Co-producing theory: Epistemic tyrannies of urban conversations

Abstract

I rethink the epistemic and geographical locations of the urban conversations which aim to create a collective ‘we' from among transnational urban diversity and glocalized Indigeneity. I argue that the first and most fundamental step in enabling the emergence of a collective global ‘we', in whose formation the ‘Indigenous others' have equal presence, is to develop epistemic tools for co-creating a collective understanding of the ‘urban'. This is because we are not yet equipped with the necessary thinking-feeling structures to hold fair conversations between the ‘transnational' and the ‘Indigenous’

In this commentary, I build on and interrogate Wyly's idea of ‘conversations’, in connection to the question he poses later in his paper: ‘Who are “we”?’ Wyly suggests that ‘“we” will be defined by conversations among transnational urban diversity and glocalized Indigeneity’ (Wyly, 2024: 43). Urban conversations are hugely impacted by the epistemic and representational power relationships that are practiced and that exist within societies, as Wyly indeed outlines in paper. Historical memories and, thereby, future policies, are thus created within these constantly evolving power dynamics. Rethinking the epistemic and geographical locations of such conversations, I argue that the first and most fundamental step in enabling the emergence of a collective ‘we’, in whose formation the ‘Indigenous others’ have equal presence, is to develop epistemic tools for co-creating a collective understanding of the ‘urban’. This is because we are not yet equipped with the necessary thinking–feeling structures to hold fair conversations between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘Indigenous’.

Conversation is a multi-directional activity taking place among multiple entities. In order that these distinct entities should be able to communicate, a ‘shared’ epistemic framework, wherein the conversation takes place, is needed. Such shared frameworks can emerge and evolve fleetingly. A fair epistemic setting for conversations requires that no one type of urban knowledge sets the terms of the conversation. If the shared framework is premised on a certain type of knowledge, we are in danger of reliving or reproducing ‘colonial’ power practices and letting the coloniality reconstitute itself. This is because any understanding of ‘other’ urbanisms will need to be translated into the central conception of the urban that dominates the epistemic framework (see Chakrabarty, 2008). Catherine Walsh, a scholar of Latin American cultural studies, highlights several experiences in Ecuador and Bolivia where the meaning and use of concepts such as decoloniality and interculturalism had ‘become functional to the systems of domination and the matrices of modern/colonial/capitalist power’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 76).

It is not only the content that needs to be pluriverse, but more essentially the terms (regulations, assumptions, and principles) of conversation. The epistemically shared space of conversation is where the ‘terms of conversation’ are defined – to use the concept suggested by Walter Mignolo, an Argentinian scholar of decoloniality (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). He uses this term in connection to the idea of a ‘colonial matrix of power’ – or ‘coloniality of power’ as it is termed by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano. The matrix, or the terms of conversation, consists of a set of epistemic structural relations and flows which function like a ‘theoretical concept that helps to make visible what is invisible to the naked (or rather the untheoretical) eye’, like a structure of management and control (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 142). Each matrix creates, or enunciates, its own domains, which constitute the content of the conversation, or that which is enunciated. For example, the discourse of modernity enunciates certain domains such as economy, history, or philosophy. The broader level, where the domains are defined, relates to the terms of the conversation, or the enunciation project. This is the level of knowledge which is composed of actors, languages, and institutions. It is at the level of enunciation that an epistemic rhetoric is enunciated, transformed, and legalised. Mignolo uses the expression enunciation/enunciated to reveal the operational logic of the rhetoric of modernity and to outline the possibilities of the praxis of decoloniality. He suggests that we need to open up our thinking to new realms of understanding beyond the domains that have been produced based on the project of modernity – for instance, to think about new forms of governance beyond the nation-state – because ‘[w]hat matters is not economics, or politics, or history, but knowledge’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 135).

The question is whether urban theory offers such a shared space for future conversations. Being embedded in a Western imaginary, a major part of the global understanding of the urban has been masked by the ‘modern/colonial enunciation’ at theorical and public levels. Often, it is through conversation (discourses and narratives, oral or written) around taken-for-granted entities (economy, politics, art, religion, etc.) – which are defined by and based on Western world-senses – that ‘the amorphous activities of a people are distinguished, narrated, theorized, critiqued, and transformed into economics, politics, history, and so on’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 137). If we want to have a fair shared framework or to frame a cosmopolitan theory, we require a historico-cultural contextualisation of the analytical vocabularies or thought frameworks that we use for understanding a city, by referring to the lifeworld within which those concepts emerge, develop, and evolve (see Falahat, 2018). Such research reveal that mainstream urban theory is a disciplinary knowledge whose boundaries reflect its epistemic roots in the academic disciplines of the European traditions of knowing, as well as the fact that it is closely linked to a certain infrastructure of defining, producing, communicating, and disseminating ‘internationally excellent’ academic knowledge (Müller, 2021; Robinson, 2022), and so cannot guarantee ‘any universal validity’ (Chakrabarty, 2008: xiii). This hegemony reminds us of ‘white supremacy in the historical evolution of the built environment of globalising cities as portrayed in central Vancouver's image’ (Wyly, 2024: 6). For an open conversation within urban theory, the terms (assumptions, regulations) of epistemic, ontological, and economic conversations need to be changed.

Changing the terms of the conversation implies overcoming both disciplinary and interdisciplinary regulations and conflicts of interpretations. In discussing the theme of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) conference (2017), ‘Decolonising geographical knowledge’, the human geographer Tariq Jazeel suggests that if decolonising geographical knowledge is the discipline's imperative, it ‘should also help us delineate contexts of intervention through the injunction to open our geographical iterations out to the world’ (Jazeel, 2017: 336). This opening is necessary because, as Jazeel asserts, ‘the dismantling of modernity's power structures, will never be achieved from within its own theoretical orthodoxies and infrastructures’; nor, we might add, through some scholarly transformation within the same academy (Jazeel, 2017: 335). This would support the processes of unlearning and relearning: ‘to learn to unlearn in order to re-learn, from the collective lived practices, experience, thought, and knowledge’ of different locations or organisations of people and the urbanisms linked to them (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 73; see also McFarlane, 2010; Spivak, 2003).

The politics of location has been a hallmark of postcolonial urban research. It is suggested that historical differences have major impacts on the creation of urban knowledge, as the historical and imaginative geographies are inseparable (see Blunt and McEwan, 2002; Crush, 1993; Sunder Rajan, 1996), and that historical difference can or should transform the foundational and fundamental categories of urbanisation. A key aim has been to foreground ‘forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization’ (Roy, 2016: 200). Within this scholarship, several methods and approaches have been suggested to deconstruct the locatedness of urban theory and our locatedness as Eurocentric academics (and hence include other locations in the process of theorising) (see, e.g., hooks, 1989; McGee and Robinson, 1995; Simone, 2011; Yiftachel, 2009; Zeiderman, 2018). The aim is to let the ‘other’ knowledges be insiders in the world of international knowledge, benefitting others but also benefiting from the dialogue without having to be translated into our scholarship – that is to ‘freely roam and linger’ in the discursive space of mainstream theories or urban conversations. ¹ This would be possible only if those ‘other’ urbanisms and urban knowledges are epistemically empowered within the globalising context of urban theory by endeavours to ‘plant and grow an otherwise’ through working ‘“within”, that is from Indigenous communities’ own ancestral knowledges and intelligence’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 26, 101). I suggest that until other knowledges gain equal epistemic power in the creation and distribution of the international knowledge, they remain too fragile in our epistemic world to engage in conversations or ‘“comparison” as a method of idiographic juxtaposition’ (Castree et al., 2020: 185). This is in line with what Wilson-Raybould (2021) suggests by emphasizing that Indigenous nations need to be supported to create their own governance models based on their own rules and traditions (Wyly, 2024: 16).

Drawing on these ideas, I argue that the rewriting of the historical-cultural roots of theory should be the crucial part of ‘producing theories in place’ and of creating the shared space of conversations. To have a genuine conversation, all sides should have the same extent of cultural-historical presence in the creation of this shared space. Having the same extent of presence of all involved entities means to co-create the shared space of knowing through different cosmologies, belief systems, imaginaries, visions, modes of thought, ways of being, ontologies, or epistemologies – that is to co-create by juxtaposing diverse categories of knowledge and being, and by appreciating different universes of meaning. This would lead to defining meanings from below by avoiding the dominance of certain mainstream conceptualisations. We usually overlook the fact that Eurocentric everyday concepts or theories contributed to the formation of the historical trajectory of global urban theory – or our urban ‘thick’ descriptions – as historico-culturally rooted entities. This rootedness makes them more powerful, in comparison to other knowledges, within the urban discourse. For an equality of presence in the creation of the shared space, ‘other’ knowledges need to be introduced to the urban epistemic world in their totality and with their own cultural-historical roots as entities embedded in their lifeworld (history, philosophy, literature, and art). Looking for historical roots and archives will help to rewrite the origins of new theories, which will subsequently offer tentative tools for displacing the geography of the current perceptions. Such rewriting is only possible when concepts and spatial structures are grasped as emblematic and understood from the perspective of their historical development up until now (see Chakrabarty, 2008; Spivak, 2003). Therefore, archival work and the excavation of the representational archives of theory in diverse locations can help in recreating a new repertoire for a shared urban theoretical framework or a cosmopolitan urban theory.

Yet it is critical to understand the micro-politics of production of such sources, and not take their ‘decoloniality’ for granted if they have been produced as an ‘otherwise’. The great films that were produced within the Iranian New Wave cinema during the 1960s and 1970s aimed at de-Westernising the national culture and creating a resistance space against the Shah's urban modernising activities. These sources, I argue elsewhere, unwittingly reproduce some nuances of colonialist tendencies in representational efforts directed towards ‘decolonisation’, that is resistance films. These works, which have been key referents for understanding Iranian modernity, create a ‘negative identity’ by ignoring lived experiences in their locations, resulting in products that ironically contribute to self-colonising processes. This negligence resulted from a deeply ingrained practice of defining the self by its difference to an ‘other’. Yet, as Garćia and Abuelo Zenón contend, the formation of a collective memory, or a collective ‘we’, starts when people begin to construct themselves ‘without the other, without the intervention of the other’, as an act of self-determination or self-reparation (García Salazar, 2017; quoted in Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 44). ²

The shared framework is not only the place where epistemologies (and sometimes ontologies) meet to set up an equal, just foundation for future urban conversations; it is, in fact, also the place where temporalities of knowledges and geobiographies of individuals meet. The significance of giving voice to those who have been disappeared during the colonisation processes can call into question the idea of any polycentric theory-building in a certain geography. Should a geobiography of R.L.C. or N. have the same depth of presence in the formation of the Canadian collective ‘we’ as that of a newly immigrated individual whose immigration has been due to their work-related (i.e. capital production) skills? How do geography and history interact in the agency of each presence within the epistemic shared framework? What should be the role of the temporal agency of place in creating the historical memories and future policies of Canada? Wyly (2024: 51) touches upon this point by highlighting the ‘ethical question of memory’ – that is, to rethink ‘what and where to remember, what and how to forget in the pursuit of some kind of shared future for some subset of an interconnected urban community’. In the thinking of polycentric urban epistemology or a representational framework within a certain location, we should acknowledge the primacy of the geography – and the culture that is linked to it. We should acknowledge ‘the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories’, as local histories, knowledges, and geographies are intertwined (Escobar, 2004; quoted in Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 27). Here, we might rather rethink the geobiographies of R.L.C. and N. as new center(s) of thought from where the ‘worlding of theory’ should take place (Roy and Ong, 2011).