The urgency of properly engaged dialogue in urban research in the context of the new landscape of ‘shitification’

Abstract

In my plenary for Dialogues in Urban Research I called for properly engaged dialogue in urban research and discussed my own attempts throughout my career (located as an outside-insider) to do just this. I am excited that those urban scholars invited to respond to my paper are on board – here I reply to the thoughtful and generous points made by Myfanwy Taylor; Steve Millington, Chloe Steadmann and Nikos Ntouris; Norma Rantisi; Jennifer Foster; John Lauermann; and Mark Boyle. I make the point that properly engaged dialogue is now more urgent than ever in the context of the new landscape of ‘shitification’.

It was an absolute honour to receive these really thoughtful responses to my 2023 AAG plenary for Dialogues in Urban Research; even more so given I felt a little uncomfortable because the plenary was quite personal in terms of my background and my academic career to date. All were persuaded by what I had to say and made me feel proud of what I have set out to do in my urban work over the past 30 years. Here are my take aways from the responses which really got me thinking, they are yet again a little personal but I think that is ok.

Taylor (2024), a scholar-activist whom I watched and admired as we worked in parallel over many years in London, gets what I had to say:

Her plenary culminates with a determination to continue pushing urban studies’ boundaries through engaged research and dialogue, while anticipating further attempts to marginalise and discipline her efforts. Loretta Lees’ plenary makes for essential – if uncomfortable – reading for academic urban researchers.

She emphasizes my ‘somewhat unstated question of what and who urban theory and urban studies is or could be for’. The latter is something I’m dealing with right now in that I am trying to get two papers published that barely engage with critical urban theory for the simple reason that this is not what we set out to do, rather working with communities on the ground we wanted to make their stories heard for activist, policy and practical reasons. But we keep coming up against reviewers not able to get or accept this – saying ‘where is the urban theory’? The assumption is that these are weak academic accounts, the ‘weak theory’ Taylor has also come up against. There needs to be much more discussion on this – what is the actual value of urban theory after all for real people living in cities? Taylor also rightly goes into some depth about the complexities and insecurities of doing and writing up the engaged dialogue I ask for, and the lack of value that institutions and funders place on collective authorship. This is something that I hope Dialogues in Urban Research tackles in more depth down the line.

The wonderful collective of MMU researchers Millington et al. (2024) point to something I have long thought about and find abhorrent. The hierarchies in British universities where non-Russell Group universities are seen as less than, as ‘proles’, where Russell Group universities see themselves as a different brand – I’m reminded of when the critical geographer, then Deputy Vice Chancellor, Gill Valentine, referred to the University of Sheffield as ‘Marks and Spencers’ and students with lower grades (in new universities) as ‘Aldi-level products’. ¹ This classism of the so-called critical brigade, who enjoy being part of the intelligentsia I critique is simply wrong. When I (and many others) left the Russell Group King's College London due to the destructive behaviour of colleagues triggered by a problematic new HOD I took up a position at Leicester University and was proud at the time that they had been one of the only British universities to reject membership of the Russell Group with the moniker ‘we are elite, not elitest’. I enjoyed my new colleagues, a refreshing atmosphere, and the more working-class cohort of students. Externally, other, well known, critical urbanists said to me – ‘why on earth did you move to Leicester Uni”? and ‘they are very lucky to have you!’. I felt I was lucky to work there, but I subsequently left Leicester, after nearly a decade, as did many others, as a new deeply problematic neoliberal leadership team shut down its globally renown Critical Management Studies ² (one of the only business schools in the UK to focus fully on critiques of management and whose colleagues were heavily involved in the UCU) who had very similar research values to those of Millington, Steadmann and Ntouris in the MMU Business School. I want to say here that where we choose to work (and yes I fully recognise that we do not all have a choice) as academic critical urbanists is important, as is the institutional support given to our work, this is rarely discussed. Of course academic elitism is evident in the US (and indeed elsewhere) too, Harvard thinks it is more prestigious than Boston University, but that is nonsense, prestige for me should be measured in different ways, and in a recent external advisory board meeting I was enthused by being told that the Initiative on Cities at BU has taken over Harvard's GSD as the place to think about but also critically do and practice (critical) urban research. Proles can do good stuff too, and as the MMU team say engaged scholarship should be prioritised over academic theory development.

Rantisi (2024) says that I present ‘a formidable challenge to “academia” as the privileged site of urban research’ and that I point to ‘the need to break down the still insular and ivory walls of its tower – both for those within and outside the walls’. Rantisi is someone who has worked hard to span the academic-practice divide in her involvement with the wonderful magazine Progressive City (before Progressive Planning) founded by Chester Hartman who, as I have written about, I also found real inspiration from. Rantisi provides a really useful summary of best practices that others can follow from work in the magazine, but importantly underlines the need for, and importance of, new contact spaces in publishing. She asks the critical question – ‘how can we ensure that “dialogue” occurs in a way that centres the voices of those who are marginalised?’. In the new (frenzied) publishing landscape of open access, AI, etc. we need fresh debate on this. Rantisi is right that we need to take up the ‘project of engaged dialogue as a work-in-progress’, as she has done so well – I look forwards to seeing what Dialogues in Urban Research does.

Foster (2024) is clear that such a project is timely, challenging, and unavoidable and that it means ‘confronting a deep legacy of domination within urban research by what Lees calls the intelligentsia, a class of thinkers holding privileged positions and extraordinary access to academic agenda-setting and intellectual dissemination’ – I could not have put it better myself! She is also right in pointing out it requires taking chances and is not for everyone. Going back to my points earlier about the importance of universities/institutions, Foster articulates better than me my aim: ‘Lees is pushing us to explore ways to stretch university aptitudes and grow universities into more responsive and profound entities that do not just service the preoccupations and aspirations of the intelligentsia, but rather build functional relationships with the world beyond academia’. And she provides a lovely example, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Research in Newfoundland, Canada, who ground their work in ‘humility, accountability, equity, and good land relations’. Foster also offers good critique of my early career use of complementarity as not being unsettling enough, as not decolonising, as not looking elsewhere, I agree and welcome future debate on this. She notes I do not mention teaching in my plenary – which again is right – but this is not something I have ignored in my career, quite the opposite: To setting up urban internships at King's College London where students worked with, and for, all sorts of groups, like the London Gypsies and Travellers, and training council estate residents in my research methods courses to help research their own estates; to supervising doctoral dissertations featuring community based research – and I want to highlight here that of Tia Ndu (2022), a fist gen, once homeless and in care, student who produced one of the best PhD theses I have seen, in which she co-produced with Broadwater Farm residents (a stigmatised and racialised council estate in North London) the very research design she used for the research itself. Last, one of the reasons I was excited to take my new job in Boston was because of the Initiative on Cities’ Metrobridge programme which ‘cultivates projects by seeking out the distinct research needs of cities, towns and community-based organisations and collaborating with faculty across the university to find the best course match for each project. We view our approach as a win-win solution as it provides tailored research support to under-resourced communities, while simultaneously providing real-world learning experiences to students from various disciplines to prepare them for their future careers’. ³

Lauermann's (2024) response makes the case for a research design that is more engaged with data, undertaking engaged dialogue through data. Like me, he is tired of ‘too much critical urban research … written solely for consumption by other critical urban researchers’, what Davidson (2023) calls ‘dialogue within’ and Perry (2022) ‘distanced scholarly critique’; the critique for critiques sake, celebrity critical theorist of the day citation overload, that adds up to very little in the end. He is right that we live in a ‘vastly different information landscape’ than that of even a decade ago. He lauds critical urban studies databases like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Princeton's Eviction Lab, yet does not engage with criticisms of them ⁴ and what we might learn from those criticisms. I think a survey and review of the engagement strategies and real-life outcomes for these lauded databases is overdue, not to criticise for criticisms sake but to learn from their successes and failings. I’d also like to see some answers to, and discussion of the values of, Lauermann's final question: ‘Could we diversify our audience if we communicated with participatory technologies, interactive tools, and user-centred design?’.

Last but not least, I turn to the response from my old PhD student comrade (Boyle, 2024), one of the most thoughtful and informed people on the history of geographical, and especially urban, thought out there. A year above me in the PhD programme at Edinburgh University, I watched Boyle to see what another first gen PhD-er like myself might do – he did so well! As a long-lapsed Catholic and still identifying strongly as a geographer, even if I am now tenured in Sociology at BU, it was amusing to see Boyle state: ‘Lees’ manifesto aspires to the transcendence of all critical geographies which are narrowly sectional. It is this catholicity that makes her line of sight new and compelling’ (my emphasis). In my plenary I refer in a footnote to another personal story – that of living, including being homeless for a while, in Belfast, at the height of the troubles after my parents separated in the 1980s; being an English Catholic I did not fit in anywhere (like James Maguire in Derry Girls). I may yet write more about this experience and how it is implicated in the way I approach urban research and engaged dialogue, but for now the words ‘sectional’ and ‘catholicity’ in Boyle's response jump out at me and I need proper time to reflect on this. Boyle's discussion of why critical urban scholars and policy makers do not speak is enlightening, only someone with his depth of knowledge and understanding of the history of geography could have written this. He argues that this estrangement is unnecessary and unsustainable, and I would add immoral, under the new landscape of ‘shitification’, ⁵ as I’ve decided to call it. Mark lists (and it is frightening for all of us with kids) this ‘shitificaiton’ – from a global climate and ecological emergency to the new prospect of nuclear war. He asks: ‘Are critical urban scholars to be content with the (impact of) impacts agendas we have been pursuing as the world has been hurtling towards collapse?’ I know I am not! And I agree with his treatise – ‘Shifting contexts mandate that we rediscover, reimagine, and revalorise the figure of the scholar policy activist and place this figure at the centre of twenty-first century critical urban research’, even if I would extend it to policy and practice too.