernist ideas the juxtaposition becomes dynamic. Dialectics separate but they also unite. In this unification there is an accumulation of thought and an opportunity to integrate some of the ideas from both Marxism and postmodernism. For both Marxism and postmodernism are wrong and right; the former attempts a structured whole, the latter a more flexible ambiguity. Constructing a dialectical relationship between Marxism and postmodernism means that the “revolution” will occur at the interface between the two. For following Olsson (1980, Preface), who talks about the juxtaposition of “birds in egg” with “eggs in bird.” … the old and the new are tied together through their backs, staring in different directions and with faces painted in complementary colors. Out of the total image of whiteness grows nevertheless a presentiment of another social science.
Global urban theory and context-sensitivity are not opposed to one another; they are inherent to understanding cities as the ultimate “noisy” social science problem. (Randolph and Storper, 2023)
Engaged dialogue beyond the ivory tower
The twitter (now X) handle for Dialogues in Urban Research says it is “an academic journal committed to fostering dialogue between urban researchers and scholars,” but which urban researchers and which scholars? Robinson (2022: 301) says: “Arriving at concepts brings us back to the agent of theorization as located anywhere, thinking with elsewhere, in a myriad of inventive ways, for many different reasons.” But who is this agent of theorization? In the conclusion to her book (2022: 369) Robinson says: In the process we have reimagined the urbanist as a scholar, practitioner, a resident who is eager to understand her context, but is keenly aware of the connections, flows and imaginations that link her settlement to multiple elsewheres, whether this is through the climate change activists, the donor evaluators, the housing specialists in the community, communications with distant friends and family, the traders who arrive to set up store, or the consultants working for the developer planning a nearby satellite city.
In my home discipline of human geography, there has been lots of attention called to “how particular voices and bodies are persistently left out of the conversation altogether,” particularly “women, people of color, and those othered through white heteromasculine hegemony” (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018: 112). There has been much less attention on the issue of class position. While growing academic contributions from women, people of colour, and LBQTQIA+ academic are welcome and necessary, in many cases those voices prioritized now come from significantly privileged class positions. Often their intersectional positions are overlooked, under-theorized, and independent from their praxis. As a critical political economist class position for me still underpins significant privilege in these academic “left out” groups. But that is for another discussion and time (see also Bhopal and Myers, 2023, on universities only supporting diversity if it benefits them). Here I want to focus on the voices of others who are often left out of urban research—that is those non-academics with in-depth, grounded knowledge of the urban. These can be individuals we have interviewed or worked with or partnerships we have formed with say community-based or other non-academic organizations. It is notable that the outcomes of our engaged dialogues on the urban with those outside of academia (the intelligentsia) have limited opportunity in terms of scholarly publication with them, even less led by them, and this undermines the ethical and equitable relationships we create and desire.
Engaging the public in the urban, in thinking about and planning cities, has become commonsensical, even institutionalized through community/public participation initiatives. As urbanists, we know the value of diverse voices and forms of knowledge but rarely do we write with or publish scholarly work with those voices. Engaging diverse voices in urban research requires an engaged dialogue that enables strong co-production. It requires rethinking the academic/non-academic, scholar/non-scholar, binary. There has been some progress on thinking through the mechanics of the co-production of knowledge, but much less in the dissemination of co-produced results in a scholarly way, in which non-academics are equal partners or even lead authors. Journals like the open access Radical Housing are beginning to lead the way on this, but they tend to focus on activists, Dialogues in Urban Research could do something different and lead the way on properly engaging nonacademics, especially those coming from a marginalized position and not considered to be part of the intelligentsia I discussed earlier.
As an undergraduate being taught 2 about Bill Bunge and the late 1960s Detroit Geographic Expedition, I was really taken by the way he, an academic, engaged with the non-academic Gwendolyn Warren, a teen, black female community leader and high schooler from Detroit's Fitzgerald neighborhood, and others. The Detroit expeditions were notable for training marginalized inner city black kids and conducting and publishing research on racial injustice in Detroit together—as academics and non-academics. This was the radical geography that I wanted to do and to some degree, it became a template (along with Chester Hartman's anti-gentrification work in San Francisco) for my later Antipode Scholar-Activist Award-funded research in which I worked with local communities in London mapping gentrification induced displacement from council estates, training council estate residents in my master’s methods course to do interviews, and our work being properly co-produced. I will say now that I learnt more from this engagement than I have ever learned from an academic conference or discussion. Interestingly, Barne's, 2018 positions Bunge as a “marginal man” but with “central contributions,” it seems he was an “outside-insider” like myself.
I want to touch on three different examples of engaged dialogue that I have been involved in outside of the ivory tower. The first is with two community organizations—Just Space and the London Tenants Federation; the second, is a relationship I developed with Beverley Robinson a displaced council estate resident; and the third, is my engagement with Elanor Warwick a housing practioner. The outputs from these engaged dialogues have been different.
My engaged dialogue with Just Space (JS) and the London Tenants Federation (LTF) has been ongoing since around 2010, during this time we have co-produced research on the demolition of council estates in London (see London Tenants Federation, Lees, Just Space and SNAG, 2014), investigated the impacts on residents, and tried to educate residents on the key issues and how they might fight back. These are both non-academic organizations that refuse to allow universities to dominate discussion and argue strongly and rightly for the value of resident-led, bottom-up insight. I am very proud that they have allowed me to work with them for so long.
In London Tenants Federation, Just Space and Lees (2021) we discuss our choice to publish our research findings from a 3-year ESRC-funded project not in an academic book but on a publicly accessible website called Estate Watch London. Choosing to produce this instead of an academic book was deliberate, we wanted to design a web resource for communities facing estate regeneration. “LTF brings together social housing tenant organizations from across London to act on matters that affect their/our homes and communities. Bringing forward grassroots evidence, experience, and comments, ensures a strong, collective voice in decision making (see https://londontenants.org). JS is a London wide network of community groups influencing plan making and planning policy. It has more than 13 years experience of working in collaboration with universities in their teaching, research and public engagement (see https://justspace.org.uk)” (London Tenants Federation, Just Space and Lees 2021). As we say in the paper our aim was: to develop and enact collaborative practice—in which we need to constantly rethink the role of universities (and, within that, academics). Working across the power imbalance between universities and community groups, and avoiding the exploitation of community knowledge and organising requires long term commitment. The university has learning and resources to share, but must recognise the expertise of community organisations and respect community decision making and ownership. Based on these principles, we would like to use this online platform to encourage tenant organisations, community groups and universities to replicate our collaboration elsewhere—beyond London, and indeed beyond the UK. (London Tenants Federation, Just Space and Lees 2021)
In my second example of engaged dialogue crossing the academic/nonacademic boundary, I set about co-authoring an academic paper with a displaced council estate resident I supported in two public inquiries—Beverley Robinson. I had to ask special permission from the City editors to publish this paper given the co-author was not an academic. I was pleased that they were open to this after having an editorial discussion, and they see it as setting forth a model of how academics and those they research (with) can co-produce an academic paper.
I first met Beverley Robinson in the first Aylesbury Estate Public Inquiry in 2018 and over time a friendship developed, I identified with Beverley and her class position, we have the same sense of humor and attitude to authority. My engaged dialogue with Beverley started as she was about to lose her home, followed her through her displacement and her re-homing which is still painful, and our engaged dialogue is continuing as we speak regularly. In the paper, Beverley interrogates her own experience, and in so doing she shares her autobiography with us; and this is interlocked, dovetailed, with an ethnographic biography undertaken by myself having worked with her and fought with her. We draw on the newish method of “ethnographic biography,” which anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (1997) claims can help overcome the problematic divide between individual, sociocultural, and historical domains of experience. For Herzfeld, “ethnographic biography” or “biographical ethnography” has real potential in helping in the task of writing lives under conditions of duress and suffering, and in engaging with embodiment, sensory experience, materiality, and so on. Critically here a non-academic narrates her own everyday, lived experience of surviving gentrification, thinking reflexively and critically examining her own subject position throughout. As we state the article is a collaboration between two people; “we act together, and in so doing acknowledge each other's intellectual contribution.” It remains unusual for academics to acknowledge properly non-academic intellectual contributions—you are either in or out of the intelligentsia, of academia.
My third example, is a recent RGS-IBG book Defensible Space on the Move: mobilisation in English housing policy and practice (Lees and Warwick, 2022) which I co-authored with someone else outside of academia, Elanor Warwick. Elanor worked for the housing association The Peabody Trust when I first met her, then CABE who part funded her part-time PhD with me, and is now working for Clarion Housing Association. We both came from different disciplinary backgrounds: myself from urban geography, whereas Elanor trained as an architect, but worked as a housing practitioner and researcher. Following the suggestion of policy mobilities scholars Baker and Walker (2019) we did a collegiate project of “engaged pluralism” that crossed the academic/non-academic divide, the theory/practice divide and disciplinary divides—our book is a deliberately trans-disciplinary book, as defensible space, although inherently geographical, entered the disciplines of criminology, architecture, and urban planning and was discussed indeed disciplined differently in and by them. We conclude that defensible space is best described as a middle-range theory, a loose and ambiguous concept that is not yet a theory (although part of it). Accepting defensible space as a middle-range theory accepts the ambiguity and complexity inherent in the idea, its messiness, and critically its fluidity of practice. We quote: “The strength of middle-range theory is that it is not mindless empiricism and not abstract theory or theory about other theorists. Merton developed theory about how the world works” (Sampson, 2010: 72). Middle-range theory is generative and adaptive. We found that practitioners recognized the concept of defensible space as “common sense” while academics preferred to dismantle it.
As a conceptual framework, defensible space was based on several unresolved debates: territoriality as a positive or negative, open or closed layouts and resultant permeability, residential spaces as distinct from other types of public realm and the degree to which environment influences behavior. As a theory (if it can be considered one) it is inherently contradictory, with inconsistent effects dependent on context and inter-dependence of other features. A design may reduce crime levels but also reduce contact between neighbors; private gardens with stout fences may create defended buffer zones, but also provide shelter for potential burglars. Yet our research showed that situated ambiguity can be a positive. Defensible space retained (and indeed still retains) its resilience because it is so fluid and ambiguous, we quote: “It is useless to try to excise all ambiguity; it is more productive to look for social arrangements that put history and ambiguity to work” (Wenger, 1998: 84).
A review of our book by my eminent ex-King's College London colleague, the built environment urbanist Rob Imrie in Buildings and Cities (https://www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/reviews/defensible-space.html) noted it would appeal to a broad readership, including academic researchers, policy makers, students, and lay people. That was our aim! He says: “The book also makes the important case for the significance of practitioner knowledge and world views, and it exhorts academics to take much more seriously how practical know-how is able to ‘speak back to theories and concepts’” (229). I would like to see more urban research that engages in dialogue between academic and non-academic (practitioner) worlds and publishes the outcomes together. For me engaging with different communities of experience has been wonderful!
Conclusion
My own class identity has led to my “outside-insider” positionality, and it has urged me throughout my career to be open to engaged dialogue as an intellectual project (but without wanting or trying to be intellectual). But I also chose and indeed continue to choose to remain inbetween, in an intermediary position, which Perry (2022) says is important for advocating for, translating, and legitimating, different ways of knowing or knowledge claims. Going forward, I would like to see an engaged dialogue in urban studies that changes the way we do so-called “critical urban studies.” This will have repercussions for our methodologies, our theory-making, and in how we communicate our research. It will no doubt also have implications for the issues we focus on and the approaches we take. The engaged pluralism that I advocate listens to the critiques of Peake et al. (2018) and does not ignore the pervasive realities of hierarchy, division and privilege; indeed it calls for a redistribution of power and dare I say dismantling and rethinking of academic power.
I would really like to see urban studies and urban scholars being much more inclusive of lesser heard voices, non-academic voices that deserve the same intellectual platform as academic voices. I would like us to be more open to publishing these engaged dialogues between academics and non-academics in different formats, building on participatory partnerships, enabling particular partnerships to be led by community organizations and their needs. I want to raise the scholarly profile of such community-engaged research and for us to discuss and share innovation in this field. I hope that Dialogues in Urban Research is open to and encourages the unorthodox models of authorship that I have discussed here, recognizing and reflecting research that is co-produced with non-academics (including urban policy makers), both individuals (both activist and non-activist) and communities, toward the end goal of thinking and creating a just city for all. I also think that deeper engagement with our own positionalities as urban scholars is much needed, reflecting on our privileges and our differences, as I have reflected on my own here. “Essential is the presentation and propagation of arguments as actively open to being revised, much more modest in their voice, collaborative in their endeavors, and precise about locational coordinates (both physical and social)” (Robinson, 2022: 386). Only in this way can we build a different urban practice that questions opinions, values broad life experiences, recognizes the complexities of intersectionality, and recognizes and includes the “other.”
There are challenges in doing this kind of engaged research! In pushing the intelligentsia to give up their academic privilege we undermine the academic system as we know it, but this in my mind is not a bad thing, it is overdue change. Engaging in dialogue more deeply and in a more pluralistic and egalitarian way outside of academia may push us in different, unanticipated, problematic, and even impractical directions—but that is a good thing to do surely? Key to the success of an engaged dialogue in urban studies that changes the way we do so-called “critical urban studies” is to develop an ethical code of conduct for the engaged pluralism that needs to take place. This is something that Just Space, the London Tenant's Federation, Southwark Notes Archive Group, and myself discussed at length and agreed on before embarking on our engaged research into the displacement of council estate residents in London. This morphed into Just Space's “Protocol on research collaboration between community/activist groups and university staff and students on housing and planning issues” (see https://justspace.org.uk/history/research-protocol/) which is a really useful read for anyone undertaking engaged dialogue in urban research.
To conclude, I am conscious that my “outside-insider” position may mean that what I discuss in this paper may not be looked at, it may go no-where, but whatever the outcome I will continue, in what is left of my career, to operate as I have to date, even as it gets more tricky in my new role of directing a university-wide center focused on cities. I am conscious that I am a first gen woman, who, over time, has gained forms of institutional power, through outputs, high citations, and institutional recognition (running a center); now I need to reflect on how I can leverage this ascendance to reinforce a sincere/real ‘engaged dialogue' with people with different forms of ‘grounded knowledge'. I have already begun to explicitly prioritize first gen hires, working with community groups, etc. and hope to model a way to stay engaged within and beyond my new position of privilege. Indeed, I continue to practice ‘engaged dialogue' to retain my ‘outsider-insider' position and to avoid going native.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.